In 1658, colonial Gov. Peter Stuyvesant declared a day of prayer and repentance from the sin of religious tolerance. The 17th-century language of Stuyvesant's proclamation is unfamiliar today, but the ideas and arguments he presents are eerily similar to the ones we hear today from the religious right of 2013. Read more
But not-so-deep-down, they have to know it's just a game. It's just pretend. I don't just mean a dim nagging at the edge of their self-awareness, I mean a pervasive, constant, gnawing ache. And the harder they play the game the more it backfires, highlighting the vast gulf between the pretend-self and the actual, unavoidable self. Read more
Whenever someone has the gall or the ignorance or the cruelty to suggest that public efforts and the government safety net should be eliminated and replaced with private charity, that person should be forced to go and talk to the people actually working for actual private charities. They should be forced to go an look into the face of the local food bank's director to see the look of despair there as they contemplate the impossibility of serving the people they serve if there wasn't also SNAP ("food stamps") and WIC and SSI and TANF. Read more
Pentagon puts envoy in charge of closing Gitmo. How the book of Job is like Huckleberry Finn. Justice Scalia believes in a "literal" Satan, but not in a literal Gospel of Mark. Churches should be praying for their cities, but cities shouldn't be paying to have them do it. U.S. Bishops and politics go together like hot dogs and ketchup: USCCB says preventing women from access to birth control is worth wrecking the full faith and credit of the United States. Read more
I could just pretend that David Barton, Tim LaHaye, Al Mohler and C. Peter Wagner are insignificant fringe figures who exercise no influence among American evangelicals. That way whenever someone asks me about their views I could reassure them that such people are of no consequence, that their influence is just being exaggerated as a scary story told by a conspiracy of liberal bloggers out to make the rest of us evangelicals look silly. Read more
I don't think they're acting. I think they're actually inspired, like Strangelove himself, by "a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead." Congressional Republicans like Ted Yoho, Joe Barton and Rand Paul seem to find calamity terribly exciting. And economic calamity is the only excitement left now that Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped all the fun out of starting wars. Read more
Hand-in-hand with the Republican Party's brief period of post-election introspection came a parallel process among the establishment institutions of white evangelicalism. They, too, briefly recognized the election as a sign that they were swimming against a demographic tide that spelled their impending obsolescence. The white evangelical post-mortems were eerily similar to those of the political party to which they had bound themselves. Read more
1. And this, kids, is why you should never hitchhike: “Right-wing truckers’ group backs ‘libtard’-hating police chief.” See, 99 percent of all truck-drivers are probably nice people who will hospitably offer a ride and friendly conversation. But then there’s that other 1 percent … 2. Here’s a right-wing example of a nonpartisan phenomenon. Bring together a bunch of people convinced that they are the purest devotees of the purest truth and eventually they’ll start questioning the purity of one another.... Read more
This comparing-down is ultimately corrosive because it bases our sense of morality in pride rather than in love — in the cardinal vice instead of the cardinal virtue. And to fuel that pride, we end up looking for ever-more extreme and exotically awful people to compare ourselves favorably against, people whose freakish cruelty makes our own mediocrity show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off. Melon morality is why if the kitten-burners didn’t already exist, we would have to invent them. Read more
It's not possible to stand with only some people against the bullies, or -- to use that theological language again -- to share in God's preferential option for only some of the oppressed. Any attempt to do that means accepting the bully's bargain, so vividly portrayed in this video: Either join them in casting stones, or become a target of those stones yourself. Read more
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