On Being a Border-Stalker

In his book Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation, journalist and Christian Jon Ward writes about how he never felt completely at home in his conservative Christian environment. He writes,

All my life I have been a mearcstapa, or a border-stalker. Mearcstapa is an Old English word used in Beowulf. Painter and author Makoto Fujimura used this term, and his modern translation of border-stalker, to describe those who “are uncomfortable in homogenous groups” and yet are still present in them, and thus they live “on the edge of their groups, going in and out of them.

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