• The recent death of failed prophesier Hal Lindsey prompted Joshua Wood to revisit his remembrance of growing up watching A Thief in the Night and its sequels.
Those movies scared the bejeezus out of him by trying to scare the bejeezus into him. And thus, as he says, “I probably gave my life to Christ hundreds of times.”
This is the main “evangelistic” result of all such evangelistic efforts: Convincing those already saved and already baptized and already attending church to pray the “sinner’s prayer” for the hundredth or two-hundredth time.
• Before there was corporate “social media,” there were blogs. And when there were blogs, there was Fafblog.
If you don’t remember Fafblog, it’s hard to explain it to you. But even if I can’t describe exactly what it did, it was better at what it did than anything else.
The second-to-last post on that site was “down with the ship.” That’s worth reading again now in lieu of reading any more post-election analyses.
• The CharisMAGA “prophets” tend to make Giblets and the Medium Lobster seem relatively rational and wise. It’s unlikely that pointing out their many false prophecies and failed predictions will ever break the spell they have over their followers or the weird appeal of their Gospel According to Phineas Taylor Barnum.
But still, for the record, it’s worth checking in with them every little bit to remember some of their predictions and to ask how those panned out here in reality. So, for example, here are Court Prophets Johnny Enlow and Steve Shultz back in August, gleefully sharing how the Word of the Lord hath come to both of them that a beloved dead celebrity was about to A) reveal that they weren’t really dead, and B) endorse Donald Trump as God’s Chosen Messiah.
Did that happen?
No. It did not happen.
These clowns are ungodly weird and believing anything they say is ungodly weird and all such “prophets” ever accomplish is fundraising for themselves and advancing the blasphemous politics of injustice.
• “This is your reminder that the sex/gender distinction was first proposed by the most famous Christian author of the 20th century,” Billie Hoard writes: “C.S. Lewis and the Sex/Gender Distinction.”
Lewis’ view, Hoard says, was an expression of his idiosyncratic Platonism, or Platon-ish-ism, and doesn’t really map onto any of the current discussions of the distinction between sex and gender. But the fact and necessity of that distinction was, to Lewis, both obvious and non-controversial. And he affirmed that in popular books that millions of American white evangelicals claim to have read.
• Here’s another academic-paper-disguised-as-blogpost: “A most controversial marriage.” Wyatt Reynolds goes both deep and wide on the 1826 marriage of Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold.
• In all of the other Republican weirdness of the 2024 election season, you may have missed or forgotten about the story of Mary Morrissey and Vermont’ “Watergate”:
A Vermont lawmaker was compelled to apologize publicly after being caught on video pouring water into her colleague’s work bag multiple times across several months.
The bizarre behavior is allegedly a part of a campaign of harassment that one legislator aimed at another who represents the same district in the Green Mountain state, independent outlet Seven Days first reported.
The Republican representative, Mary Morrissey, 67, confessed to dumping water in the bag of the Democratic legislator Jim Carroll, 62. She later apologized during a Vermont state house session on Monday.
Morrissey was re-elected on November 5.
• The title for this post comes from the lyrics to the band James’ biggest hit here in America, “Laid.”
That song was a college radio hit back in 1993 and has become a kind of cult classic over the last 30+ years, covered by a ton of artists and by every local bar band with a singer who can hit that falsetto.
And, again, the fact that songs like this — or like “Lola” and “Rebel Rebel” — are familiar and beloved across the generations, and yet their utterly familiar subject matter is now something some folks are pretending is brand new is confirmation that those folks are just pretending. Their act is unconvincing because they’re acting in bad faith. We know it. They know it. And they know that we know it.
So when you encounter these folks reciting the lines of their bullshit script about “gender politics” or “identity politics” or whatever transphobic hate they’ve been instructed to recite, you can call them out by singing any of these to highlight that their outrage over this supposedly brand new, trendy, Biden-era woke phenomenon isn’t convincing to anyone who doesn’t have the memory of a goldfish.
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