• Evangelical Christians here in the United States can, broadly, be classified in two categories: Gatekeepers and Flanders. I’m far more fond of the latter category.
Say “Hey-diddly-ho, neighbor!” to Josh Cobia, a worship leader and pastor at an evangelical church in Santa Monica, writing for The Washington Post’s Acts of Faith blog: “I went to church with Bruce Jenner. Here’s what Caitlyn Jenner taught me about Jesus.”
• Police don’t yet know why the Rev. Dr. Augustus Sealy of the First Church of the Nazarene in Hartford, Connecticut, was attacked in a drive-by shooting that left him seriously injured, but they suspect it was a hate-crime motivated by the fact that LGBT people were welcomed and affirmed at Sealy’s church.
The deputy police chief told Talking Points Memo that, “Some language used in the incident — and given where it was, in front of a church known to be accepting of our LGBT community — it led us to have concern that this is a hate crime.”
So here is a Christian pastor gunned down in front of his church, possibly because of his Christian beliefs. And the silence of the supposed champions of “religious liberty” — the Todd Starneses and Mike Huckabees and Franklin Grahams and the rest — is deafening. They’re always claiming or warning of Christian persecution, but when the “wrong” kind of Christian gets shot … silence.
• “It might be incongruous to think of spies having to account for expenses, like any old suit on a business trip, but in reality, people working for intelligence services do have to keep track of the money they’re spending, file expense reports, and even hound their company (the Company, in this case) to reimburse them.” There’s at least one movie plot (or dozens) lurking in this Sarah Laskow piece for Atlas Obscura.
• Role-playing games didn’t exist in rural New Hampshire in the 1890s, but I’d bet any one of the Nelson brothers would’ve been an awesome DM.
• Christianity Today chimes in with a summary of Christian denunciations of the “Charlie Charlie Challenge” — the neither fun nor scary game in which credulous kids and/or clergy try to freak themselves out by watching a poorly balanced pencil move. Timothy C. Morgan drily seems to side with those who attribute the pencil’s movement to “gravity,” but he dutifully cites a host of other Christian folk who are eager to attribute falling objects to the work of demonic powers.
Morgan quotes Southern Baptist publicity-hound Robert Jeffress as well as José Antonio Fortea, a “Roman Catholic expert in demonology” and “Vatican-approved exorcist.” But, alas, he doesn’t mention James “The Amazing” Randi, the magician and skeptic who debunked this very same parlor trick on national television 35 years ago.
That juxtaposition got me wondering. Why hasn’t Fr. Fortea bothered to collect his $1 million prize? James Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge has been around since 1964. The money is just sitting there for the taking for anyone who “demonstrates any psychic, supernatural, or paranormal ability under satisfactory observation.” So why hasn’t Fortea or Fr. Gabriele Amorth or any of the many other official and unofficial professional exorcists stepped forward to claim this prize?
• Hurricanes in the northern hemisphere and cyclones in the southern hemisphere spin in opposite directions. But is this also true about toilets and sink drains? Science to the rescue! The creators of two terrific science channels on YouTube — Derek Muller of Veritasium and Destin Sandler of Smarter Every Day — have teamed up for a trans-equatorial demonstration, with synchronized videos from the northern and southern hemispheres. Very cool.
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