If you wrote something that was half in poetry and half in prose, you'd probably have a good reason why you made that choice. You'd mean it to mean something. The same was probably true for whoever wrote the book of Joel, but what that choice meant for them is, to us, a bit of a mystery. (Plus: Suggestions wanted for a First Testament iTunes playlist.) Read more
"He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty." Read more
Think some awful thoughts and say some awful words and don't think no more about reforming. Take up the wickedness of liberation, and if you can think of anything worse, do that, too. As long as you're in, and in for good, you might as well go the whole hog. Read more
A president doesn't need a deep, personal understanding of every nuance of every complex international issue. He just needs to have people around him who do have such an understanding. And then -- and this seems to be the vital, missing piece for Donald Trump -- he needs to listen to those people and pay attention when they tell him what he needs to know. Read more
Wherein Buck and Steve watch TV, a couple of comic bits fall flat, and Nicolae tells the Beave, in detail, about his plans to bring the U.N. into accord with premillennial dispensationalist numerology. Read more
"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
So evangelicals believe that most people die without ever being born. And for evangelical Christians, death means Heaven or Hell. Evangelicals don't have the comforting elastic consolation offered by some notion of Limbo or Purgatory for unbaptized Pagan Babies. It's simply Heaven or Hell. So where do these "people" go? Read more
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
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