"Pastor Ted's embrace of 'private property' as the badge. hallmark and signifier of Christianity is absurd. Christians do believe and always have believed in the right to private property, but that right has always, always been limited. And the insistence on those limits has always been just as important, or more important, than the insistence on the right itself." Read more
Cleaning out the bookmarks with some late-night links, featuring a lovely Tom Waits cover, plus: Virginia Woolf in her own voice; wisdom from Buechner, Willard and Pohler; Rod the Rogue Demon Hunter on flaccid "apologetics;" why there were no brown M&Ms; and an introduction to North America's most unlikely mayor. Read more
Ignorance loves company. The truly stupid resent those who are not and won't be satisfied until they've burned all the books, torn down the libraries, closed the universities, and made it impossible for anyone else not to share their own proud ignorance. Read more
"These town hall meetings are like a kind of postmodern theater. The meetings are deliberately misleading. The president knows this, and we know this, and he knows that we know that he knows this. Duplicity becomes multiplicity and one gets the sense that the president has lost his way in a hall of mirrors." Read more
If you're in charge of a business, then you simply fire the bunglers and the screw-ups, the Snouts and the Starvelings. Or you never hire them in the first place. What becomes of them after they're fired, or if no one ever hires them? Not your problem. Not your concern. But if you're in charge of a country, or if you're in charge of a local church, then it is your concern. Read more
David Rothkopf on "an epoch-long war" against half of the world; Jill Filipovic on evangelicals and "the orphan crisis that wasn't;" Charlie Pierce on the kind of "culture" that gives little children guns; T.F. Charlton on Jason Collins and Tim Tebow; and Ed Kilgore on Constantine's sword and the National Day of Prayer. Read more
Keeping it brief -- a few short observations and links for a Tuesday morning. The kind of thing I would Tweet if I didn't suck at The Twitter, including: Jason Alexander is a mensch; Franklin Graham is not a PK success story; the Family Research Council lies about everything; bosses don't like pregnant workers; Hobby Lobby goes nuclear on shoplifters; and harnessing religious tribalism for a good cause. Read more
"Discussions of civility often focus on the superficial, such as avoiding name-calling and not using dirty words. But those minor transgressions against civility are nothing compared to the fundamental duplicity of the sort practiced by those crying 'appeasement' and 'Chamberlain' at every turn. Such duplicity and dishonesty precludes civility, it makes honest conversation and dialogue impossible." Read more
Rescuers are "going house to house and block to block to try and find any survivors that are out there and trapped,'' said state emergency management spokesman Jerry Lojka. "We can only imagine that there are still many others there that are unaccounted for,'' he said. Read more
Yes, Dolan -- a bishop and cardinal in his church -- decided that an analogy about cleanliness and purity rules was a good description of Jesus' message. Dolan seems to think that the Gospels' repetitive, relentless theme of Jesus' unconditional embrace of the unclean somehow means that we should do the opposite. Read more
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