"It is foolishness and a public madness to fill the cupboards with clothing and allow people who are created in God's image and likeness to stand naked and trembling with cold, so that they can hardly hold themselves upright. Yes, you say, he is cheating and he is only pretending to be weak and trembling. What! Do you not fear that lightning from Heaven will fall on you for this word? ..." Read more
Today’s protest anthem and Saturday morning open thread comes courtesy of Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band. We are brothers, sisters all. Read more
Last Monday, a third of the planet vanished faster than you can blink, without a trace, without an explanation. The entire world has seen something “that no one can explain.” There are no more children anymore and no one knows how or why or what happened. Compared to the confounding, incomprehensible, world-altering Event, a couple of guys tripping and dying scarcely registers on anyone’s personal list of unexplainable happenings. Read more
"Is there anything sadder – and ultimately more repellent – than a clean-minded pornographer?" That was Pauline Kael reacting to Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange," but it's also an apt description of the so-called "Billy Graham rule," which fosters the creepy obsessiveness of the habitual cheater and attempts to re-brand it as vigilance. Read more
Let's relax and take a deep breath with an almost completely Trump-free post, featuring the music of the Old 97's, a new documentary on Reinhold Niebuhr, and the sense of recognition that comes from realizing that comedian Pete Holmes is a Gordon College grad and a recovering evangelical (that explains a lot). Read more
This is the difference between Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. Parks effectively and strategically practiced civil disobedience. She broke an unjust law, submitting to her arrest and prosecution, and thereby helped to spark a public debate and a mass movement that ultimately changed and corrected that unjust law. Harriet Tubman broke an unjust law -- many unjust laws -- but she was compelled not to get caught doing so, for her own sake and for the sake of those she rescued. Read more
Guess what, all those phone calls and town halls and protests against the awful, awful "Trumpcare" bill? They worked. Well done, folks. Also: Trump's budget wants to cut LIHEAP; the CFPB ain't dead yet; what flat-earthers are on about; and YNATKC. Read more
Science reports like this make listening to "secular" news radio just one more thing that's being taken away from them. And so this feeds into the weird (but also delicious) delusion that white Christians in America are being persecuted for their faith. Read more
Today’s protest anthem and Saturday open thread comes from the other side of the world, courtesy of Midnight Oil. Read more
Writing a bad book — a hastily written, shabbily imagined, incoherent story with wrenching lapses in continuity, hilarious factual errors, and characters that do not behave in recognizably human ways — was the only way for LaHaye & Jenkins to keep their prophecy beliefs intact. Had they tried to write a better book — one in which, at a minimum, there was a semblance of continuity and in which people acted like people — they would have been forced to realize that the thing they’ve been telling themselves they believe is an impossibility. Read more
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