7 @ 9: ‘The faith I get excited about’

1. Barbara Ehrenreich 10,000. Bill O’Reilly 0.

2. “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!”

3. Yes, David Barton lies about everything. My new theory is that even he has gotten bored with his lucrative, but one-note con game and that he’s taken to making it slightly more interesting for himself by stretching the limits just to see how much the rubes will let him get away with. What if I tell them something really blatantly outrageous? he asks himself. What if I start telling them that I speak 600 times a year while also working 14-hour days at my ranch — they couldn’t possibly believe that could they?

But they did. So now he’ll have to come up with something even more obviously impossible and see if he can get his audience to buy that too.

4. Charisma magazine was once a publication primarily concerned with charismatic/Pentecostal spirituality, but it has long since gone ’round the bend into far-right culture war bonkerdom. The latest example: Charisma goes prepper. The really sad thing there is that Joseph Mattera doesn’t even seem smart enough to skim his kickbacks as he urges his poor readers to stockpile gold. Has Glenn Beck taught him nothing?

5. “An important takeaway from all this is, in a way, the most simple. It’s a reminder that women are not stupid.”

6. Shay T.L. Kearns: “An American Theology”

I’m not interested in a personal salvation that is about me and Jesus. I’m not interested in a Jesus who was only born to die and to keep me from swearing.

I want the Jesus who lived. I want the Jesus who resisted. I want the Jesus who hung out with the “bad crowd”, drank too much, ate too much, and resisted the empire. I want the Jesus who was killed because he knew that God wanted more for people than to blend into the way things were. I want the Jesus who said a resounding no to violence and to death. I want a salvation that is for all of us; one that is both personal and political. I want a salvation that means we all have clean water and enough to eat and an end to violence. I want a salvation that is good news to people on the margins. That’s the faith I get excited about.

7. Geds promises his shiny new blog will be fun. I say we hold him to that promise (though I’m not sure how to go about doing that).