That's what Jesus is saying. "The poor will always be with you" because you are disobedient, hardhearted, exploitative and devious. The presence of poverty is not some inevitable law of the universe, it's the consequence of sin -- your sin, the sin of the wealthy, not the sin of the poor. The fact that the poor are with us is a rebuke. It is evidence of our guilt and failure and wicked thinking. Read more
Global Weekly doesn't seem to have published an issue since before the Rapture, and that was eight days ago. Buck fought for, and was awarded, the responsibility of writing the big cover story on the biggest news story of all time, but before writing a single sentence of it, he flew off to England to research a different story, one which he backed off of, brokering a deal to cover it up. Combine those with his dropping the ball on Nicolae's big scoop and that's three strikes. Read more
"Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments ... are summed up in this word, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law." Read more
"Folks 'round here love their families," the Very Nice man says. "We value hard work and honesty." And the Very Nice man seems Very Nice, until you realize that what he's actually saying is that he and his community imagine that other people in other places do NOT love their families and that "those people" do NOT value hard work and honesty. Once you realize this is what they want and need to believe about everyone else, the Very Nice man and his Very Nice community no longer seem quite so nice. Read more
Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Plus: Lawless, clueless cops invite a lawsuit from Disney (and from Murdock & Nelson); Don Francisco meets Half-Hanged Mary; religious right diploma mills; and the good news about those awful Family Christian Stores. Read more
The Pearly Gates of Heaven are a cliché image in popular culture. Every time a famous person dies, newspaper cartoonists churn out variations of the Famous Person at the Pearly Gates cartoon. The same Pearly Gates scene gets recycled endlessly in movies, TV shows, advertising, and more jokes than we could ever get written down. But in all of that pop-culture imagery and in all the religious folklore built around it, we tend to get one detail of John of Patmos' vision completely backwards. Read more
Here’s Tracy Chapman with your Saturday protest anthem and open thread. Read more
Originally posted August 3, 2007. Read this entire series, for free, via the convenient Left Behind Index. This post is also part of the ebook collection The Anti-Christ Handbook: Volume 1, available on Amazon for just $2.99. Volume 2 of The Anti-Christ Handbook, completing all the posts on the first Left Behind book, is also now available. Left Behind, pp. 308-314 We’ve noted before that setting a story in the “not-too-distant future” can be particularly tricky. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins faced a... Read more
American society is marked by the baffling phenomenon of the haves resenting the have-nots. This is such a common feature of American life that we almost get inured to how dazzlingly weird this is. The wealthy deride the poor as "takers." The rich resent the poor. White folks indignantly resent people of color. Men resent women. The powerful resent the powerless. This is ass-backwards and utterly illogical. Read more
Donald Trump is the end-product (so far) of the white evangelical narrative of decline -- the product of generations of jeremiads bemoaning every small step of greater justice and greater equality for women, people of color, and religious and sexual minorities. That narrative has always condemned and rejected "Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall" as -- in Howe's words -- "American cultural decline" that is "moving the country farther from resembling [a] Christian society." Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In