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
If you regard canon as a magical category that imparts to a text some greater import than the actual words of that text, then I'm afraid that neither the poem nor the Gospel story will be quite as satisfying to you as they might be if their canonicity were confirmable with greater certainty. In that case, I suppose, it won't matter that both the poem and the Gospel story are good, beautiful and true. Read more
On Monday, Frank Robinson visited the Orioles spring training camp in Florida. That’s a big deal. Frank Robinson is the kind of hall-of-famer that other hall-of-famers regard with awe. He was Rookie of the Year in 1956, NL MVP in 1961, and AL MVP in 1966, when he won the triple crown. He hit 586 home runs — still enough to rank him No. 9 on the all-time list. And in 1975 he became the first black manager in the... Read more
No. Read more
The bigger problem here is Michael's contention that "the witnesses predicted in the Scriptures" will be martyred by Israel, "where the real Messiah is hated." That's a big change from what the book of Revelation actually says, which is that these witnesses are themselves Israelites who will be martyred by the Beast/Babylon/empire. Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In