"A little courage goes a long, long way / Get's you a little bit further down the road each day / And before you know it, you'll hear someone say / That'll do, pig, that'll do." And in other news: Elizabeth Warren takes on the lords of credit-scoring, bad Lifetime movies, messy ecclesiology, and Jimmy Carter's presidential film festival. Read more
GOP analyst Steve Schmidt analyzes the GOP. Amy Davidson on the right's backwards Dred Scott analogies. Reggie L. Williams on the whiteness of American theology. Benjamin Park on Kim Davis' Christian nationalism. And the New England Journal of Medicine on Planned Parenthood. Read more
"You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor." Read more
If "Gotham" endures as a popular TV show, it could run for years and we could end up watching Bruce and Selina (and Mazouz and Bicondova) growing up in real time. But this wouldn't be like "Boyhood" or like the Harry Potter movies (which arguably did the "Boyhood" thing before Richard Linklater started his project). This would be a coming-of-age story that didn't end up in a happier place. Read more
We were there during the First Intifada and things were a bit tense in and around Jerusalem. But that unrest was, in 1990, far removed from the Temple Mount. That site was off-limits, held in too great reverence by everyone in the region -- Jews, Muslims, Christians, secular scholars -- for it to become part of the field of play for the roiling political struggle unfolding throughout the rest of the region. Read more
There's a bit of folk-wisdom that says you should never lend money to a friend unless you are willing to part with one or the other for good -- either the money or the friend. Something like that is true when it comes to lending your integrity to friends. You'll need to be willing to part with one or the other because it may turn out that you'll only be able to keep one of them, and you should decide ahead of time which is more important to you. Read more
"Let me tell you something major," Dirk says. In the immediate aftermath of the mass disappearances, it takes someone with an unhealthy tunnel-vision to think that "something major" could mean anything other than, say, revealing what happened to all those people, or what might happen next. But what Dirk means by "something major" is instead this: an unscheduled special election in Romania. Read more
If we can find someone worse to compare ourselves to, then we can feel better about ourselves without having to change anything we're doing or anything we're becoming. Alas, however, this technique only works briefly before it begins producing diminishing returns. So we will need to identify some person or group who are even worse, and then worse still. This is a process of slothful imagination and it always ends up in the same way, with the same lazy stock character of the Very Worst People we can imagine. Yes, that's right, say it with me: Satanic baby-killers. Read more
I had to work last night, so I missed the Republican primary debate, which I understand ended a short time ago. From what I read on Twitter, this debate taught us that vaccines are dangerous, America is not a planet, and we're apparently going to put former British prime ministers on U.S. currency. Here's an open thread to discuss the debate, a better list of women deserving to be honored on our currency, and/or what you would hope your Secret Service codename would be if you were ever elected president. Read more
"Which one of your children do you love the most?" is an infamous question* because it requires us to negotiate the meaning of that verb "love." Granted, that word has many competing definitions, but the meanings of "love" that I think are most essential don't allow for it to be treated as a zero-sum game bound by the economics of scarcity. Love for one child does not and ought not to diminish love for the others. Read more
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