"As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl; and the four had the same form, their construction being something like a wheel within a wheel." Read more
Everything about this scheme was poorly thought-out and then poorly executed -- it's like the plot of a darkly humorous Cohen brothers movie. Particularly hilarious is Courser and Gamrat's weird certainty that faking a gay prostitution scandal would surely eclipse concern about their plain-vanilla adultery. They seem to imagine that everyone views the world the same way they do -- imagining that everyone thinks gay secks is the Worst Possible Thing Ever. Read more
Max Ehrenfreund on Kansas' efforts to kick the poors. Ta-Nehisi Coates on "Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality." Randall Kennedy on "The Civil Rights Movement and the Politics of Memory." Jill Lepore on arguments from privacy and arguments from equality. And Sr. Joan Chittister on "pro-life" vs. pro-birth. Read more
Originally posted May 6, 2005. Left Behind, pp. 89-96 The good news: Buck Williams is finally out of the men’s room stall. The bad news: He spends the next five pages in a phone booth. I recently came across Kurt Vonnegut’s “Eight rules for writing fiction.” It’s a good list, the value of which becomes clearer when applied to a book like Left Behind, in which each of these eight rules is repeatedly, egregiously violated. LaHaye and Jenkins seem to have misconstrued Rule... Read more
There was absolutely nothing about this crime scene that should have made any police officer or journalist imagine that this crime had anything to do with Presbyterianism at all. That's just a nonsense claim fabricated out of whole cloth by a panicked sheriff who seems utterly ignorant about Presbyterianism and Presbyterians. Read more
• Another big steaming pile of Bal Tashchit. • Peter Enns has been one of my favorite bloggers on Patheos’ evangelical channel, and I’m sad to see him go, even though he’s a Yankees fan. But I’m also excited to see what he has in store for us at his new site — peteenns.com, “The Bible for Normal People.” At the top of Enns’ new site he features a rotating set of quotes from his books, including this one from... Read more
"The commandments -- 'You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”,' and any other commandment -- are summed up in this word, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law." Read more
This is a tricky question. This photo is, potentially, going to appear in the newspaper and on the evening news, where it will likely be seen by potential jurors in your eventual trial. You don't want to come across looking guilty, but then, if you wind up getting convicted, you don't want to appear glib or remorseless either. Read more
"After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages ... eating delicious pancakes." Remembering the I in IHOP. Plus: The Stone Age lasted longer than a few generations; Alabama police should choose a more honest Beatitude; and say hello to the Gerry Adams of Operation Rescue. Read more
A better presumption, I think, is to assume these storytellers recognized what they were doing and did it deliberately and that something else is going on other than an attempt to provide harmonious, wholly consistent stories that would satisfy the modern sensibilities of readers 2,500 years later. To understand the stories they told, we need to understand the choices they made in telling those stories. We can't do that if we presume that they never made choices, only mistakes. Read more
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