If you're fired in disgrace for covering up a gang-rape, you can still get a job at Liberty University. Also: Landlords who fail to even supply stable land; burning a flag is not as offensive as shredding the Constitution, but it's still not cool; a rare misdemeanor for Alabama's felonious GOP; and it's not just sicko Calvinist preachers who want to punish women when a pregnancy ends. Read more
Some Monday links now that I've finally got our Christmas lights up and working: A classroom video from 1946 gains disturbing relevance today; David Barton pretends that the American Southwest does not exist; white evangelical pastors say horribly cruel things about miscarriages for the same reason their politics is horribly cruel (and vice versa). Read more
Liel Leibovitz and Masha Gessen on the horrifyingly pertinent lessons learned from their grandparents. Yolanda Pierce and Hollis Phelps on white evangelicals vs. the gospel. And Katie Grimes on the fiction of the "white" working class. Read more
Concordance-ism doesn't ask us to read the Bible. It asks us to "look up" things in the Bible -- to consult the Bible without reading it. I would say this is a terrible, terrible way to read the Bible, but, again, it's NOT reading. And it often winds up being terribly misleading. Read more
Purely by chance, today's classic Left Behind installment (i.e.: re-run) features a random Carol Brady reference. RIP Florence Henderson. In this terrible year, we're even losing our Wessonality. Click through for a boggling tour of one of the nastiest Lies for Jesus and how anti-abortion urban legends can make "Christian" fiction incomprehensible. Read more
Whether we're talking about witch-hunters in Salem, or Warnke-citing prosecutors in a 1980s daycare center case, or that guy at your church forwarding emails about Planned Parenthood "selling baby parts," there's no actual panic in these immoral "moral panics." Fear and outrage are not the main factors. They're having fun. They're enjoying this. Read more
"Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also." Read more
""OK, kids, here's a fun little game where we train you to be monstrous contenders in a Hobbesian war of all against all. With music! Life is zero-sum, kiddies. Remember that your happiness derives from others' loss, and others' happiness means less for you! You are ultimately, and always, utterly alone." Read more
Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” Read more
I've seen Left Behind described as a "page-turner," but you'd have to be turning those pages really, really fast for any of this to seem to make sense. Read more
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