The Center for Prophetic Imagination

12/18/2025

Precarity kills more liberatory imagination than censorship ever has.

12/17/2025

This is oft-cited information but bears repeating: There are enough empty homes in the United States for every unhoused person to have 20 homes each. Our political and economic system values property over people and spends a lot of energy lying to us about it.

12/14/2025

"Once it is concluded that Christianity is infected with 'Whitianity,' once it is granted that a racist doctrine of the tradition has been perpetuated, the tradition must be scrutinized in the most radical and comprehensive manner."

12/13/2025

The Center for Prophetic Imagination has formally closed as an organization.

Starting in the new year, this page will shift accordingly. It will no longer speak as a nonprofit or use that language. Instead, it will function as a place where I share my own writing, analysis, and ongoing work under my own name.

I also want to name something related and real: in 2026, I will be relocating outside of the United States. This decision is shaped by the current political climate and the increasing precarity it creates, particularly for trans people and those working openly at the intersection of power, religion, and resistance. It’s a move made for safety, sustainability, and the ability to keep doing this work at all.

I will also occasionally use this space to amplify work by colleagues whose thinking I respect, including work by people connected to organizations I care about and by writers like Kalie May, whose work many of you encountered through CPI. I'm open to the possibility of this space becoming of collaboration of like-minded content creators. But that is something to discern after I've resettled.

I'm the meantime, there are no programs, campaigns, or institutional plans ahead. Just work in public, shared with care, across borders if necessary.

If that’s not what you’re here for, it’s completely okay to step away. If it is, you’re welcome to stay.

Peace and Resistance,

Maki Ashe Pendergast
Former Director of the Center for Prophetic Imagination

12/13/2025

Faith in Transition: Interviews on Spirituality and Queerness # 7

An interview with Peter Hu. Peter is a 45 year old entrepreneur, native to Singapore. Peter has been a Christian since his teens. His faith is evolved, and evolving.

12/13/2025

"To limit humanity to gender binaries would limit the expression of God in the world. It would mean creating a god that reflects our limited perceptions."

12/12/2025

People aren’t just dense.

Institutions train people to perform density. It is a defensive maneuver, a way to dodge the weight of another person’s reality by retreating into policy, procedure, or polite vagueness. Bureaucratic language becomes a shield that lets someone say “nothing is wrong here” while quietly stepping around whatever is actually happening.

For someone living in precarity, this isn’t neutral. It is death by a thousand administrative and interpersonal cuts. None of them outrageous enough to call out in isolation. None of them obvious enough to rally support around. Just a steady drip of small dismissals, non-answers, delays, and procedural brush-offs that accumulate into real harm.

From the outside, it looks like incompetence. Or oversensitivity. Or someone “freaking out over nothing.” That is how this kind of violence works. It hides in civility. It masquerades as normal. It leaves no single moment you can point to and say, “Look, this is where the harm happened.” But the pattern is unmistakable when you are the one absorbing it.

Anyone who belongs to an oppressed group knows this texture in their own context. You learn how aggression gets naturalized, how avoidance becomes policy, how harm is laundered through politeness. And if you are not living inside that pressure, it is easy to dismiss it all as a personal failing instead of the structural weather someone is walking through every day. Hell, even when you are living inside the pressure, you are conditioned to treat it as your own personal failing instead of a structural problem.

This is how oppression maintains itself without ever raising its voice. Not through spectacular moments of cruelty, but through the ordinary performance of not understanding what is perfectly legible.

12/12/2025

I think about, historically, trans women of color like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who lit the fire on the LGBTQIA rights movement, and they were quickly kicked out and erased. They share a common thread with Sojourner Truth, another revolutionary woman, and just like her, Black women, women of color, q***r women, trans women, disabled women, Muslim women, and so many others are still asking many of y’all, “Ain’t I a woman?”
- Raquel Willis

12/11/2025

Faith in Transition: Interviews about Spirituality and Queerness #6

An interview with Alicia T. Crosby (she/hers): a justice educator, activist, and minister whose work addresses the spiritual, systemic, and interpersonal harm people experience.

Faith in Transition: Interviews about Spirituality and Queerness #6 An interview with Alicia T. Crosby (she/hers): a justice educator, activist, and minister whose work addresses the spiritual, systemic, and interpersonal harm people experience.

12/10/2025

In a culture that equates worth with productivity, The Inaction Planner offers a radical reminder: your value isn't measured by your output. This three-month guide encourages you to embrace rest and reflection, affirming that you don't have to be busy to matter.

12/10/2025

Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of their tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love. —Terry Eagleton