"Few people had more influence on Billy Graham than Bell," reads the Wikipedia entry for Nelson Bell, Billy's father-in-law. And the more you know about Nelson Bell and the journal he founded to promote and defend segregation, the more disturbing that sentence becomes. Read more
Would Jesus bowl? That question has been asked and answered. Even among the fundiest of the fundies I grew up around, bowling was never condemned as an impermissible form of "worldliness." We bowled. And we prayed that God would guide the ball to help us nail that 7-10 split. Read more
Syndicate theology brings together some leading religious historians to discuss Billy Graham's legacy in a thoughtful, collegial exchange. Samantha Bee helpfully covers some of the same territory, albeit with a few more jokes about butt stuff. Read more
Buck hopes that his lying to Verna and preventing her from speaking to the greatest evangelist in the world will lead to her accepting Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior. That would make life so much easier for Buck and the rest of the Tribulation Force. If Verna only converted like they had, then maybe she'd at last agree to help keep all their secrets secret. And maybe she'd start wearing some heels once in a while. Read more
Take away all indirect responsibility and all of our more direct, more proximate responsibilities become enormously more challenging. If we begin to treat those direct responsibilities as exclusive -- as precluding all of the indirect responsibilities -- then we're soon going to find that it's impossible to manage them. Without the network of mutuality, we're on our own for everything -- which is to say, we're screwed. Read more
"Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me." Read more
The transition from Billy Graham to his son Franklin Graham is a microcosm of the past 40 years of white evangelical Christianity in America. For Billy, the primary thing was always proclamation evangelism. That was the core of his identity. For Franklin, the primary thing is always the culture wars -- anti-feminism, white supremacy, and the lucrative demonizing of the Other. That is the core of his identity. Read more
The male leaders of the Roman Catholic Church are now mumbling about maybe, some day, ending the late-developing innovation of a ban on women deacons. We can't talk about that without talking about Paul's first-century letter to the church in Rome, which was carried by a woman deacon and greets, by name, a long list of women leaders in the church. Also: Londoners get to vote; all change is incremental; a sexual predator is also a financial predator; and I am really old. Read more
want us to read Billings' surprisingly inaccurate predictions as unerringly accurate. The sense one gets from this passage is that the LaHaye and Jenkins are using Billings' video message to rewrite the account of the previous 200 pages, to fill in or even change the details of events we've already read about. It's a bit like listening to someone botch the telling of a long joke, when they realize halfway through that they've left out essential details and they start backtracking and correcting themselves. Read more
The once mostly Catholic phenomenon of congressional "pro-life Democrats" ended due to the horror of the clergy abuse scandal. Thus nowadays, most "pro-life Democrats" are really blue dogs -- "social conservatives" who have found other, more effective, ways of signaling that social conservatism and all that it entails. Read more
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