• When books are outlawed, only outlaws will have books.
• “Can you see my rage?” asks Dianne Lynn Savage of Farmville, North Carolina, in a viral video railing against Muslims, liberals, teachers, vocabulary and the “subliminable” techniques she believes the evil Muslim liberals are using to brainwash good white Christianamerican children. And yes we can. We can see her rage. And we’ve seen it before.
• Texas plumber Mark Oberholzer discovers the limits to the old saying about “no such thing as bad publicity.” Poor guy. All he did was sell his used truck.
• According to the appallingly named YouVersion Bible-reading app, the most popular Bible verse for American Christians is Philippians 4:8, which, here in America, is the locus classicus about the Christian imperative to refrain from masturbation.
(It’s not actually about that. It’s another one of those passages in which the word for justice gets misleadingly translated into something more like “righteousness/uprightness/moral rectitude,” thereby reinforcing the disastrous white Christian disregard for the centrality of justice in the Bible and in Christian discipleship. And it’s another one of those passages that gets spiritualized and neutralized by cutting Paul off mid-thought, so that the part everyone quotes ends with “think on these things,” and we never, ever read the next phrase “Keep on doing …” because that would be works righteousness, and good Protestants don’t believe in works-righteousness — except when it comes to sexual purity. Hence the popularity of Philippians 4:8 as a kind of textual saltpeter.)
• A Los Angeles criminal court probably made the proper decision when it sent home prospective juror Brad Pitt lest his presence in a jury distract from the case being considered. (Kudos to Pitt, though, for showing up when summoned.) Maybe movie stars could be held in reserve for jury service in cases that involve a celebrity defendant?
• Alvin McEwen notes that the anti-marriage-equality group NOM probably shouldn’t be citing the story of Jesus’ nativity as support for their view of “traditional” and “biblical” marriage. It’s not really about a family that typifies their “one man, one woman” campaign.
• The “History” Channel’s upcoming Revelation: The End of Days looks awful. Just what we needed — another piece of pop-culture sensationalism that pretends the Darby/Scofield/LaHaye/Bircher fever-dream is somehow “based on the Bible.”
The only redeeming feature of this promo for this dreck is the text reading, ominously, “The Plagues Are Here.” The word “plagues” isn’t from the pop-reinvention of Revelation that the show is purportedly based on. “The plagues” comes to us from another story — that of Exodus. So maybe some viewers will make that connection — identifying the disasters in John’s Apocalypse with the plagues of Egypt in Exodus, and maybe some of them will catch the hint that both of these stories are about the liberation of people oppressed by an empire and not check lists of predictions about the distant future.
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