Meet Eady Jay “edj”

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Eady Jay “edj”. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Eady Jay, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

My parents are both very hard working people, but not to the detriment of their relationships. They balanced work, rest and play quite well. My mother completed a degree later in life (which was not a common thing for women in their thirties in the 90s), and I ended up doing something similar. Even when our dreams and goals for life seem delayed, their is a sense in which we make the most of it or adapt our dreams a little, and find the resilience to follow the malleable dream rather than being depressed about seemingly failed dreams or hopes deferred.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am an Australian married to an American and living in North Carolina. I met my husband because we were both publicly “deconstructing” hell on Facebook in 2013! We were both raised in Evangelicalism and soon embraced Evangelical-Universalism, a term coined by author Robin Parry AKA Gregory Macdonald.

Since moving to the US in 2021, my deconstruction journey has progressed to include more political concerns, essentially deconstructing evangelicalism and embracing a more progressive faith. I am exploring the “isms,” purity culture, and sexuality, and have recently published my first memoir, Deconstructing Sexual Shame. I blog and post on various social platforms including my website www.EvangelicalDeconstructingJourney.com, and I am currently working on a follow-up manifesto: Reconstructing Sexual Ethics.

I love to write, not only blogs and books, but also music & lyrics which can be found on my website. My desire is to share the love and grace of God through my music and writing and to inspire meaningful evolution of the Christian faith!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

It feels like both a blessing and a curse to be an empathetic person. I have always tried very hard to put myself in other people’s shoes. I have confronted bullies because I would hate to be bullied. I have even empathized with bullies and wondered what drove them to bully others and what was really going on inside them. I am quick to apologize when I have said or done abusive things myself, because, again, I imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of my behavior. I believe empathy helps us move toward others and connect with those we struggle to understand.

In light of being raised as something of an empath, when I first started opening up more publicly about my deconstruction journey, (for example writing provocative posts on Facebook about eternal conscious torment being a misinterpretation of the words we translate as “hell” from Scripture), I was able to be less judgmental and more compassionate to people who interacted with my material. I would take the time to respond thoughtfully to questions, ask my own questions, and try not to judge people’s meanness. When I was done with an argument, rather than saying “I’m right and you’re wrong” I would regularly agree to disagree. I didn’t need to be right because I empathetically understood that it is normal for us to hold our opinions close and think we are “right.” I allow for the fact that I could always be mistaken, that there is always more to learn, more to deconstruct and reconstruct.

I highly value empathy, non-judgment, and also the deconstruction journey itself. Recently I have come to suspect that the cycle of deconstruction-and-reconstruction may be vital to the evolution of the human species as well as the Christian faith. Systems work for a time, until we find faults in those systems and construct something new and hopefully better – more ethical, more intelligent and more beneficial to the whole or holistic. I want to believe that we are evolving in the direction of love (and empathy and non-judgment) and that this love is more ethical and just and holistic. And I don’t think we can evolve / develop / awaken to new spiritual levels, without first becoming frustrated with the current various religious and social systems that need deconstructing! I value being “in process” or in the evolutionary spiral of deconstructing and reconstructing.

Develop empathy by regularly trying to imagine what it would be like to be the other person in the conversation you are having or the situation you are facing.

As you develop empathy, let this naturally increase your compassion which refuses to judge the other person as “wrong,” or “bad,” or to “other” them, or to block yourself off from trying to understand what it would feel like to actually be them.

Even though we embrace empathy and non-judgment, we still want to progress toward a better world for all. Be open to change. Open to new ideas. Open to challenging and difficult questions and perspectives.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

Reading has probably had the most profound impact on my deconstruction-and-reconstruction journeys. Podcasts, sermons and building online community has also been extremely helpful.

Some authors I would recommend:
Rachel Held Evans
Sarah Bessey
Jessica Valenti
Rob Bell
Thomas Jay Oord
Richard Rohr

Podcasts:
Where do we go from here?
The new evangelicals
Faith and feminism
Holy heretics
Robcast

There are book reviews on my website. I hesitate to recommend one single book as the most impactful, because it really depends what topic is the most meaningful to you on your spiritual journey at the moment. But I will mention that I have recently come across a book called “Spiral Dynamics” which has given me a new perspective of change / evolution and has even influenced how I understand deconstruction. It is a textbook “exploring the new science of memetics.” It describes how we (humans) invent systems for coping with life and dealing with life’s changes (environmental, social etc). But eventually all systems require deconstruction and reconstruction as we awaken to new levels of thinking or higher consciousness! Rob and Trace Bell discuss spiral dynamics on the Robcast, which is where I first came across it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.evangelicaldeconstructionjourney.com
• Instagram: @edj.eadyjay
• Facebook: Eady Jay / evangelical deconstruction Journey
• Youtube: @EDJ.eadyjay

Image Credits

The photo of me: Ulina Cunningham
Book cover and banner: Raghav Khattar