• In case anyone needed a reminder, here’s your reminder: Donald Trump is a horrible, horrible human being.
Hopefully, his appalling comments will be used to shame/blackmail him into writing a big check to support health workers in Liberia.
• “The tongue is a fire,” the book of James says. “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!” Sarah Miller’s Hairpin essay on yoga, “Anger Problems and the Trivia Superteam” is one of the better sermons I’ve ever encountered on James 3:1-12. (It’s not really a sermon, and she never mentions that passage, but still.)
• Archbishop can be a great gig if you’re in the racket for all the wrong reasons.
• Remember that upcoming biblical epic motion picture David and Goliath — the one that producers promise will be “biblically correct in every way“? Paul Davidson exhaustively explains just how impossible that would be in “The Men Who Killed Goliath: Unraveling the Layers of Tradition Behind a Timeless Tale of Heroism.”
The Bible provides us with a bunch of very different, incompatible accounts of the killing of Goliath — and only two of them involve David.
• I’ve been reading John Cole ever since he was an angry right-wing warblogger and I’ve grown fond of him over the years. He’s blogging his way through rehab now, with his usual blunt candor, and I wish the big guy nothing but the best:
Made it through a week-long detox at a very fine medical establishment, and let me assure you, next summer my vacation plans are going to be better or I am kicking my travel agent’s ass. In all honesty, it was not that terrible, but absolutely not an experience I would wish on anyone. Actually, that’s not true at all — there are a lot of people I would wish it on, and some of you are probably reading this right now and desperately need a similar vacation. All I can say is go do it.
• “They were trying out a new eggnog recipe, the station said, adding that the cause of the blast was undetermined.” I like eggnog, but I prefer it when it’s not quite so explodey.
• Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga do Cole Porter. Yep, that works:
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