Happy Halloween. Here are some Friday tricks and treats, including: professional liar David Barton isn't a fan of Left Behind either; Michelle Krabill on rape culture in the Bible Belt; Pat Robertson criticizes lazy brain cancer patient for not coming to him sooner. Plus: Does Francis believe in evolution? Is the pope Catholic? Read more
"Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins sincerely believe that we are now living in the End Times. They wrote Left Behind in the hopes of convincing others that this is so. Yet on page after page the reader is confronted with jarring illustrations of how glaringly, insurmountably incompatible this End Times world is with the actual world we are living in. The more you read, the more this book undermines the argument that our world and the world of the End Times are the same thing." Read more
The stories in the text provide the basis for other stories about those stories, and details from those new stories seep back into the popular understanding as though they were part of the original. The revised and expanded original then provides the basis for even more new stories, and the cycle repeats itself. The text feeds into popular culture and popular culture, in turn, feeds back into the text, and after multiple repetitions of that cycle we lose the ability to distinguish one from the other. Read more
The trees are very pretty here in late October. The lawn and the sidewalks and the bushes and the driveway are not. I apologize for neglecting this week's "Nicolae" post for a Tuesday spent with a rake and tarp. Read more
The evangelical ethics guild seems to have fashioned this mandatory boilerplate in the 1960s or 1970s, back when John Updike was publishing his earliest novels. And like an early Updike novel, it seems both moralistic and dated -- far removed from any conversation that's going on now. Read more
David Gushee's "Changing Our Mind" calls for a church in which "the rules are the same" for all Christians -- regardless of sexual orientation. That's the radically un-radical core of his message. And maybe also the un-radically radical aspect of it. It doesn't seek to amend or to overturn conservative Christian ideas about marriage and sexual ethics, only to expand them to apply equally to LGBT Christians as well. Read more
Laughing at bullies, oppressors, and the pompous defenders of injustice is almost never sufficient. It may not even be necessary. But I think it helps. And anyway, it's funny. Read more
"It is difficult to overstate the potential impact of Gushee’s defection. His Christian ethics textbook, Kingdom Ethics, co-authored with the late Glen Stassen, is widely respected and was named a 2004 Christianity Today book of the year. He serves as theologian-in-residence for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a coalition of 15 theological schools, 150 ministries, and 1,800 Baptist churches nationwide. ... Gushee is not someone who can be easily dismissed." Read more
The idea that God speaks directly and unambiguously to humans is a given in the story of Abraham. The idea that God speaks directly and unambiguously to humans now is simply false. When that story is invoked today in support of the claim that we have precisely the same kind of direct and unambiguous access to divine command as Abraham had, then something dangerously wrong is going on. Read more
Happy Monday. Here's some stuff about patriotic secessionists, a bishop's hospitality, Frank Peretti and Neil Gaiman, the army of moderators who keep Facebook safe, the sanctity of for-profit wedding mills, and the state of the debate over Social Security. Read more
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