Greetings, from Rust.


Hi there!

This was a pandemic-isolation project born of wondering how institutional progressive faith (to wit: actual churches, creating living ministry together) might interface meaningfully with the people and places around them.

I continue to wrestle with these questions in ways that seem likely to lead fairly imminently toward transdisciplinary PhD studies in sustainability and critical geography.

For now, life in the parish and outside of it is busy, we are living amid institutions that seem threadbare and are beholden to a political economy that seems busted, and I’ve taken an extended reflective pause in my public writing.

All to say, it’s been longer than I intended between essays, and I don’t see an end to the silence in the near term.

I am, for now, happy to hear from you if you’d like to reach out. And I am, as always, wishing you well in the meantime.

j

Hi, all. New year, new note.

First, I want to offer my awed gratitude to everyone who supported this project, and my writing in general, in the last year. It was a heady and strange experience to file a 1099 for this side gig, and it highlighted both the amazing possibilities of crowd-supported writing and also my own sense of mismatch with what I’m trying to do in this moment. (I made a big donation to First Nations Development Institute, if you’re wondering what happened with that; FNDI is an Indigenous-led, Indigenous-focused organization that I can’t say enough about. Their regional foodshed work alone, led by my friend and legal community colleague A-dae Romero-Briones, is inspiring and game-changing, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.)

I am excited to continue exploring with you here, and grateful to be in dialogue in this way. And, the exploration is going to happen on an unpaid basis and on an irregular schedule, in a way that allows for quality of thought and care of framing given that I am also in covenant with a beloved community as their full-time parish minister. I am, additionally and perhaps forever, a student: this year I’m at UMass Amherst learning cartography and the kind of civil engineering that concerns itself with crosswalk placement and how safe it is to be a pedestrian in some communities vs. how dangerous it is in others. I am quite excited to bring a liberation theology lens to the constructive process of city-making and a reflective component to the physical experiences of city-living; I am sure we’ll talk about this here very soon.

For now, thanks for being my partners in learning as we all continue living into the Anthropocene and its spaces of rust and reimagining. These are strange seasons and we make meaning, and indeed make lives, only together.

In loving faith,

Jordinn

8-30-21

What it is

Rust and Reimagining is a shared public theology project of the Rev. Jordinn Nelson Long. I am engaged with history as a passion project rooted in story: yours, mine, and above all, ours. I am intrigued by the tales we create together in our partnerships, and Rust explores those tales as relationships between people, ideas, transactional power structures, institutions, communities, and the hopes and values that we express when we build things—and when we abandon them.

Rust is, in particular, an attempt to make visible the realities of the post-industrial landscapes in which we construct our own lives. It is an ongoing call to make sense of the ruins we find in these places if we are courageous enough to look at them, and of the reckonings and reparations that might allow us to live more beautifully together.

How it works

This is a year-long exploration, and archives are available here on the site. Also, your comments are welcome, so if you have background to add, from the historical to the theological to the personal (none of which, my friends, are so disconnected as we might believe), please do.

Signing up

Finally, Substack would have me tell you (and I suppose that I agree) that you should subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never, and these are their words, miss an update.

If you’re in, click below. For an image-based journey, you can also follow the Rust Insta at https://www.instagram.com/rustandreimagining/.

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Do we inhabit a post-industrial hellscape? Maybe. Reimagining in the in-between.

People

publishes Rust and Reimagining on Substack, PhD student at Memorial University of Newfoundland