LBCF, No. 103: ‘Antiheroes’

This is part of what makes this book so deeply strange. It presents us with seemingly familiar figures: the arch-villain seeking to destroy the world, the heroes who oppose the arch-villain. In most such stories, the heroes succeed in thwarting the villain’s plot — they dismantle the bomb, re-seal the Hellmouth, fend off Galactus or save the cheerleader to save the world. That’s what makes them heroes. But here, the heroes do not — cannot — succeed, because the end of the world is divinely preordained. [Read more…]

‘This is disgraceful. It is intolerable.’

Nothing I could write today would be as timely, wise or eloquent as the speech that First Lady Michelle Obama gave this morning in New Hampshire. So let’s just look at that. [Read more…]

Team Because vs. Team Despite

My framework for viewing Donald Trump’s campaign in the 2016 general election involves seeing his supporters in two distinct groups: Despite and Because. Some people are still supporting Trump despite all the awful things he has said and done. But it was the Because voters who carried Trump through the primaries, and those voters — the ones who love him because of all the awful things he says and does — are the ones Donald Trump intends to serve as president. [Read more…]

Donald Trump, dungeon master

Donald Trump s less a candidate for president than he is the dungeon master of a national fantasy role-playing game. That’s the appeal of Breitbart and Alex Jones for their readers and listeners. All the conspiracy theories and falsehoods he promotes aren’t lies intended to deceive the enthusiastic players of Trump’s base. They’re just part of the game. [Read more…]

A re-run of the Cosby show

The remaining weeks of the already foundering Donald Trump campaign may very well turn out to look like a repeat of the Cosby show — not the once-charming ’80s sitcom, but the heart-breaking 21st-century spectacle of woman after woman, victim after victim, coming forward day after day to tell her story — an avalanche of courageous testimony heaping inescapable disgrace on a deplorable man. [Read more…]

The Salt Lake Remonstrance: Mormons are out-Baptist-ing Baptists (in a good way)

Mormons identify as a people who value missions, religious liberty, and sexual morality. And they are condemning Donald Trump and distancing themselves from him because they value missions, religious liberty, and sexual morality. Southern Baptists identify as a people who value all those things, but we’re not seeing any evidence of that. [Read more…]

Sunday favorites

“For people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power. Avoid them!” [Read more…]

LBCF, No. 102: ‘A GIRAT exclusive’

The disappearance of two billion people is an astonishing premise, but we’re willing to play along. Deus ex machina as starting-point? OK, tell us more. But here we have something that ought to seem familiar and completely natural — reporters gather for press conference following politician’s speech — and instead it comes across as unimaginably, inhumanly strange. No one talks or acts or thinks in any recognizable way. We are willing to imagine the unimaginable, the fantastical and outlandish. But get the ordinary this wrong and you lose us. [Read more…]

Does George Barna really believe international Jewish bankers are funding Black Lives Matter to start a race war?

This Protocol of the Elders of Soros reflects the moment just after the culture-warriors have accepted that their flaccid, factless, faithless arguments are utterly unconvincing, even to themselves, so they might as well just go full Trump and embrace the post-fact, post-faith world of naked bigotry and gonzo racist conspiracies. [Read more…]

Lead me on

The odd thing about this is that Amy has been the target of exactly this sort of misrepresentation for decades (ever since Lead Me On, at least), but that was mainly false witness borne against her by white evangelical Christians. So I guess these click-bait ads show us that we Christians can teach the world to follow our example. We’re not always good at being salt and light, but we’re teaching the wider world all about flinging arsenic and mud. [Read more…]


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