David Sheff, “If You Want to See Inequality in the US at its Worst, Visit an Impound Lot” When I reached the front of the line, I handed the clerk my credit card, on which she charged $472. I retrieved my car and drove home. I left behind the roomful of my fellow citizens, a disparate group bound together by the fact that they didn’t have the cash or credit required to free their impounded cars, a fact that threatened... Read more
"Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble?" Read more
Theology is the story of God's relationship with humanity. The parts of that story that pertain to God will always be, at some level, speculative -- marked by assertions and contentions that can never be wholly proved or wholly falsified. But the other part of theology -- the part of the story that tells us about humanity, about people -- is something we can verify, measure, confirm or disprove, based on our own experience and our observations of the experience of others. Read more
Tonight, in theaters, Nic Cage will have his fully loaded 747 on autopilot up there on the big screen, fantasizing about a woman he's never touched while Jesus disintegrates all the real, true Christians. Let's celebrate the occasion by revisiting an old Left Behind post from 11 years ago. Read more
The Cage, but no Kirk, plus some Thursday links and musings, including: Anti-abortion groups get on board defending pregnant workers' rights; a judgmental condemnation of judgmental stereotypes of Christians; congrats to Ian Ebright; and more egotistical index-skimming -- here and on distant planets. Read more
Anticipation is building for the premillennial dispensationalist movie event of the year. Left Behind arrives in theaters tomorrow, but today, we get the reviews. Read more
Gannett's Bill Goodykuntz says, "'Left Behind' is a terrible movie, bad in almost every way, not even qualifying as so-bad-it's-good material." While Elizabeth Weitzman of The Daily News calls it a "failed epic -- really, an epic failure." Read more
December 1989 turned out to be probably the worst possible time ever to claim as a fact "the universal disaster of revolution." The ink wasn't even dry on poor Glenn Tinder's assertion that "There is perhaps not a single example in our time of a determined effort to produce swift and sweeping change which has not ended in tyranny" before every other publication was dominated by news of example after example of that very thing. Read more
"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up," G.K. Chesterton said. That's good advice. But Chesterton's maxim works backwards as well as forwards. If we come to know that there's no good reason for the fence -- or only bad reasons for it -- then we're obliged to take it down. Read more
Defending the status quo of the prevailing culture by accusing those trying to change it of "cultural accommodation" is self-refuting nonsense. It makes no sense -- particularly when coupled with the narrative/assertion that says those seeking change are dangerous revolutionaries. Those two things cannot both be true. These people cannot both be radical revolutionaries threatening to overthrow the prevailing culture and also squishy conformists so desperate to be affirmed by that prevailing culture that they will redefine themselves to accommodate it. Read more
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