Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and it said to Balaam, "What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times? ... Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all your life to this day? Have I been in the habit of treating you in this way?" Read more
If you've ever taught a class with this kind of reading/discussion set up, you'll likely recognize this maneuver. Or maybe you were a student in such a class and you were eager to get into something intriguing in chapter 6 and wound up frustrated that the whole session was spent parsing a few paragraphs in the first pages of chapter 1. Or maybe you were That Student -- persistently dragging out the discussion of that first chapter and trying to run out the clock before anyone moves on to the other stuff you didn't read and exposes you as unprepared. Read more
Copy editors help keep readers safe from garbled, meaningless, passive-voice abominations like this form of cop-speak. Such language isn't written clearly and thus cannot be read clearly. Read too much of it and you'll cease to be able to think clearly. It's a way of writing, speaking, and thinking that separates nouns from verbs, and therefore separates causes from effects, and therefore separates power from responsibility. Read more
It seems the spirit of Jonathan Blanchard hasn't been entirely quenched at Wheaton College. Wheaton students' response to Jerry Falwell Jr.'s Donald Trump/Yosemite Sam imitation gives me a bit of hope for the future of this bastion of white evangelicalism. Read more
A brief refresher on the biblical story that explains why I refer to Billy Graham's rotten son as "Franklin Hophni Phineas Graham." (Along with a short visit to the eerie local ghost town that takes its name from the same biblical story and that I'm hoping will be featured in "Mallrats 2.") Read more
I'm not sure that women such as Irene Steele really exist, but if they did, they would be caught in a vicious Catch-22. Their only ambition is to marry a good man. But the kinds of men who would be interested in marrying them -- the kinds of men who are attracted to servility, who need others to "submit" to their will -- are not good men. Read more
Throughout all those years of refusing to admit that we had been wrong, and were still wrong -- and of compounding that wrongness by failing to explore how and why we could have been so thoroughly, utterly, and monstrously wrong -- white evangelical Christians sometimes tried to distract ourselves and others by changing the subject. We did this by borrowing Lincoln's formula: "If X is not wrong, then nothing is wrong." If we could find some other value for X -- anything other than the enduring disgrace of our wrongness about slavery -- then we could hope to reclaim some measure of moral credibility. Read more
"No one has to give the signal. No one holds a rehearsal. No one has to make sure it all happens again in 12 months. Moms and dads have learned it from their parents. Aunts, uncles and friends tell stories to keep it alive. A large portion of the human race makes this happen each Christmas Eve, and all of it is like, well, magic." Read more
What stories do we, or should we, include in the list of "canonical" Santa Claus lore? And even if we agree on such a list of canonical stories, how do we reconcile the various contradictions between, say, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" and "Miracle on 34th Street"? Read more
The "rules" of war may not carry legal consequences, but they do carry inescapable consequences of identity. It is always possible to "get away with" attacking non-combatants just so long as you go on to win, ensuring your war "crimes" are never punished. But you can't break that rule without becoming a breaker of the rule. Which is to say, more bluntly, that you cannot break that rule without becoming infamous -- a coward, a murderer, and an asshole. Read more
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