Oh good, it’s Mother’s Day, and Fake Ascension, but let’s face it, mostly Mother’s Day. Indulge me, since I am a mother and all, with some patience (the chief one of all my own virtues) as I complain about it. While it is important to honor mothers, since everyone in one sense or another does have one, the whole business of Mother’s Day has become a serious bore. Long ago, like maybe in the early 2000s, when Mother’s Day rolled... Read more
Have got to rush about today, doing something or other, avoiding the rain probably, but wanted to drop in say that I’m nearing the end of two books that have been lately absorbing my attention. I actually want to write about them more than just a flung out word here, but you might be interested in them before I arrive at that exalted moment. The first is Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians & Fractured American Politics, and the... Read more
We have an extra super special treat this morning. Instead of 7 Takes, we’re going destroy all happiness by laboring through an entire 39 minute Andy Stanley sermon. You know the one. That time where he undoes the entire Christian faith by trying to save it from itself. You will probably need two devices for this. One to watch the sermon, found here, and one to read the rest of this Fisk as it is playing. Ready? Gird your loins... Read more
Labored through the Bari Weiss column that everyone is freaking out about. Really loved the perfectly distributed pictures of all those people who were once beyond the pale, but not so much anymore, having gone end run around the usual media and connected with listeners and readers directly. Find it utterly fascinating, utterly, that the most pressing question for Bari Weiss is knowing the intellectual parameters of the Intellectual Dark Web, which name I love, and being sure that gatekeepers... Read more
I am of a variety of schizophrenic minds about the Met Gala. Spent valuable time I did not possess reading the outrage ebb and flow on twitter yesterday, and then went back and looked at a lot of the outfits again. But then, as per usual, was overcome by the juxtaposition of all those outfits against the sick and horrifying accounts of NY’s attorney general being a public champion for women, apparently, while in private, well, I had to stop... Read more
The birds outside the window are driving the cat, and maybe even me, crazy. They are calling loudly, one unto the other, in fits and frenzies. The tail of the cat doth twitch, and I wonder what they all have to be so excited about. Perhaps it might be spring after all. So, of course, I spent some sunny hours indoors yesterday, pouring over the Met Gala fashions. Didn’t know it was even that time of year but saw so... Read more
We were trying to recap Synod but were so desperately tried that we wandered into a confused commentary on the troubles in the SBC. Long silences as we grope, cough, for words, sarcasm as we listen to the yard waste truck chew up all the trees and branches from our entire street, resignation as we realize we have no blinding theological insight at our fingertips are the marks of this amazing podcast. You should listen to it if only to... Read more
Looks like Ascension Day is coming up this very week. Which is a nice time to question again the sanity of Jesus, bothering to come at all, and then going away just when we all thought it was going to get really good. If Jesus had gotten his act together the way modern Christians have, he would have stuck around to ensure the success of his satellite campuses. Barring that possibility–I mean, there were really good reasons for him to... Read more
It’s Friday, so that’s Takes One It’s been a more than usually busy week. Monday I had to somehow twist the fourth child’s hair into a bun and produce her at the appointed time for the taking of pictures, in costume, with her dance class. We set off in plenty of time, hair spayed into oblivion, merrily trundling down the road. The gas gage did say there was none, but I figured we would get all the way out there,... Read more
This alarming study was making its way around the inter-tubes of the web yesterday. I saw it in a variety of places. In short, there’s an epidemic of loneliness. People are lonelier than ever before. And it’s getting worse. Almost half of respondents reported being lonely, and younger people are lonelier than their aging and decrepit counterparts. Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little... Read more
Preventing Grace
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