Here is your open thread for February 4, 2020.
Happy 58th birthday to Clint Black:
Today is the birthday of beloved kook Norton I, Emperor of the United States, and of Philly comic David Brenner (“Did you ever get a cured ham and wonder what it had?”). Baptist pastor’s kid Alice Cooper turns 72 today. It’s also the birthday of Patrick Bergin, who was so creepily good in Sleeping With the Enemy that it probably harmed his career. And labor reporter turned second-wave feminist Betty Friedan was born on February 4, 1921.
Less happily, Facebook was founded on this day in 2004 and soon took off, because it turns out what the world was waiting for was AOL, but for older and more credulous people.
Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913.
Parks was an activist for years before her role in sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. And she was an activist for justice for the rest of her life, including years of service on the Board of Advocates for Planned Parenthood. (That last point is headsplodingly impossible to grasp for many of my white evangelical friends, a point we’ll need to return to in a separate post.)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born February 4, 1906. Cost of Discipleship is the book preachers always mine for inspirational quotes, but Life Together is the really important one, particularly now, since one subtext of the book is “How to Be the Church in a Way That Keeps Us All From Being Good Nazis.”
I’ve written quite a bit about Bonhoeffer here, see, for example, “What made it possible for him to see?” and especially “The surest way to become a monster is to imagine you’re a hero.” We discussed his essay On Folly here: “‘Under a spell’: Bonhoeffer on folly.” (Short version: What Bonhoeffer refers to as “folly” is what we today call “Trumpism.”)
Talk amongst yourselves.
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