The Big Box has been doing Spring without any of the usual seasonal hiring. How does that work? It doesn’t. For me, personally, it means a lot of 10- or 12-hour days there and a lot less time here. The 20th-anniversary “flashback” posts that were meant to supplement regular posting here have, instead, been replacing that. Apologies for that.
Fortunately for my mental and physical well-being, we’re finally nearing the end of peak Spring. Got a lot to catch up on here.
• This seems like a reasonable suggestion from Bob Seidenstecker at OnlySky: “Every nonprofit submits an annual IRS 990 to make its cash flow public — every nonprofit, that is, except churches.”
Seidenstecker is not usually intent on helping churches, but his argument here doesn’t sound like mere concern trolling:
Not only is this exemption unfair, it makes churches look like they have something to hide. Given past financial scandals, some do, but this secrecy makes most churches look undeservedly bad. Christians should demand that this exemption be removed. This change would improve the reputation of American churches at a time when a little reputation polishing would be welcome.
There’s a consumer-protection element here, empowering millions of Americans to get a better sense of how their tithes and offerings are really being spent. The effect of that — for most churches, and most church-goers — would be beneficial.
It’s not hard to imagine how the demagogues of Fox, OAN, Charisma, and the rest of MAGA-world would misrepresent this as a nefarious attack on churches by Big Gubmint. But that guns-blazing defense of secrecy might, at least, give us the opportunity to Follow the Money behind those opposed to allowing us to Follow the Money.
• The Golden Rule, for those who have perhaps forgotten, urges us to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is the cornerstone of any Christian ethic.
And, yes, that means it is also the starting point for any Christian sexual ethic. Sex is not some magical external category involving or requiring a wholly distinct novel set of ethical principles. The Golden Rule doesn’t cease to be an ethical priority just because we’re now also talking about sex. If anything, the particular physical and emotional vulnerabilities of sex ought to make the Golden Rule even more essentially important — not less so.
All of which is to say that this is Very Bad News and clear evidence of sexual sin: “Evangelicals have a 47-point orgasm gap, meaning 95% of evangelical men report almost always or always reaching orgasm during a sexual encounter, but only 48% of women do.”
Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. And contempt for the Golden Rule is always, always, always a sin. Love seeketh not its own. Whatever that data reveals about evangelical men, it ain’t love.
• That’s right, I’m not from Texas. … Charles Kuffner tries to explain Skeet Jones, the emperor of Loving County (pop. 57), urging us non-Texans to understand that “the Yellowstone-meets-Game of Thrones as directed by early-career Coen Brothers aspect of this” isn’t even the strangest part of the story.
• Speaking of Texas … “In a series of increasingly disturbing statements in a sermon on Sunday, Christian hate-preacher Dillon Awes of Stedfast Baptist Church in Texas said all gay people in the United States should be charged with crimes, tried, and executed.”
A reminder that “Stedfast” there is not a spelling mistake. This King James Version spelling is deliberate for this KJV-only franchise of defiantly hateful and ignorant Rushdoony-ish, white-supremacist independent Baptists. When you see this spelling, run the other way instead, fast.
• Andrea L. Turpin writes fondly and wistfully about her seminary alma mater: “A Love Letter To My Theological Seminary: On Gordon-Conwell Selling Its Main Residential Campus.”
My seminary did something similar — changing its name, selling its campus, and moving back in with its former spin-off further out on the Main Line. I’m glad to see “Palmer Seminary of Eastern University” surviving and regaining its footing with its new identity, but I fully understand the melancholy note in Turpin’s “love letter.”
Kathryn Post zooms out for the bigger picture: “As religious landscape shifts, reshaped seminaries shed their campuses.”
• I was still a seminary student the one year some theater friends scored us tickets to the Henry David Ball — the most fabulous Halloween party in Philadelphia. It was glorious and joyous and over-the-top in all the best ways — the kind of extravaganza that sounds like something Bill Hader’s “Stephon” character could only dream about. (It had everything — dancing nuns, Skeletor … Mitch Williams.) Judges for the RuPaul-worthy drag show that night included then-Mayor Ed Rendell, old-money Republican Council Member Thatcher Longstreth, and some guy from Action News.
At the end of the night, I was standing outside waiting for my ride when a handsome gentleman with a salt-and-pepper beard and a gorgeous teal taffeta gown walked up, told me, “You should know that you have eyes to die for and you deserve everything your precious heart desires,” curtseyed, and strode off down the street. I have carried that blessing with me ever since.
I couldn’t help but remember that delightful night when reading this: “They’re Coming For Drag Shows. Really.”
Thanks to all that seminary training, I tend to think in terms of justice and injustice, oppression and liberation. But the joylessness of MAGAmerica is also terrifying and also matters. “Republicans are anti-fun” sounds like a relatively insignificant criticism when viewed against the violence of January 6 or the nightmare of Doug Mastriano’s “Rod of Iron” vision for my state. But fun and joy and delight are also morally consequential. If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your counter-revolution.
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