Can we just take a moment and count the ways in which this has been a week of good news? Especially since it followed a week of such heartbreak and tragedy… Sometimes the good news wins the newsfeed, and you just want to savor it. So let’s talk about how the Supreme Court said “Yes” to Affordable Care . After years of legislators acting like 2-year-olds in a fight over the last cookie, the right to access medical care... Read more
It’s that time again. All over the country, exhausted pastoral search committees plow through another pile of profiles, fumble with the technology for another round of Skype interviews, and miss another week of family dinner times to make a series of reference-check phone calls. Meanwhile, pastors sit anxiously by the phone, like they are waiting for the daggone quarterback to call on a Friday night, just hoping for that next small sign of hope: “we are moving ahead in our... Read more
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Summer is for slackers. And non-fiction is for suckers. I stick by that, and in that vein, my summer reading list is usually ALL fiction. But this year, I’m going to diverge from that just a little bit. Like many white people in America, I’m realizing more every day that I don’t know the first thing about race, or racism, as it lives and breathes in the soil of my own... Read more
After last week’s mass shooting at a Charleston AME church, predictable threads of dialogue emerged in the media. People talking about gun control. People talking about mental illness (note: racism is not a mental illness). People continuing dialogue about racism. People raising flags, and people taking them down. Is it just me… or do arguments for keeping the Confederate flag on display sound a lot like the arguments that pro-gun advocates use for zero-restriction laws? It’s not just me. They... Read more
A guest post by Lee Hull Moses Sometime this summer, my car, a Matrix hatchback in a deep blue color I’ve always loved, is going to pass the 100,000 mile mark. I’ve been watching the odometer creep closer with some anticipation, as if the car is approaching a major birthday that should be marked with fanfare and celebration. I realize it’s silly and a bit cliche to get sentimental about a car. Surely it’s nothing more than a hunk of... Read more
Guest Post by Sarah Stewart Holland At least once a week, I get the same message on Facebook. It is some variation on “I don’t know how you do it!” Usually, these messages come from my more progressive friends who express astonishment at my ability to share my thoughts on very controversial topics without losing my cool. My response is almost always the same. I share my honest belief that if we cannot even TALK about important subjects such as... Read more
You guys, this is adorable. A friend sent me this blog post about how to know if you have accidentally wandered into one of those scary progressive churches. I’m not going to post a link to it, because Voldemort. But anyway, they tell you how to stay true to the gospel and RUN AWAY, before the evil “emergent” church folk can get their gay-loving, non-hell-fearing, climate-change-believing hooks in you. I think if you read way down to the bottom, there’s probably... Read more
If the image of a 200+pound white man with a gun, pinning an unarmed, 90 pound black girl to the ground with his knees—while he is fully clothed and she is wearing a bikini—has not been keeping you up nights, then you must be missing something. Like maybe you missed the white male bystanders aiding the officer. Or maybe you missed the police shouting and cursing, while the kids just asked what in the world they’d done? Or maybe you... Read more
People are tired of talking about Caitlyn Jenner. Or so my newsfeed says. Best I can tell, there are two camps of people who want to be done talking about this: 1-Those who say there are plenty of other transgender people in America who are not making news, and one person’s journey should not be so elevated just because of their celebrity; and 2-Those who see the whole story as “a man who decided to become a woman,” misunderstanding the... Read more
*Ritzheimer. I mean… it just SOUNDS like a Nazi caricature. A cartoon bad guy with a swastika and a little Hitler mustache, a tiny cartoon devil at his shoulder. But the real guy’s not a cartoon. He’s alive and real in Phoenix, and he’s drumming up an anti-Muslim following. Last week, he rallied a couple hundred of his white supremacist buddies for a “demonstration” on the steps of a local mosque. Wearing t-shirts with a message so obscene, the media... Read more
Irreverin
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In