• So, OK, tried to pre-schedule a few posts ahead of a hectic and daunting Big Box weekend and I goofed up on tomorrow’s, making it today’s. Those worried that this blog is turning into nothing but re-runs can be reassured that it also now includes Sneak Previews of future re-runs. Oops.

• Before diving in on the ways that Grove City College trustees have disgraced and beclowned themselves by embracing anti-anti-racism, here’s a bit of background on another white evangelical college:

• The Race Project: Cedarville (Part One)
• The Race Project: Cedarville (Part Two)

Nothing to see here, just a bunch of white evangelical college students hog-tying and assaulting a Black classmate because his parents refused to sign the school-mandated form banning interracial dating. But, you know, that was the 1980s — ancient history.

• “She swallowed the bird to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly …”

• RIP Roger Angell:

Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try — antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

• This Daily Kos post by Benthovens5th discusses one of the most pertinent biblical passages for our curdled, crabs-in-a-bucket national discussion of odious debt: “Student Loan Forgiveness vs the Parable of the Vineyard.”

I’d add Luke 4:29, “They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff.”

This is a recurring theme throughout the Bible: 1) Any talk of Jubilee will make Some People very angry; 2) Those people are the Bad Guys.

• Shelby Alito’s sloppy draft of the precedent-destroying decision criminalizing abortion was most probably leaked ahead of time by Alito himself. But the second likeliest candidate for the leak is Ginni Thomas.

• This Smithsonian piece by Diane Bernard is interesting: “How a Failed Assassination Attempt Pushed George Wallace to Reconsider His Segregationist Views.”

I mean, personally, I attempt and advocate a host of rational, spiritual, and social approaches that I hope will nudge my white-/Christian- nationalist neighbors to reconsider their segregationist views. And I’m certain it’s best to stick to such nonviolent approaches (for a host of reasons, including the practical/prudential reasons Niebuhr discusses here). So while I’m somewhat grateful to the Smithsonian for reminding us that other approaches are sometimes also effective, please don’t take that headline as advice.

• Before this month, I had never heard of the “Free Republic of Franklin,” but then this weird-but-true slice of history showed up twice in my RSS feed. The first was from Erik Loomis’ visit to the American grave of William Blount — a war profiteer during the Revolution who went on to a bunch of other grand schemes involving his personal enrichment at the expense of the newly independent country. The second was from Daniel Silliman’s look at “Why Tennessee Is Just Now Looking at Lifting a Ban on Clergy in the Legislature.”

Both pieces are a helpful tonic against claims that our contemporary political and religious divisions are “worse than they’ve ever been.” Loomis reminds us that Abigail Adams wanted William Blount executed by guillotine. Silliman recounts vicious intramural fights between very slightly different Calvinist perspectives that resulted in preachers being burned in effigy.

I’d say that makes the impeccably polite wine-and-cheese protests near Shelby Alito’s house seem quaintly civil by comparison, but frankly those protests were doing a fine job being quaintly civil on their own.

• “Why It Took Six Decades for James Hong to Get a Star on the Walk of Fame.”

James Hong is amazing. He’s a “working actor” who’s still working, now, at age 93 — still adding to his list of 440-and-counting acting credits on IMDB. You’ve seen him a whole lot in movies or on TV, or heard his voice in animated productions. And you’ve never seem him just coasting or phoning it in or settling for the two-dimensional stereotypes that were the only parts available to him for much of his long career.

• Like Chris Arnade, I’m a big fan of long walks, and there’s plenty of interesting or wise advice in his post, “How to Walk (12 miles a day).” But I’d also point out one more way to walk 12 miles a day: Get a job at the Big Box (and then leave early once you hit the 12-mile mark).

• This is well stated and very hard to disagree with: “Google search is merely Google searching its advertisers pockets for some transaction money. Google Search used to convey an impression of limitless brainpower and now you can’t tap on it without being despatched to the mall. Worse yet, it’s not even a good mall.”

• Mark Evanier doesn’t usually write much about sports, but this is a terrific story: “The Man We Didn’t Believe.”

