We've all seen bad movies in which the plot doesn't make sense because they haven't provided a valid reason why the heroes don't just go to the police. This is that movie. Except here it's worse because the hero is a policeman and he won't even go to himself. Read more
David Dark on James Lawson, being awesome. Willie James Jennings on the "tormented deployment" of a deformed idea of "reconciliation." Nikole Hannah-Jones on segregationism in 21st-century America. Kristin Du Mez on "Donald Trump and Militant Evangelical Masculinity." Read more
It's beyond creepy to learn that one of the biggest names in evangelical philanthropy is one tiny step removed from the biggest name in paramilitary profiteering and mercenary massacres. And why is this family of right-wing billionaires so obsessed with shooting bears? Also: The very, very bad inaugural poem that gives Scots one more reason to hate Donald Trump; mercy seasons justice; and a closer look at American Nazis' conflicted views on Israel. Read more
Romans 8 contains both a passage of beautiful comfort that should always be read at funerals and a sorely abused passage that has been twisted into a cruelly glib slogan that should never, ever, be read at funerals. Please don't get those two passages confused. Read more
"Woe to you, scribes and pastors, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.'" Read more
To appreciate the meaning of this, you need to remember that LaHaye and Jenkins don't think of the U.N. as a diplomatic forum for the nations of the world. They think of it as a kind of global government. The secretary-general is, to them, a kind of world overlord. (They seem to think the word "general" in that title entails global military rank.) Read more
The difference is justice. Justice is the necessary ingredient without which no worship, prayer, assembly, offering or other form of religious expression will be regarded as legitimate by God Almighty. Injustice delegitimizes all religion. It turns that which God has commanded into something that God detests. Read more
The problem for those attempting to argue that Douglass' rhetoric was anti-Bible is that his supposedly anti-Bible rhetoric is taken directly from the Bible. It is -- in both style and substance -- explicitly and utterly biblical. He is imitating, emulating and directly quoting from the Bible itself. Read more
"This horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity. For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done!" Read more
The faction defending the status quo is -- correctly -- portrayed as the "conservative" side. They're fighting to prevent change. They embody the definition of conservatism by standing athwart history and yelling "Stop!" And thus, because they are in that sense conservative, they also tend to portray themselves and to be portrayed by others as being religiously conservative. Thus positioned as the representatives of religious conservatism, they are therefore also perceived as the defenders of true religion against the liberals and the anti-religious. Everyone else therefore has "a religion problem." Everyone except them. Read more
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