Happy cornbread anniversary

Happy cornbread anniversary May 5, 2015

Erik Loomis marks the passing of Guy Carawan by sharing this fascinating short interview with Pete Seeger on the history of the song “We Shall Overcome.”

That’s how unionists and civil-rights activists learned that song. Here’s a link to an old post sharing my story of “How I learned that song.”

• Critics of abstinence-only sex education love to highlight the approach’s many, many failures, touting the mountains of evidence that show it to be a huge waste of time and money. But those nay-sayers don’t like to talk about the benefits of abstinence-only sex ed — like, for example, what about the 90 percent of students who don’t have chlamydia?

• Ezra Klein started Vox in the hopes of creating a resource that could make complex, wonky news accessible and understandable for the general reader. This post from Matt Yglesias lives up to that promise: “R+L=J: The fan theory that holds the key to Game of Thrones.

• Culture-warriors really ought to try to understand at least the basic outlines of the culture they’re warring against. Franklin Graham, for example, might have spared himself some embarrassment if he’d had somebody in his camp who could have explained to him the central metaphor of the X-Men comic books. When he says the comic is an “attempt to indoctrinate our young people to accept” those who are different, he’s not exactly wrong — just on the wrong side.

Graham’s resemblance to one of X-Men’s cartoon villains is, frankly, uncanny.

SameDifference
An uncanny resemblance: Infamous anti-gay fanatic Franklin Graham (left). Infamous anti-mutant fanatic Sen. Robert Kelly (right). Or maybe vice versa. It’s hard to tell since they’re both cartoons.

• I am very pleased to welcome Rhetoric Race & Religion to the “Progressive Christian Channel” here at Patheos. Dr. Andre E. Johnson and his impressive roster of contributors have built R3 into one of my favorite blogs. Read it. Subscribe. Follow them on FaceTwit or SnapGram or whatever it is you kids use these days now that blogs are passé.

• “Rep. David Brat Claims ISIS Has Set up Camp in Texas.” Thus, Calvinism.

• Last week I linked, separately, to posts by Mallory Ortberg and by Laura Turner. Here they are working together. They should do this more often.

 


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