Harmonia Rosales, an artist based in Chicago, has revisited Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Like Michelangelo’s original, Rosales’ painting leads us to think about what it means to believe that we have been created in the image of God. Both paintings do so, of course, by envisioning God in our own image, which also leads us to think about the meaning of incarnation, and what it means to believe that God did the very same thing. Rosales’ painting is good theology.... Read more
That's a terribly uncomfortable place to be, but it's where millions of white evangelical Christians in America find themselves because it's where they've been taught to believe they are required to be. They wish they could have a faith that better aligned with what their nagging conscience is telling them would be more good, more beautiful, more true, more just, and more loving, but they've been taught to believe that such faith is not permitted. Read more
It's overwhelming. And that's the dangerous thing. We're at risk of being overwhelmed. We freeze up, paralyzed, waiting for the next shoe to drop, even as it's raining shoes. We can be so transfixed by the spectacle of Trump's implosion that we become spectators -- sitting and watching instead of acting, now, to stop him. Read more
Today's protest anthem and Monday morning open thread comes courtesy of Curtis Mayfield. The Vaughn brothers took the bones of that song and wrote another one. Then John Mayer did too. But no more passive waiting, people. Get ready. Get on board. Tick tock. Read more
"So you see, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the Lord has decreed disaster for you." Read more
The story has just moved beyond unrealistic, beyond implausible, into the realm of hopelessly impossible. And keep in mind that, for the authors and most of their millions of readers, this isn’t merely a story. This is a fictional account of what they think of as actual events that will soon occur. Their unreal and impossible fiction is a reflection of their unreal and impossible beliefs about the actual world. Read more
Anger, we're told, will eat you alive and make you unhappy. And that can be true -- depending on what it is that you are angry about, and why. But if, like Benjamin Ferencz, you get angry and stay angry at the right things -- angry at injustice, and cruelty, and inhumanity, angry on behalf of others -- then that anger will keep you churning. Read more
It's a bit odd to be writing about this right after President Trump's audaciously Nixonian firing of the FBI director -- the third time this president has fired an official currently in charge of an investigation into the possible criminal activities of this president. But there's a common thread here: White nationalist hegemony is incompatible with constitutional democracy. Read more
This doesn't quite amount to Holocaust denialism, but it is a kind of Holocaust diminishing -- a way of disparaging the meaning and importance of that event and to reduce it to nothing more than a tool in service of some other end. That end is not primarily a political goal -- ending legal abortion -- but an emotional goal. It's about the need to pretend that you are Good and Brave and Courageous when you already know that you are none of those things. Read more
Today’s protest anthem and Monday morning open thread comes courtesy of Talking Heads (RIP Jonathan Demme). The burning keeps me alive. Read more
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