Ezra was such an abusive, wrong-headed jerk that whole chunks elsewhere in scripture go out of their way to repudiate his ideology and behavior. That's why Ruth is in the canon. It's why Ruth is in every story of David and why Ruth is in the genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels. Read more
Primary campaigns, and particularly primary debates, tend to get bogged down in purity disputes. When the candidates mostly agree on policies, programs, and priorities, they turn to debating purity, and the focus shifts to accusations and counter-accusations in which old votes and speeches are parsed for supposed evidence of a failure to uphold 100-percent purity on the agreed-upon stance. This is play-acting and pretense and it's worse than meaningless. Read more
So far in the Great Tribulation, CNN is crushing the competition. The cable news channel has established itself as the one and only reliable source for breaking news in the earth's last days. Fox News is AWOL in this story -- I suppose because everyone there was Raptured. And over at Global Weekly, the world's greatest reporter has decided to take the month off for an "escapade" in Israel, and to attend a funeral back in Illinois. Read more
"Wealth is treacherous; the arrogant do not endure. ... Shall not everyone taunt such people and, with mocking riddles, say about them ... Because you have plundered many nations, all that survive of the peoples shall plunder you." Read more
To promote their Rapture mythology, "Bible prophecy" enthusiasts turn to Matthew 24, as read through the filter of the Scofield Bible and the lyrics of a Larry Norman song. But Larry and Scofield very clearly get that passage wrong. They're reading it backwards. In Matthew 24, getting "left behind" is a Good Thing. Read more
The point of all three of Jesus' stories, of course, is that the kingdom of God is made up of those who do good, not those who do evil -- and particularly not those evildoers (weeds, goats, Dives) who ignore the needs of the poor. To read such stories and ignore this point is perverse. To interpret them as primarily about the specific mechanics of the End Times -- the role of Abraham and angels, the heat-setting of the fiery furnace -- is even more perverse. Read more
Now that evangelical colleges like Oral Roberts are cool with requiring students to wear Fitbits, does this mean we can move past our cultural Mark-of-the-Beast-phobia and stop having to carry around paper documentation of auto registration and proof of insurance? Also: Freeform Nephilim, jury duty, Robyn Hitchcock's Kaddish, Nehushtan in Texas, and Winona, forever. Read more
To Sen. Marco Rubio, President Obama's visit yesterday to a Baltimore mosque was "divisive." Obama's acknowledgement of the equal rights of religious minorities, to Rubio, amounts to "pitting people against each other." So let's revisit President George Washington's 1790 "Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport." It's really good, but Marco Rubio isn't gonna like it. Read more
Ah yes, the "Hotel California" urban legend, widely embraced by white evangelicals eager to believe that the Eagles' hit song was a detailed allegory about the Church of Satan. This applied the interpretive approach evangelicals had taught themselves for reading Genesis, Revelation, and the Sermon on the Mount -- read the metaphors literally and the literal statements as metaphors. Thus a song about selling one's soul to the music industry turns into a song about musicians actually selling their souls. Read more
The problem, apparently, is that Russell Moore may be a staunch opponent of abortion and staunch defender of "traditional marriage," but he clearly does not want to be a staunch defender of white supremacy. And that apparently makes a lot of white Southern Baptists very uncomfortable. To them, if Moore is not willing to defend white supremacy, then he isn't really representative of Southern Baptists. Read more
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