• I’ve been reading Philip Jenkins’ fascinating, eclectic blog long enough that when he tells us that an obscure story from Christian history may be “truly noteworthy and indeed weird,” I believe him.
“What a Lethal Roof Tile Tells Us About Christian Heresy” is a terrific peek at how sometimes the voices excised and erased from history sneak their way back in, if you know how to look for them.
• And while we’re on the subject of historians with quirky blogs, here’s Dr. Eleanor Janega “On A.I. and the golem.”
• Mike Evans — the white fundamentalist Christian Zionist extremist, not the wide receiver — is also apparently a wanna-be novelist. Connor Echols got a hold of a draft of Evans’ unpublished End Times thriller, which Evans apparently (under)paid an IDF colonel to edit for him.
“Read this Evangelical Zionist leader’s leaked suspense novel,” Echols’ headline says. But no thank you. I’m too old to get sucked back into that.
• Rabbi Hazzan Jeffrey Myers and the Rev. Eric Manning have a beautiful friendship and interfaith partnership. I wish they’d never met: “Tree of Life rabbi and Mother Emanuel pastor: 7 years of a friendship forged in tragedy.”
• Peter Coviello on what it’s like to be interviewed by political reporters for The New York Times:
Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter. Some people say this; however, others say this. It’s so offhand you can think you’re gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised.
• Andrew Long has a nice profile of YouTuber Jared Smith for The Assembly, “The Atheist Who Wants You to Go to Church.” Smith is an ex-vangelical with a very personal story and perspective.
The article includes a link to this recent video of his, “How I Lost My Faith at a Christian College (And Still Loved It).” I imagine there are some folks at Wheaton College who won’t be happy about this short, charming video, but the school — and especially the faculty — should actually be proud of Smith’s description of his time there. (The folks who run the unaccredited Pentecostal FIRE School of Ministry, on the other hand, might want to try to understand why they should not be proud of his experience there.)
Wheaton comes across much, much better in the testimony and life of this atheist alum than it does in the testimony and life of an alumnus like the widow-and-orphan-starving white nationalist monster Russ Vought.
• Speaking of evangelical college faculty, and faculty more generally, John Fea posted part of a recent interview with Harvard’s Jill Lepore, in which she addresses some ill-defined sense of “wokeness.” Lepore says:
… something really changed on campus around 2014. I often talk with colleagues who are close friends about this: What was it that actually changed it?
Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak, or a thing you can say about something. This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial to the public shaming stuff.
The date she gives there is interesting as 2014 was basically the first full year of the new internet based almost entirely on the corporate algorithms of a small oligopoly of “social media” tech companies. Google Reader was killed in July of 2013, Facebook was aggressively throttling outside links, not just to blogs, but to news sites, etc. Makes sense to me that this would be right around when classrooms might have started resembling Twitter — which is a shorter way of describing what Lepore describes.
• The “Trump Burger” shop in Houston was a MAGA-themed restaurant more famous for its Trump-worshiping decor than for its food. “It paid homage to President Donald Trump with memorabilia on the walls and doors, plus ‘Trump’ stamped on the burgers themselves.”
The restaurant closed last month after its owner and proprietor, a Lebanese immigrant, was detained and possibly deported by ICE. Local news reports that the former Trump Burger site will soon be home to “Empire Pizza.”
• After that epic 7-game World Series, Pittsburgh sportswriter Tim Benz decided to talk about it with 83-year-old Steve Blass, a hero in the Pirates’ World Series win back in 1971: “Pirates legend Steve Blass stirs colorful comps to Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s World Series heroics.” This is delightful if you like baseball or even if you just like old guys tellin’ stories. (via AZspot)
• The title of this post comes, of course, from Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a song that’s found new resonance thanks to the 50-year anniversary of that wreck and, for some reason, due to its popularity on TikTok. (These kids today with their rock and roll.)
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