• “Indeed, today’s quote is especially brazen: ‘We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.’ Whether the GOP candidate appreciates this or not, the first three words of that sentence go a long way towards refuting the last three words in the sentence.”
• “The Bible, if we are paying attention, behaves in such a way that it decenters itself and drives us to center our trust in the living God, whose actions are neither restricted nor fully described in these ancient and diverse writings that bear witness to God’s actions.”
Peter Enns doing his thing. The problem with his call to study the Bible as it is is that the Bible as it is won’t do what we’re trying to make it do — serve as the final arbiter in all debates, one that coincidentally gives divine affirmation to Our Team.
• Joel Duff reminds us of two more things Young-Earth creationists can never allow themselves to think about too much:
Yeah, poor Al Mohler can’t look up at the night sky or kick a pebble without jeopardizing his fragile biblical literalism. And as Duff points out, he can’t kill bugs in his garden or run the filter on his swimming pool either.
• I wound up reluctantly serving as “weapons master” for a local theater company a few years ago. I was given that job — which wasn’t as cool as that title suggests — because of my reluctance, because the fight director we hired (this guy, he’s terrific) wanted someone who would approach it with some trepidation.
That show — an experimental Calvinist neo-noir incorporating deaf and hearing casts — included some gunfire. The gun was a revolver with a bar welded into the barrel so it could never be used for live ammo. It was kept in a locked box with a supply of blanks and it was to be loaded by one and only one person — me, the weapons master. I would load the gun for the first shooting scene before the show, lock it in the box, put the key in my pocket, and never let the box out of my sight. Before that scene, the actor would come to me and I’d unlock the box and give him the gun offstage. After that scene he would return the gun to me, I would make sure it was empty, load the second blank, and lock it back in the box until the second shooting scene. No exceptions.
All of which is to say that I don’t understand how something like this could ever happen: “‘Vigilante’ shoots bystander and fellow actor during shootout stunt for tourists.” Or, rather, I understand how it happened, but I don’t understand how any self-respecting theatrical production — even a low-tier “re-enactment” troupe performing for tourists at the OK Corral — was so reckless as to allow guns capable of firing live rounds anywhere near their set.
Or, for that matter, why even a prop-gun loaded with blanks would ever be pointed directly at another actor. You don’t need to do that. Ever. This is why.
• Carol Kuniholm writes about the upcoming election here in Pennsylvania for our state Supreme Court Justices, noting the key issue in this vote — that it’s deeply weird and indefensible to elect state Supreme Court justices. (Ours is one of eight states to do this.)
• It turns out that Marilynne Robinson’s beloved novel Gilead is really just part of the secret Muslim conspiracy.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In