• This post will, for some people, be full of immensely helpful and practical advice. If you’re not one of those particular people, then that post still stands as a reminder that, whatever your specific situation or experience, sharing your story with others may well be immensely helpful and practical for someone out there: “So here I am, somehow, me, little pure and naive Perfect Number, somehow I’m giving sex ed advice on the internet. But I have to. I have to say these things, because I needed to hear them back then, and there was no one to tell me.”

• I agree with both the title of this post and the tweet it quotes.

• Fred Bonine (1763-1941) was a capable eye doctor who ran track in college. There’s no urgent reason why you should know that, just as there was no urgent reason for Paul Campos to spend hours of his time writing and researching a 2,000-word deep dive confirming that this is all anyone really needs to know about Fred Bonine.

But I’m still glad he did that, and I’m glad I read it. (Is there a follow-up post? Of course there is.)

• “Will Minneapolis Pass a Law That Helps Renters Buy Their Homes?” We need a (better) progressive version of ALEC, so that instead of occasionally reading stories about positive efforts in one city we’re constantly reading stories about a series of positive efforts in dozens of cities and statehouses.

Some of those efforts might even gain bipartisan support.

• For now, the Old People who own more than $1 trillion in odious student debt are still alive and  still in charge, and still using every one of their remaining breaths to ensure that the Young People burdened by all of that debt will never, ever escape from it. But time is not on their side.

Eventually, those Old People will be dead and the Young People trapped in their beastly system will be able to demolish it, rewrite the rules to make them just or at least minimally decent, and all the living will celebrate a great Jubilee. That will happen. It would be nice if the Old People now in charge helped it to happen now instead of leaving millions of Young People waiting for — and thus wishing for — them to die.

• Is your refrigerator running? “Glenn Youngkin Set Up a Tip Line to Snitch on Teachers. It’s Only Gotten Weirder Since.” Glad to see this backfiring almost as much as it deserves.

• “Jason Wolter, is a thoughtful, broad-shouldered Lutheran pastor who reads widely and measures his words carefully.”

No, no he is not. The next sentence of this MPR/AP cletus safari reads: “He also suspects Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic as a political tool, doubts President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and is certain that COVID-19 vaccines kill people.” And, we learn later in the piece, he gets all his news from Gab (“Widely described as a haven for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, the alt-right, Donald Trump supporters, and QAnon conspiracy theorists”).

The Rev. Wolter is a barking mad white nationalist loon who appears to be measuring his words only because he’s working hard not to drop the N-bomb when speaking on the record with the big-city reporter. If he’s a Lutheran pastor, then I’d guess it’s more because of Von den Jüden und iren Lügen than despite it.

• “In August, after purchasing a 900-square-foot-Methodist church built in 1876, Lindsay and his business partner, Anna Cronin, opened Dirt Church Brewing Co. in East Haven, Vermont. It’s one of at least eight church breweries that have opened in the U.S. since 2020.”

That’s from Kathryn Post’s RNS report, “Suds in the sanctuary: Craft breweries populate vacant US churches.” One more for our growing file of stories about former church buildings. That file is likely to get pretty big in the years ahead. But, alas, not big enough, because …

• “Inside the fastest growing religious movement on earth.”

And also: Inside the fastest growing religious movement on earth.

But at least the St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Benson, Minnesota, is still destined to be turned into a microbrewery in the next five-to-10 years.

• Jeffrey Salkin highlights a lovely Late Show moment between host Stephen Colbert and guest Dua Lipa. (Relevant magazine also flags that conversation. And here’s the video.)

This would have been a Huge Event for the white evangelical subculture even as recently as the W years. A certifiably famous pop star speaking fluent evangelicalese and earnestly discussing Christian faith on network television would’ve had us giddy with excitement, making Dua Lipa a subcultural cult hero hailed as the Second Coming of Tim Tebow.

But in the Trumpified and Fox-ified white evangelical culture of today, this will barely register at all because, after all, neither Lipa nor Colbert is Team MAGA. Those are the new rules.

• I missed this piece by Gordon Govier in Christianity Today which further suggests the obsessive quackiness of both the “biblical archaeologist” and the Comet Research Team sifting through the destruction of Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley: “Sodom Destroyed by Meteor, Scientists Say. Biblical Archaeologists Not Convinced.”

