• Heath Bradley offers a patient and pastoral response to N.T. Wright’s confused rant on marriage equality: “Why Wright Is Wrong About Same-Sex Marriage (Part 1).”
Bradley prefaces his response with an explanation of why Wright’s befuddled blather was so disappointing. This is a man whose writing we treasure because he always does his homework. When he writes about Paul and the first-century church, he engages the best arguments and the best scholarship from all angles and moves the conversation forward. It was stunning to see this same man attacking straw-men caricatures and recycling gender-essentialist arguments from the mid-20th century, apparently unaware that anyone had said, thought or written anything in the generation since then.
I was surprised to see N.T. Wright peddling ignorant smarm, but the identity of the patient doesn’t change the prescription for that disease. The most reliable remedy for smarm is snark, thus this. But for those seeking a snark-free response to Wright, Heath Bradley’s response is quite good.
• Part of Wright’s problem, I think, is uniquely Anglican. Wright is a former bishop in an established church in which ecclesiastical authority is handcuffed to civil authority and in which religious decisions have to be, as Rowan Williams said, “nodded through parliament.” Wright’s American counterparts in the Episcopal Church are able to think and to speak of the civil right of marriage as distinct from the sacrament of marriage in a way that Anglicans aren’t accustomed to doing. Where Episcopalians are mindful of Loving v. Virginia, Anglicans are still thinking in terms of Henry VIII v. Catherine. That mindset isn’t doing Bishop Wright any favors.
• “It just cannot be that a man should lose hope every day” — Andrew Martin on “Johnny Cash’s Lost Decade.”
• The Liar Tony Perkins has announced another round of the Family Research Council’s “Call 2 Fall” — which is both an annual exercise in partisan prayer and an annual invitation to play with the event logo in PhotoShop:
If you wanna kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel. (On your knees boy …)
• Gretchen McCulloch shares Anne Curzan’s remarks on “the dictionary,” which reminds me of some of the perennial discussion about The Bible:
At some level, we know that there are human hands behind dictionaries, but we’re really not sure who those hands belong to. I’m actually fascinated by this. Even the most critical people out there tend not to be very critical about dictionaries, not distinguishing among them and not asking a whole lot of questions about who edited them. Just think about the phrase “Look it up in the dictionary,” which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same. Consider the library here on campus, where you go into the reading room, and there is a large, unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and respect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers.
• Hey, look, we’ve gotten through all four albums of Daniel Amos’ Alarma Chronicles. The final song is basically Terry Taylor’s version of “Across the Universe,” but Terry’s version of “Across the Universe” is lovely:
Jai Guru Deva OM. Selah.
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