What does it Mean to be Human?

Most of us were handed a gospel that begins in failure. We learned early that the human condition — the neediness, the limitation, the body, the longing — is the problem that Jesus came to solve. We were taught to manage it, transcend it, or at least keep it out of the way of our spiritual lives.

But what if that story begins in the wrong place?

Paradox Found is a six-week class built around three events that change everything: the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection. Not as theological doctrines to be understood, but as movements in a story that is still unfolding — in us, between us, and in the world we inhabit.

Week by week, we will ask what each movement actually says about what it means to be human. We will discover that God did not enter the human condition reluctantly. That the cross exposed something more precise than our moral failures. That the resurrection did not undo embodiment — it vindicated it.

By the end of six weeks, participants will have a framework for understanding why shame organized so much of human experience, what God did about it at the level of the image we were made to bear, and what it might look like to begin receiving what has already been accomplished.

This class is open to anyone — those with deep theological backgrounds and those with none, those who are firmly inside the Christian tradition and those who are not sure where they stand.

Overall Course Learning Outcome:

By the end of this course, participants will have a framework for understanding why shame organized so much of their experience, a language for naming the specific shape of their own wound, a practice for bringing that wound into the presence of God without managing it first, and the beginning of an embodied sense that it is not only permissible but divinely affirmed to be fully, undefendedly, gloriously human.