In the promise that I kept to myself of being consistent on my blog, I have already failed to do so. However, it’s only in the sense that I want to make sure everything is perfect.

Perfect reviews. Perfect timing. Perfect wording. Perfect images. Perfect title.

Everything is perfect.

Producing the content is the only issue, it’s never the ideas. The ideas are always overflowing and being written down in notebooks, sticky notes, and Google Docs. Research into what it is I want to accomplish in my piece is done so thoroughly that I can’t really meet my own personal deadlines. Out of all these “complaints”, there really is no excuse – or complaint.

Since I started this blog, there has always been this desire to look and delve deeper into my own passion. Finding the heavier meaning behind it all, and seeing something so much more. I find myself looking into other blogs such as Beneath The Tangles, an anime blog with a Christian focus. Their blog has inspired me to do so much more with my work and connecting it with Islam in the same respect.

In doing research for my Muslim anime group, Animate Life!, I stumbled across one of their reviews on Ghibli films and spirituality and found the most enlightening and motivational quotes from Jolyon Baraka Thomas.

“…entertainers can playfully use religious symbols to create an engaging story, and viewers can derive spiritual meaning from popular media, regardless of whether the creator intended them to do so.”

“…’vernacular religion’ refers to religion as it is lived- not what religious authorities say religion ‘should be,’ but how religious concepts are translated into a particular culture and actually practiced by people.”

“…it is left up to each of us as audience members to makes sense of these dissociated religious elements by translating them back to out own vernacular of faith.”

It is these quotes, supplemented by the teachings of my teachers that inspire me to take these writings seriously. In doing all of this, I also am opening my world of anime and manga, delving into titles and “to be read’s” and truly appreciating art for what it is.

So while I have been slow in my upload process, the work is being steadily done to produce content that is befitting of what I want to accomplish and what I hope viewers will read.

With all of this being said, I’m excited to say my first big topic of will be from a retreat I had the pleasure of being apart of called The Sage’s Journey, where we discuss Star Wars through the eyes of philosophers and scholars of Islam with our teacher Dr. Ali Hussein. There were a varieties of readings recommended to supplement this paper, and once it is released I’ll be content insha’Allah.

Find the book here!