Every day in every way, this narrative of decline says, things are going to Hell in a handbasket. The world is getting worse and worse, and it will keep getting worse until Jesus comes back to destroy it all. That narrative is a lie. Despair is a sin. Hope is a duty. Positive change -- progress -- is possible. Read more
"Fifty years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished, but we’re getting closer. Two hundred and thirty-nine years after this nation’s founding our union is not yet perfect, but we are getting closer. Our job’s easier because somebody already got us through that first mile. Somebody already got us over that bridge. When it feels the road is too hard, when the torch we’ve been passed feels too heavy, we will remember these early travelers, and draw strength from their example, and hold firmly the words of the prophet Isaiah: 'Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on [the] wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint.'" Read more
Ta-Nehisi Coates on "The Gangs of Ferguson." Mychal Denzel Smith and Elias Isquith also read and respond to the DOJ report. Amelia Boynton Robinson remembers Bloody Sunday in Selma. Derrick Jensen on the unmasking of hatred. Read more
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves." Read more
This started out as a series of bland jokes about the idea of my parents listening to The Doors, then, via a short trip down memory lane, it took an odd turn into religious history and a consideration of white supremacist theology. Not sure exactly how that happened. Read more
"All around were ambulances and other emergency vehicles trying to get to ugly wreckage scenes," LaHaye and Jenkins tell us. Yet Rayford ignores them all. He walks through and past all of that ugly wreckage, ignoring the suffering of those around him, and all the while congratulates himself for being the kind of heroic, upright, morally superior man who would always be "first to volunteer for emergency duty." Read more
Pennsylvania's GOP wants to be known as the party of contagious food-handlers. An illiterate pastor wants to change the words to "I Love to Tell the Story." Cal Thomas says the book of Daniel warned us about the coming of the equal protection clause. And the "American exceptionalism" of slow, over-priced Internet access. Read more
Rayford Steele seems to think of lecturing pregnant women about abortion the same way he thinks about evangelism -- it's an unpleasant duty he is obliged to perform in order to exempt himself from the guilt of others' damnation. That's how he approached his awkward attempt to "witness" at Hattie back in the first book and it's how he approached his anti-abortion sermon here. Read more
Once enough Baby Boomers die, Millennials might have a chance to declare a Jubilee and start rebuilding the infrastructure their parents and grandparents refused to maintain. Plus: Katy Perry, instant karma, a reminder that Franklin Graham is awful, and the first museum of the American Holocaust. Read more
An open letter signed by the 17 most recent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention calls for the U.S. to begin some kind of military intervention against ISIS. None of these 17 Southern Baptist leaders apparently bothered to check to see if maybe the U.S. was already doing that -- maybe since last summer, maybe? Read more
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