• Dan Baum talks to John Ehrlichman about the origin of the War on Drugs:
I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
OK, then. Whew.
• This whole Neuhaus/Novak neoliberal Catholic spin on JP2 didn’t really survive any reading of Laborem Exercens. Pronouncing it dead at this point is welcome, but it was never really alive in the first place.
• Following our look at an “old Cherokee story” that isn’t an old Cherokee story, here’s Jia Tolentino “On the Origin of Certain Quotable ‘African Proverbs’” (via @mwdooley).
Tolentino gives it her best shot, but she’s unable to track down a solid citation for the “proverb” in question. The “old African proverb” and “old Cherokee story” business, it seems, may just be a way of saying, “Somebody said this, I don’t know who.”
• I’m having a hard time believing that anti-feminist, anti-immigrant Phyllis Schlafly (still not dead!) had to be “manipulated” into supporting the anti-feminist, anti-immigrant Republican candidate Donald Trump, even if some of her anti-feminist, anti-immigrant supporters believe she should instead be supporting the anti-feminist, anti-immigrant Republican candidate Ted Cruz.
• In a recent Left Behind installment, we discussed the pop-evangelism method called the “Romans Road.” That approach is notable for glomming onto a handful of prooftexts from Paul’s epistle and using them to construct a soteriology that almost completely contradicts the apostle’s argument in that book.
Chapter and verse divisions are convenient for many reasons, but they also lead us astray, tempting us to read isolated verses — sentences divorced from paragraphs, paragraphs divorced from context — in a way they were never meant to be read. Romans is one long argument and needs to be read that way. If you don’t have time or attention for that, then please just read Galatians instead (Romans for Dummies).
Anyway, for a taste of that larger argument and a hint of everything the “Romans Road” distorts, check out Michael Bird on “Morna Hooker’s New Article on Pistis Christou.” (That may translate “faith in Christ” or “faithfulness of Christ,” and the prepositions bear a lot of weight there.)
• Sticking with the music of 1994 for a bit, because I’m a middle-aged guy and that’s how we do:
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