There's no scandal here. The man isn't an apostate or a heretic, a betrayer, a deceiver or a sinner. He got lonely. Treating this like a scandal is just cruel and wrong. Read more
There's no scandal here. The man isn't an apostate or a heretic, a betrayer, a deceiver or a sinner. He got lonely. Treating this like a scandal is just cruel and wrong. Read more
To play up the claim that this is newsworthy, CT tries to portray this man's "fall" as part of a trend affecting all of society. That larger trend, in CT's view, doesn't have anything to do with the ongoing pattern of repressed social conservatives exposed for the hypocrisy of their private lives. Of course not. For CT, the trend can only be the same trend they see everywhere -- the narrative of decline that sees libertine liberals threatening to turn America into Sodom due to their no-co-pay birth control and their equality under the law for LGBT people. Read more
Glenn Greenwald on "journalists" against journalism. Jeet Heer and Sarah Posner on Donald Trump. Eric Foner on pseudo-politics and psycho-politics. And a Martin Luther King Jr. speech that revisionist fantasists like to pretend doesn't exist because they're too busy attributing out-of-context W.E.B. DuBois quotes to Margaret Sanger so they can play-act like they're Bonhoeffer fighting Hitler. Read more
About three months later Judah was told, "Your daughter-in-law Tamar has played the whore; moreover she is pregnant as a result of whoredom." And Judah said, "Bring her out, and let her be burned." As she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law, "It was the owner of these who made me pregnant." And she said, "Take note, please, whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff." Read more
The piped-in music at the Big Box has been playing country music this week, leading to the following reflection on two distinct visions of liberation in the work of popular theologian Martina McBride. And, because I've read too many InterVarsity Press books over the years, I have included a list of questions for further discussion. Read more
It's a sad day here on Planet Lovetron, so grab a ball, go find an 8-foot rim, and slam down a dunk to remember the one-and-only Darryl Dawkins. Also: Living in the future; some Oscar predictions; and the difficulty nowadays in discerning farce from satire. Read more
Ephesians 5:18 says "Do not get drunk on wine [Greek: oinos], which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit." For evangelicals, the word "wine" here refers to wine, which is evil. But in the second chapter of John's Gospel, when Jesus changes some 30 gallons of water into "wine" [oinos] that's really just nonalcoholic grape juice -- because what's a wedding feast without at least 30 gallons of nonalcoholic grape juice? Read more
Before the Reagan years, the culture wars were an anti-civil-rights struggle focused on race ("states' rights," busing, etc.), which drew support from white evangelical voters. After the Reagan years, the culture wars became an anti-feminist struggle focused on sex (abortion, LGBT rights, etc.), which solidified that white evangelical support into the GOP's largest and most reliable voting bloc. That was a huge change. Or, maybe, it wasn't. Read more
Granted, Jimmy Carter isn't generally described as "badass." That's a shame because building thousands of houses for Habitat should be thought of that way. And negotiating a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt involved high levels of bad-assery. Also, too, eradicating the Guinea worm? That's so badass that Samuel Jackson should play Carter in the movie version of the story. Read more
This isn't really about Donald Trump. It's about white evangelical voters and their support (later revoked) for Jimmy Carter and their support (later regretted) for George W. Bush. And it's about why it's misleading and anachronistic to imagine that the religious right of 1980 was anything at all like the religious right of 1988 or of 2004 or of 2015. Read more
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