Proper grooming is the by-product of a healthy attitude and high moral fiber

• We Christians believe that Jesus was without sin. Apparently, some  Christians take that to mean that Jesus was practically perfect in every way — not just sinless, but incapable even of making mistakes. “His divine nature is perfect, and a perfect being cannot make mistakes,” writes Fuller Seminary’s Oliver Crisp.”So Christ the God-man could not make mistakes.”

Crisp seems to be confusing Jesus of Nazareth with the Internet’s version of Chuck Norris. Jesus was human. Jesus couldn’t do this:

• Christian Swingle: “A poll of users of cheating website Ashley Madison found that about a quarter identify as evangelical.”

Clearly, this is because the institution of marriage has been so weakened by attacks from The Gays.

• “To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” I was reminded of those words from Moses Seixas and George Washington when looking at these maps showing the “second-largest religion in each state.”

• Everybody knows that evangelicals are committed to absolute truth while squishy mainline Protestants have adopted the anything-goes worldview of moral relativism. This is a major theme reiterated on a daily basis by a host of evangelical public figures. Here’s the reality:

Last year, an Episcopal priest in Massachusetts, the Rev. John E. McGinn, was accused of plagiarized sermons from Sermons.com. He was suspended by his diocese and said he planned to retire.

Richard Land, who was president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, came under fire in 2012 after being accused of plagiarism in his radio broadcasts. He has since become president of Southern Evangelical Seminary.

Tim Goeglein, who led the Bush administration’s point outreach to religious conservatives, resigned in 2008 after it was revealed that he plagiarized in columns he wrote for his hometown paper. He has since joined Focus on the Family.

In the mainline denomination, lying gets you suspended. In the conservative evangelical world, it gets you promoted. Any questions?

• Dianna Anderson helpfully discussed “the male gaze” in her helpful “back to basics” series recently, and it’s a good introduction to the phrase and the ideas it conveys. I also love Bethany Jones pithy, hilarious summary of the concept in a single paragraph:

The peniscope’s peeping cyclopean eye can only interpret the beguiling differences between the bodies of men and women – boooooooobbbs – as evidence for the compelling alienness of a woman. Faced with the body of a woman, the peniscope won’t relate, project or identify. It will only stare. Even though in the whole of this lonely, cool and infinitely spreading universe the thing that is most like a man is a woman. And vice versa.

• Sure enough, at my younger daughter’s graduation, the high school choir got up and sang Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run.” That capped a five-year streak during which we heard that song from that choir at every parent’s night, every NHS assembly, graduation, awards presentation, etc., we attended during our tenure as Downingtown East parents. It became something of a running joke — “You can’t get your diploma until somebody sings the theme from Working Girl” — but it also grew on me. I would have been disappointed if we hadn’t heard that song last night.

The boundless aspiration and optimism of Simon’s Whitman-esque anthem seems appropriate for a high school graduation. I’m not always a fan of the civil-religious appropriation of religious imagery, and the song’s refrain — “Come, the New Jerusalem” — can seem jarring when it follows the “Star Spangled Banner” and the always-creepy performance of the Pledge of Allegiance. But such language seems inevitable in the song — less a specific invocation of John of Patmos (or of Blake, or Swedenboug) than just a desperate reaching and stretching for the biggest dream one can dream. I can go on (and on, and on) about how optimism is a weak substitute for hope, and about how the 19th-century post-millennial spirit this song taps into needs to be chastened, but when I hear young voices singing of big dreams, I’m inclined to give all of that a bit of a pass. “Let all the dreamers wake the nation” … yes, please, we could use a bit more of that too.