This is what LaHaye and Jenkins believe it means to be a Christian. This is what LaHaye and Jenkins believe it means to be a human. Hannah Arendt gave a name to this perspective: "the banality of evil." The subject of her book, like the heroes of Left Behind, was a man primarily focused on travel arrangements. Read more
Vincent Price is theologically significant. Price wore a devilish goatee that made him look like Satan. How do we know that’s what Satan looks like? We learned it from Vincent Price — and from a thousand other pop-culture and folk-culture figures preceding him. Read more
Here's the premise for a TV show: It's all true. Everything Pat Robertson says is true. Everything that's posted on Charismanews is true. All of it. All the writers need to do is conform the fictional reality of the show to the wild reality described every day by Robertson, et. al. Read more
"Pray" isn't the only verb that works this way. "I thank you" is another example. The deed itself consists of reciting the same words we use to describe it. The giving of thanks involves the saying of "thanks." I say, "I thank you," and thereby I thank you. Read more
The remarkable thing here is that Anderson's skeptical take on multilevel marketing appeared on the website of Christianity Today -- a publication at the institutional heart of the white evangelical subculture. And in that subculture, you can't swing a Stella & Dot necklace with hitting several institutions dependent on multilevel marketing money. Read more
Jerry Jenkins is, for the most part, terrible at world-building and continuity. His fictional world contradicts itself repeatedly. He introduces huge changes and then forgets about them just a few pages later. But on this one point he is reliably, relentlessly consistent. The misogyny in this chapter -- the contempt and disgust for women displayed here -- permeates the entirety of this story and of the theology that drives it. Read more
Here we have a choice that -- according to the pope himself -- can be made for either good or bad reasons. As a spiritual leader, then, the pope has a choice to make about this choice. One possibility would be for him to teach and encourage his followers to make good choices for good reasons. Another possibility would be for him to preclude the possibility of his followers making bad choices by arrogating to himself the right to make this choice on behalf of everyone else. And he chose the second one. That is immoral and unjust. Read more
New York state is still shackling pregnant inmates. What's to stop Vladimir Putin from going all Koch/Adelson? A Southern Baptist college takes swift action to purge itself of professors who are critical of racism. Plus Samuel Beckett, John Muir and a bad day for the weinermobile. Read more
"Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth -- our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments. And we should assume humbly that we’re confused and don’t always know what we’re doing and we’re staggering and stumbling towards Him, and have some humility in that process. And that means we have to speak up against those who would misuse His name to justify oppression, or violence, or hatred with that fierce certainty. No God condones terror. No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number." Read more
Apparently something dramatic must have happened "a decade ago" in Iraq. The article doesn't say what that might have been. It doesn't say that what happened there happened with the full, enthusiastic support and advocacy of then-Rep. Frank Wolf, and of Christianity Today, and of Texas pastors like Randel Everett. It doesn't say what they all told us at the time would be the outcome of what happened more than a decade ago in Iraq, or how radically, disastrously wrong all those predictions and reassurances proved to be. Read more
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