"Four Texas lawmakers, including two now running for statewide office, bought into a fledgling technology company that aimed to reap huge dividends with trades in electricity markets. Instead, the lawmakers said in a lawsuit, they were scammed by a chiseler who once claimed to have found Noah’s Ark." Read more
The attempt to redefine "religious liberty" as a license to discriminate isn't really a "wolf in sheep's clothing that masks discrimination under a veneer of piety." It's a wolf in wolf's clothing, with a veneer of piety that has never fooled anyone. It is the same impious impulse that led good Christian people to hang Mary Dyer on the Boston Common. Read more
In The Guardian, Dean Burnett writes, “Time travelers: Please don’t kill Hitler.” The dek of Burnett’s article summarizes where he’s going with this: “In almost any science-fiction scenario involving time-travel, the default action is to kill Hitler. As terrible a human being as he was, there are many reasons why this probably isn’t a good idea.” I agree, but not for any of the reasons Burnett suggests. If I were a time traveler, I wouldn’t kill Hitler. I would kidnap... Read more
"Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter." Read more
If you set out deliberately to destroy the church and pervert the gospel, you probably still couldn't come up with anything as diabolically effective as the teavangelical nonsense of the angry white religious right. Here is some good commentary on Arizona from William Lindsey, E.J. Dionne and Rachel Held Evans. Read more
"It is not a standard; it is not abstract; it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong. It is a chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial, but, above all, nearly all of them concrete and connected with a materialistic prejudice against particular materials." Read more
Brewer comes through in Arizona. Texas can't find a "legitimate governmental purpose" for it's same-sex marriage ban either. Pizza and high-school geometry. Blue collar temp work is really dangerous. Another terrible evangelistic video. Some revealing stories about who we view as "dangerous." Read more
It takes your eyes a moment to adjust to sunlight -- it's so much brighter than the dim candles the gatekeepers had allowed back inside. But then you look around and realize you've found a new home -- a place where you can breathe. A place where you can see without worrying that you'll see the wrong things or hear the wrong things or think the wrong things. It's liberating. It's Jubilee -- a new creation. Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. Read more
"Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love." Read more
That's what all those other tribal signifiers, past and present, tend to be -- short-hand substitutes for the clobber-text hermeneutic of white American Christianity. Whether it's the currently ascendent tribal marker of being anti-gay, or if it's the tribal marker of young-Earth creationism, or if it's the rapidly fading tribal marker of teetotalism, all of those things weren't so much about the things themselves, but were, rather, ways of shouting, "But what about the Bible?" They were ways of demonstrating one's allegiance to what tribal gatekeepers called "the authority of the scriptures." Which is to say, really, the authority of the tribal gatekeepers themselves. Read more
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