It's never that easy when identity is at stake. Identity means survival is at stake. It's safer to cling to a lie -- even if we know it's a lie -- than to allow the destruction of who and what it is that we've always believed ourselves to be. Read more
Sonia Sotomayor on lawless police; Ben Moberg on Orlando; Loretta Lynch on being seen; Alex Massie on the consequences of hateful rhetoric; and Carvell Wallace on the "Negro Motorist Green Book" and the meaning of home. Read more
The surest way to lose at politics is to refuse to participate in it because you're above it all. Refusing to sully yourself with the ugly business of compromise and get-what-you-can incremental change doesn't mean you'll have pure, clean hands when the revolution comes. It means the other guy wins, big time, because nobody is playing against him. Read more
Restaurants probably took a bit of a hit from the Rapture -- what with there now being 2 billion or so fewer potential customers. Chuck E. Cheese and other such places catering to children would, of course, be out of business for good. (It probably also would be best, post-Rapture, for restaurants to remove the kids' pages from their menus, as the uncontrolled sobbing they would likely provoke could be distracting to the other diners.) Read more
If you want to be beloved by white evangelicals, then, your best bet is to never become one of them. Stay an outsider, but occasionally say things about God that they can celebrate and feel affirmed by. Smile in their direction, but from a distance. (See, for example: Reagan, Ronald.) Read more
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins frame this whole conversation as some steely contest of nerves -- a high-stakes negotiation, a struggle for dominance, and an exercise in brinksmanship, with Buck and Verna staring one another down to see who blinks first. That's probably not the best way to think about evangelism. Read more
"Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." That's how I know that Zacchaeus was "born again." Plus: What spiritual maturity isn't; giant sinkholes in Siberia; an astonishing inside look at private prisons; and some other links to distract from the absence of a "Nicolae" post. Read more
It seems that some of the same right-wing hacks who have for years suggested that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim now want us to believe that Donald Trump is a secret born-again Christian. Asked to defend his claim of Trump's secret conversion, James Dobson instead pointed out that, to him, defeating Hillary Clinton was more important than whether or not he's telling the truth. Read more
"Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil." Read more
"Vanished: Left Behind the Next Generation" is coming to theaters in September. Because religious tribalism means even very bad, money-losing movies get to be a franchise. Let's look at the trailer. Read more
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