slacktivist - Page 4 of 743 - "Test everything; hold fast to what is good."

I know I’m supposed to say ‘Jesus,’ but it sure sounds more like a squirrel to me

October 10, 2019 By Fred Clark

• When I was a kid back in the early 1970s, our small town’s library was a cramped set of rooms on the third floor of the township building. You had to go in past the police desk and up three flights of stairs. My mom was a library regular who was furious that many would-be patrons just couldn’t make it up those stairs. She made library runs for some of her older neighbors who couldn’t manage it, and recruited… Read more

So I bit him

October 9, 2019 By Fred Clark

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Ralph Reed is not saying that Trump is God. Ralph Reed is saying that Trump is Caesar and that Christians have a moral duty to worship and obey Caesar. Read more

When Jesus comes back to fix God’s two huge mistakes

October 8, 2019 By Fred Clark

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“Bible prophecy” is the business of explaining God’s mistakes and God’s plan to correct them at the end of the world. Read more

LBCF, No. 249: ‘The Religion Editor’

October 4, 2019 By Fred Clark

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This sort of obvious wrongness can’t really be called misapprehension. It’s more like a kind of non-apprehension — a stubborn refusal to apprehend. Read more

See then that ye walk circumspectly

October 3, 2019 By Fred Clark

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I have a suspicion about the origins of “woke” that I haven’t been able to confirm. My guess is that it started in the black church. The full associated phrase — “Get woke, stay woke” — just sounds preacherly. More specifically, it sounds like somebody got started on a sermon on Ephesians 5 and then got rolling. But I haven’t found any confirmation of that. Before the term got conscripted and corporatized, overused and appropriated, and just generally beaten beyond… Read more

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

October 1, 2019 By Fred Clark

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The story of every “ex-gay ministry” begins exactly the same way and ends exactly the same way. Read more

The heirs of the abstractions

September 30, 2019 By Fred Clark

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Anthea Butler’s NBC News op-ed — “White evangelicals love Trump and aren’t confused about why. No one should be.” — is going to upset a lot of readers. That’s a good thing, because Butler is speaking urgent, unvarnished truth. The stark bluntness of that truth, though, is going to make what she’s saying difficult to hear — especially for the white evangelicals she’s talking about. They’re going to be indignantly defensive about this. That’s not unusual, of course — indignant… Read more

LBCF, No. 248: ‘Lying to Stan’

September 27, 2019 By Fred Clark

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Apart from the awful rom-com subplot, this book is just characters talking to their bosses at work. It should’ve been titled “See Me in My Office As Soon As You Get In.” Read more

‘I wouldn’t buy any green bananas’

September 26, 2019 By Fred Clark

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The Trump administration is further slashing America’s hospitality to refugees — and thereby destroying refugee resettlement agencies, probably beyond repair. Read more