Look, okay, I know how this looks. I try to keep my embarrassing guilty pleasures to myself. I am a sucker for the anime romance genre. Between confessing to my love for dating sims two weeks ago to defaming King Solomon at the beginning of this season - I’m really just holding on for dear life at this point. But it didn’t take long into the first episode My Dress-Up Darling to realize that this show is doing something different. Not everything - it certainly has its cringier

With our first ever State of the RE:Union a few weeks ago, we made the announcement that Checkpoint would be instituting something new in our community: the Guardian role. We discerned that, with our ever-growing server, it was time to really consider what safety looked like online. This is something that we've seen other online communities fail at honoring and we wanted to be the best we could possibly be. When exploring what it looks like to protect the members within our d

Looking at Ranking of Kings - I couldn’t help but keep putting off watching this show. I thought it was going to be some kind of childlike fantasy story that wouldn’t keep me hooked. What I got instead was Studio Ghibli presents’ Game of Thrones. This story is packed to brim with betrayal, political intrigue, and some horribly complex characters. And I love it. But above everything about this show, one thing is the most clear: I would die for Bojji. The central character of t

In the work of digital ministry, I have had to learn plenty about adaptivity. I've grown through failure, success, and mentorship every day, no exaggeration. But there is one piece of clarity that I've known and shouted from the rooftops since Day One: if the church wants to survive and thrive in digital spaces, then we must learn to collaborate and connect. As a proud United Methodist, this should theoretically be second nature. But, the truth is - platforms like Twitch, Dis

Nerd Pastor Nate is a featured writer for Rethink Church writing on gaming, anime, and other pop culture topics. In this post, he discusses the familial trauma in the film Encanto. Read the full article below or visit the main site here.

If you’re anything like me, then you’ve logged way too many hours already into the world of Pokemon Legends Arceus. I may or may not have spent like thirty hours in the game before beating the second frenzied lord. I’m not even gonna deny it - I’m obsessed. But there’s something different about this Pokemon game. Game Freak has always been pretty good about hiding bits and pieces of Poke-lore into the background of the games and the bookshelves, but with this jaunt into histo

As a digital-based entity, given enough time the algorithm of the Internet will reward continuous effort with a 'viral post.' It's not foolproof, but it's likely. We've been around for nearly two years and we've been gifted with several of these viral moments. If we continue doing the hard work, then we will likely continue to experience these short bursts of unbridled reach. It's a surprisingly challenging thing for a human being with a human mind to handle this kind of expo

I had quite a few things I wanted to write about in this newsletter - but then the New York Times posted an op-ed piece on online churches. Written by Anglican Priest Tish Harrison Warren, I had no choice but to formulate some kind of response. And respond I certainly did - you can watch my full 30 minutes on the topic here - but I wanted to highlight just a few points in this newsletter. Ms. Warren's article is an important one, because it highlights the prevailing sentiment