• “This calls for wisdom: Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast.” And this calls for celebration: The Anti-Christ Handbook has now surpassed that number, selling more than 666 copies!
• The sky is falling! The sky is falling! David Barton and his Chicken Little tour bring the narrative of decline to nearby Lancaster County.
• Fox News TV personality Bill O’Reilly says that President Obama had “nothing to do” with the death of Osama bin Laden. And Bill-O would know, I guess, because he was there and personally witnessed the raid.
• At Jesus Creed, David Moore interviews Thomas McKenzie, author of The Anglican Way. McKenzie is from the conservative splinter group ACNA, which is what you get when you mix American white evangelical tribalism with Episcopalianism. Or what you get when you try to turn a centered group into a bounded group.
McKenzie trips over himself when he cites the great Anglican maxim “In essentials, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, love.” His group split off because of Teh Gay, which is, for them an “issue” and not a matter of Christian people no less Christian and no less human than him. That either means he oddly considers this a creedal essential, yet refused to choose unity over schism. Or else he considers it a doubtful thing, yet refuses to treat it with liberty or love. He’d probably be better off just not quoting that in the future.
Still, he has some interesting things to say, and this interview is further evidence that the Anglican/Episcopalian world is — like the American evangelical world — diverse, messy, and utterly resistant to the gatekeepers’ attempts to draw tidy boundaries.
Related: The Christian Examiner drops all pretense of accuracy and integrity, and writer Joni B. Hannigan drops all pretense of not being a sanctimonious lump.
• Dahlia Lithwick has the same reaction as I did to Wisconsin’s announcement that 12-year-olds can magically be proclaimed 21-year-olds because they’re accused of a horrible crime:
We want to brutally and severely punish the Slender Man teens precisely because they make us feel like the world is full of vicious monsters. We may also think we can make ourselves and our families safer by effectively ending these two lives. Of course this is the same sort of logic these two disturbed girls applied to Slender Man himself—the idea that they could make their worlds safer if only a life was ended. This is the logic of magical thinking enacted with horrific real-world consequences. It would be ironic in the extreme if we used the criminal justice system to apply precisely this kind of upside-down logic to these two girls; the fantasy that monsters exist, lives are expendable, and reckless acts make us safer.
• Here’s a corollary to the Streisand effect — awesome ideas you might not have thought of until someone announces that they’re now prohibited: “Ikea Stamps Out Hide-and-Seek Games in Furniture Stores.” The ban applies to the chain’s stores in The Netherlands, so youth ministers please note — there’s still time to get a game together here in the U.S.
This reminds me of growing up at a fundamentalist Christian school and spending our study halls reading through the school’s vast, two-binder rulebook. We were looking for ideas.
• Fundigelical Liberty University is pushing it’s new online programs with ads on YouTube. Their latest pop-up ad says, “Study online and spend more time with her.” I would’ve balked at the sexism of that ad, but I was too busy laughing that it had popped up while I was listening to this:
Remember, kids, Jerry Falwell wants you to spend more time with Genevieve.
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