CT, being CT, uses that title “biblical archaeologists” to mean two different and incompatible things. It means, for them, both folks like Steven Collins, who use archaeology to “prove” the Bible is historically literal, rejecting whatever doesn’t fit that preconception, and also, more generally, archaeologists working in the lands mentioned in the stories in the Bible. The latter sort of “biblical archaeologists” tend to be frustrated by the former sort, as you can see from Govier’s piece.

Govier also wrote about Collins’ quixotic obsession with finding a literal Sodom way back in 2014, noting that Collins seemed so fixated on “proving” that Tall el-Hamman was Sodom that he was willing to rewrite the entire chronology of the Hebrew scriptures rather than admit that his site just doesn’t fit the timeline he wants it to.

See earlier:

• A night with Lot in Sodom: On meteors and memory
• A night with Lot in Sodom, better see that twice

• Oh, and here’s another recent story about a very old story which may or may not carry unwritten memory: “How Indigenous Stories Helped Scientists Understand the Origin of Three Huge Boulders.”

• From one angle, this is an inspiring, encouraging story and a bit of good news: “Jews, Christians and Muslims to paint over swastikas in Argentinian Jewish cemetery.”

From another angle, of course, the story is bad news: people are still painting swastikas in Jewish cemeteries in 2021.

• Monica Cole of One Million Dozens of Moms is now performing umbrage because “Credit Karms ‘Attempts to Normalize Sin’ by Using Two Dads in Ad.”

No. Credit Karma has already normalized sin by normalizing usury and the abominable, literally God-damned notion that creditors are morally superior to debtors. This Mammon worship is so thoroughly normal-seeming now that even our alleged culture-war turns out to be, in this case, a fight over whether or not same-sex couples have an equal right to have their privacy harvested for profit by the shock-troops of the anti-Jubilee counter-revolution.

It’s still remarkable to me that perpetually frightened and aggrieved white evangelicals have come up with thousands of absurd candidates for their illiteralist notion of “the Mark of the Beast,” but none of them blinks an eye over the three-digit numbers assigned to all of them by the unelected barons of Transunion, Equifax, and Experian, even when those deliberately unreliable “credit scores” literally determine who can and cannot buy or sell.

• “The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.”

While you’re over there at Friends of Justice, take a look at their “Completed Campaigns” page for a sense of the group’s history. And there’s a lot of history on that page, even though it only goes back to 2002, which may seem less like “history” than simply memory, or even like current events. But it’s all still part of the history that Republican school boards and state legislatures are aggressively working to suppress.

This is the necessary meaning of all of the anti-“CRT” or anti-1619 Project white hysteria that has become the current Republican/evangelical agenda. It’s not just about suppressing history, but about forbidding memory — about forcing you to forget or to rewrite what you saw with your own eyes.

• Pat Robertson is finally stepping down as host of The 700 Club on CBN, the cable network he founded, thus prompting multiple retrospective articles on the 91-year-old white evangelical archbishop’s long career, including this one by Mark I. Pinsky for RNS: “Pat Robertson turned Christian TV into political power — and blew it up with wacky prophecy.”

Pinsky notes that Robertson’s many, many extreme and ridiculous public statements over the years: “embarrassed his fellow Christians and marginalized the once-estimable political power Robertson wielded, consigning Robertson to the role of what one megachurch pastor called ‘the crazy uncle in the evangelical attic.'”

There’s no need there for the attempted attribution of “one megachurch pastor” — the “crazy uncle” description of Robertson goes way back and has been so widely used that it’s impossible to say when or where it was first suggested. See for example this 2008 Language Log post, which found nearly 800 results for a search for “Pat Robertson” + “crazy uncle.”

Back in 2008, of course, the influence of someone like Robertson still seemed marginal and fringe — not something taken seriously by either the mainstream of the Republican Party or the mainstream majority of white evangelicalism. Robertson won four Republican primaries in 1988 and then, we imagined, the fever broke and the “crazy uncle” was shut back in the attic. It took us almost 40 years to realize that the rest of white evangelicalism and the rest of the Republican Party had locked themselves in that same attic with him.

I suppose one way to describe the evolution of both the GOP and evangelicalism over the past 40+ years would be to paraphrase that quote from Blake: The voice of dishonest indignation makes us deaf to the voice of God.

• Since I’ve now used its lyrics for the title of three recent posts, here’s the “Museum Song” from Barnum.