• Scott Paeth provides the assessment that Eric Metaxas so richly deserves — “Eric Metaxas and the Egregious Misuse of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” This is devastatingly accurate:
Metaxas is hijacking the legacy and reputation of a man who, in a state of great moral and spiritual conflict, chose to resist what is commonly understood to be the most evil and despicable regime of the 20th century, a regime that corralled and murdered, among many others, homosexuals, and using that legacy to argue that the welcome extended by liberal churches to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters is somehow “the exact same thing” as the complacent acceptance of Nazism by German Christians in the 1930s.
I’m sorry, but this is a crime against history and an offense against Christianity. It’s bad theology, bad biblical criticism, and bad ethics. There is simply no basis for anyone to grant Eric Metaxas any credibility as an historian or as a commentator on Bonhoeffer.
And that’s just the preamble. It picks up steam from there.
• How not to do evangelism. After reading the story, I’m 80-percent sure that these grown men — driving around and inviting children to get in their car — really were recruiting for Sunday school and not just using that as a cover story for what it seemed they were doing. You’d think the Gospel of God Baptist Church would have learned something after last summer’s disastrous Vacation Bible School theme: “Join the Candy Man in the Free Candy Van!”
• If you work in a restaurant in New York state, or if you know someone who works in a restaurant in New York, or if you eat in restaurants in New York, then you should know about this: “[State Attorney General Eric T.] Schneiderman’s office has created a ‘fast food worker complaint form‘ asking employees to provide details on the pay and scheduling practices where they work.”
Wage-theft and abuse of employees is now so commonplace there’s a form to complain about it. Good thing we declawed all the unions.
• “If the Supreme Court decides an arts and crafts chain is capable of religious beliefs and thus can have a religious right to deny its employees insurance coverage for birth control, then airlines might be able to assert a religious right to pay men more than women, bakeries could assert a religious right to deny employees insurance coverage for vaccinations, hotels might be able to assert a religious right to refuse rooms to customers based on race, and restaurants could assert a religious right to refuse to serve gay couples.”
• Learned a new and sadly useful word thanks to Sir Paul McCartney in the text accompanying this YouTube video. It’s from the end of Bruce Springsteen’s 2012 concert in Hyde Park, London, where McCartney came out for a rocking encore. The Boss and the Beatle and the E Street Band did “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout” … and then concert officials pulled the plug. It was getting late and there was a curfew or a noise ordinance or some such, so they shut off the microphones on Paul McCartney in London, England.
“Some bloody jobsworth,” McCartney said.
That is, Wikipedia tells me, a British colloquialism for “a person who uses their job description in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights in acting in an obstructive or unhelpful manner.” Like everyone, I’ve often had the misfortune to encounter such people. It’s good to have such an apt word for them.
• Propaganda is harder than it looks: For weeks the Putineers have been assuring us that Russia’s military is liberating eastern Ukraine from neo-Nazi fascists. If that’s your argument — that Putin’s foes are neo-Nazis — then maybe it’s a bit counter-productive to also go around blaming Jews for the Holocaust.
• Here’s a little more from St. Paul & The Broken Bones — “Let It Be So“:
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