1. Florida, Texas and North Carolina all continue to be frequently dismaying and appalling, but lately Oklahoma has been making a strong bid to challenge these top contenders. (Oh, and the New Hampshire legislature is still too large.)
2. Celebrity sex-tape from Alyssa Milano (SFW) serves as both a surprisingly informative overview of the Syrian crisis and a mordantly funny skewering of American media and politics.
3. Here are some nice write-ups on the NALT Christians Project from Gay Married Californian, Elizabeth Dias for Time, Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, Jim Burroway and William Lindsey.
You should also read Camille Beredjick’s more cautious take on the project, which she describes as “direly needed” but far from perfect. And you should read Dianna E. Anderson’s critique of the project, because: A) She highlights some of the potential dangers that could make such efforts do more harm than good; and B) you should always read Dianna Anderson.
I think Beredjick’s “direly needed” comment points to both the importance and the danger for this project. Speaking up in this way is necessary, but it is far from sufficient. We get in trouble when we confuse those.
We can’t do one of the many necessary things, pat ourselves on the back, and return to our seats imagining that this will be sufficient. Just because we’ve done one thing that needed to be done, we shouldn’t ever think we’ve therefore done everything we’re responsible to do. Signing a petition may be a good thing to do and sometimes it may be a necessary thing to do. But it’s very rarely the case that signing a petition and doing nothing else is a good thing to do. And if signing a petition makes you feel satisfied, like you’ve done all you need to do, then probably in that case signing the petition was not a good thing to do.
(On the flipside, of course, we shouldn’t neglect small-but-necessary measures just because they’re not sufficient. Most of the things we need to do are less than sufficient, but we can’t avoid them just because other, larger things also need doing.)
4. Qanta Ahmed says “Don’t surrender Islam to the Islamists.” Ahmed, author of In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom, argues that “moderate Muslims have to reclaim the dialogue” on their own behalf, on behalf of religious minorities, and on behalf of Islam itself. It is, in other words, necessary for anti-Islamist moderate Muslims to speak up and to say, “We’re not all like that.”
Is that everything that needs to be done to counter Islamism? No, it is not sufficient, but it is necessary.
5. J.R. Daniel Kirk’s “Open Letter to New Testament Students” is wise and also, I think, kind. Kirk notes that all classes involve rethinking preconceptions, but biblical studies are different, he says, because “rarely do you have as much invested in the assumptions that the professor is trying to deconstruct.”
6. John Turner looks at Carolyn Renée Dupont’s Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975. Dupont, Turner says, argues that: “Southern evangelicals did not simply ignore the political strife of the 1960s through their concentration on evangelism and personal salvation. Instead, they were active belligerents.” And that, she says, restructured white evangelicalism in the South, paving the way for the religious right: “Evangelicals no longer voice caution about political activity … because, in their resurrected and monolithically conservative form, no challenge to their politics can arise to trouble unity within these bodies.”
This is one reason, by the way, that troubling this false unity of monolithic, conservative evangelicalism, is necessary — not sufficient, but necessary — in combatting the religious right and its continuing advocacy of injustice. (And combatting the religious right is, of course, only one necessary-but-not-sufficient aspect of seeking justice.)
Turner also quotes this from Dupont: “Certain ways of viewing sin, morality, and individual responsibility structure a people’s thinking so as to obscure and discount collective and corporate responsibility.” I’m going to have to read this book.
7. Deane Galbraith is back to posting at Remnant of Giants, which I enjoy because giants. He just did one of those Google search-analytic posts, providing an excuse to link back to this bit of classic advice offered in response to one such search leading someone to his site: “How Do You Know When You’re Having Sex With a Fallen Angel? Some Handy Hints From a Biblical Scholar?” You may want to bookmark that for future reference.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In