So, OK, the starred-to-read-later folder in my RSS reader is now overflowing with posts and articles and breaking news items that broke months ago. Time to clear that out.
The following items may not be hot off the presses, but they may still be of interest …
• It’s a matter of trust: “Even abortion foes will help friends who choose to end a pregnancy.”
They will do this because they know their friends and appreciate that their friends have good, legitimate reasons for their decision. But they want to criminalize that same decision, preventing other people from making it because they do not know those other people and they have chosen to believe that those other people, unlike their friend, must be making their decision based on the worst imaginable motives.
Anti-abortionism is always, always based on bearing false witness against thy neighbor. It is not a position one can arrive at unless one is willing — and eager — to presume the very worst about people you otherwise know nothing about.
• Michel Martin’s NPR segment on “The Road To Overturning Roe v. Wade,” is best read — or heard — at NPR’s site, rather than at this summary from Baptist Global News, “Kristin Du Mez explains white evangelicals and abortion on NPR show; Ed Young preaches Mother’s Day sermon on abortion.”
But I do need to highlight one piece from that BGN item, near the end, in discussing Texas mega-church pastor Ed Young’s abortion-is-worse-than-the-Holocaust diatribe framing himself as the heroic Van Helsing who, alone, stands against the Satanic baby-killers.
Mark Wingfield — commendably — fact-checks Young’s most outrageous claims, but in doing so he also shows us why fact-checking alone is insufficient when dealing with “pro-life” fantasists like Young. When Young claims that legal abortion is “genocide against Blacks,” Wingfield treats this as a face-value claim of Young’s actual, good-faith belief. It’s not that.
This is not a thing that Ed Young or his white parishioners have actually managed to convince themselves is true. It is a mantra they recite, like The One Line They Quote From King’s “Dream” Speech, to reassure themselves that Someone Else is the real racists and so, therefore, we could not possibly be on the side of racism, even as we support racist candidates and policies, seek to destroy post-Brown public education, oppose non-white immigration, and preach whole sermons based on the claim that anti-racism and equal justice are an attack on the foundations of their own faith and identity.
Whenever you encounter this “legal abortion is the real racism” nonsense, you’re not dealing with a good-faith assertion or some simple misunderstanding. You’re not even dealing with someone who’s talking to you. They’re talking to themselves, reciting the mantra they hope will silence the nagging voice of their own conscience. Pay no more attention or respect than you would to anyone else you meet who stands, arms wrapped around their sides, gently rocking and murmuring, “But I can’t be the bad guy, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t …”
• “Pete Enns Ruins Leviticus.” Really though, this podcast episode involves Dr. Enns defending Leviticus from getting ruined by misuse or ignorance. It’s still Leviticus — still dense and detailed and levitical — but it’s far more interesting than the impression you may have gotten from some arbitrary clobber-texter or from that one time you resolved to read the whole Bible straight through and got bogged down in this book.
• David Swartz reflects on “A Tragic Anniversary: The Politics of Jesus Turns Fifty.” Like me, I suspect Swartz still has a once-beloved copy of John Howard Yoder’s book somewhere filled with underlining and highlighting and handwritten notes in the margins wrestling with the profound, challenging, life- and faith-changing arguments it contains. And, like me, I suspect that Swartz hasn’t been able to bring himself to touch that book in a long time.
What does it mean that this author turned out to be a monster? The shallow and the self-absorbed flee from this difficult question, turning to shiny distractions like discussions of “cancel culture” and “reputation.” But Swartz recognizes that’s not the crucial point here. This is: “Yoder’s communitarian ethic of peace failed spectacularly in real life as his local congregation, his seminary employer, and his denomination failed to keep Yoder in check. Decades later, an investigation revealed that over 100 women experienced unwanted violations at conferences, classrooms, retreats, homes, apartments, offices, and parking lots. That Yoder himself could violate an ethic of peace is troubling.”
Compartmentalizing Yoder’s crimes as “personal failings” or “hypocrisy” is insufficient. Here we have a book that we once believed contained necessary and vitally important insights. But we have since learned that it also very likely contains pernicious, toxic thinking. What do we do with a book that very possibly offers both something we need and something that we need to avoid? Swartz doesn’t know either, but he’s at least asking some of the right questions.
• Charles McCrary on “The Supreme Court and the Strange Politics of the ‘Sincere Believer’“:
The advent of the “sincerity test” in the 1940s—according to which courts do not consider whether a claimant’s statements are true, just whether they really believe them—has led to a strange and complicated politics of sincerity. More and more believers have passed the test, as more and more beliefs have been considered religious. And courts do not subject those beliefs to a test of orthodoxy. One’s beliefs do not have to line up with those of their religious leader or organization. It’s a radically individual standard.
• Step One of the plan to revitalize sales of the Choco Taco seems to be going well.
• At the time, I wasn’t sure what to make of Mark Heard’s 1987 reinvention as the one-man-band IDEoLA. His one album under that name was a jarring, very ’80s departure from his earlier acoustic troubadour style, and it seemed like maybe he was better at the old thing than at this new thing. But if that was the break he needed to become the songwriter who went on to produce his final three albums — Dry Bones Dance, Second Hand, and Satellite Sky — then it was worth it.
Oddly, Olivia Newton-John wound up recording a song from that IDEoLA album, “How to Grow Up Big and Strong,” the lyrics of which supplies the title for this post. It’s not my favorite Mark Heard song, nor my favorite Olivia Newton-John recording. I wish she’d recorded more of his stuff. “House of Broken Dreams,” maybe, or “Love Is Not the Only Thing.”
But sadly they’re both gone now, so let’s remember both of them with this (which Heard also produced):
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