1. Frederick Clarkson (no relation) sees the Manhattan Declaration as an indication of a growing alliance between Catholics and Protestants on the religious right, with “religious liberty” as the potential rallying cry. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out when evangelicals start to realize that the Catholic right’s insistence on its “religious liberty” to impose its anti-contraception views on Taco Bell employees also extends to its “religious liberty” to impose those views on evangelicals.
2. “If you are about to drink a $3,500 bottle of wine, you have to think for just a minute about this option instead: Drink a $100 bottle of wine that is about as good, but from a less renowned chateau. And deploy the other $3,400 to pay for malaria-preventing mosquito nets in Africa …” Or, as every Christian writer for the first four centuries of the faith attested: Superfluity is theft.
3. Jeez — this is exactly what happened to poor Winnifred Burkle. Robert Farley is right: “Don’t. Open. The Box.”
4. “Crack babies” was a lie. As Steve Thorngate writes: “By the end of the study, Hurt and her colleagues had concluded that ‘poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine.'” The hysteria around the “crack baby” myth led to harsher sentencing for those possessing crack cocaine. Will we now see a corresponding effort to crack down on those responsible for so many children being forced to grow up in poverty? Silly question. We blame poor children for their poverty and sentence them to remain in it. Forever.
5. So, speaking of how the evangelical tribe lacks a right-wing boundary, Warren Throckmorton asks “Does the Church Have a League of the South Problem?” That’s a question that really ought to answer itself.
6. “I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven,” retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said the other day. “No, I would say sorry. I mean, I would much rather go to the other place.” This produced immediate condemnation from religious right spokesman Witchsmeller Bryan Fischer. And from Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe. Fischer loves going Godwin and comparing anyone who doesn’t hate LGBT people as much as he does to Hitler and to every other deceased dictator from history. That’s kind of odd when you realize that the contemporary leaders who most share his views are people like Mugabe and Vladimir Putin.
7. You may remember a couple years ago I was trying (and failing) to transfer a delightful Kurt Vonnegut talk (lecture? skit?) on the shape of stories from VHS to digital. Good news! Via Steve Buchheit I learn that it’s been posted to YouTube. And here it is:
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In