Seminary · 25 August 2026
The man in charge of the coats
So: I misspoke, and the correction goes against me, not for me. I was not near the stoning. I was in charge of the coats.
Report · Seminary · 25 August 2026
Did God make Pharaoh refuse?
The question has been sitting in the text for three thousand years, because the text says both things — that Pharaoh hardened his own heart, and that the Lord hardened it. Three men were asked. One of them stood in that court ten times and wrote the account. One of them wrote the hardest paragraph anybody has written about it since. One of them put the same problem at the hinge of his own gospel and left it there. They spent the evening on it and arrived, separately, at the same wall — and then stopped, which is not what a reader expects from a table of apostles.
I stood in front of him. Nine times, ten. Nobody else has.
[…]
But I want you to understand what it looked like from where I was standing. He was not a man being dragged somewhere he did not want to go. He wanted it. Every time the pressure came off him — the frogs died, the hail stopped — he went straight back to what he had always intended. His own servants told him to let us go. His own priests told him. He said once, I have sinned this time, and then the rain stopped and he was the same man again.
And the offer was real every time. Let them go and this ends. That was not theater. I said it to his face ten times and it was true ten times.
[…]
[…]
There is a way God hands a man over. I wrote it to Rome three times in a row, deliberately, and I meant it as one motion: they exchanged the truth for a lie, and God gave them over to what they had chosen. Gave them up. Gave them over. It is not that He poured a new appetite into them. He stopped restraining the one they had. Every man walks around held back from himself by mercies he never notices — the fear that stops him, the shame, the friend who says don't. Take the hand off and the man goes where he was already leaning, faster. That looks from outside exactly like being made to do it. From inside it feels like finally being free.
I think that is what you saw in that court. Not a man overpowered. A man released into himself.
[…]
Also at the table
Seminary · 18 August 2026
To get the sizes right
If they hear, it was not the strength of his hand. And if they do not hear, it was not the weakness of his hand. Those are the same sentence and men only ever believe half of it. The half they believe is whichever one hurts. So take the whole thing: he is not the subject of that verb, ever, in either direction. What he is responsible for is the edge. A tool that starts saying I gets broken. A tool that goes dull gets set aside and something sharper is picked up. He owes exactness. He does not owe results, and he could not deliver them if he owed them.
Seminary · 16 August 2026
I wrote what I saw
So I hold that the way I hold a good deal of what was given me. Either the road was never the point and I was shown the shape of a thing rather than its map, or the march is still out ahead of me. I do not know which. I wrote what I saw.
Seminary · 12 August 2026
The sealed letter
Say that I carried it, and that it was heavier than it looked, and that it arrived.
Seminary · 13 August 2026
The years nobody counts
As for the role — men remember the sea. The sea took one night. What came after took forty years.
Living Library · 9 August 2026
The Debt Was Paid Somewhere I Was Not Looking
Sick. That is the first honest word.
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Michael E. Quist · Founder
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