Rules are a lousy way to get people to follow rules. This is why our Christian Rules for Sex and our Rules for Christian Sex are a dead end. It's not so much that these rules are widely disobeyed, but that they are largely irrelevant. We don't bother explaining most of them. We aren't able to explain many of them. So it shouldn't be surprising that others don't understand them either. Read more
"We support biblical families," Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy says of his fast-food corporation. So let's take a look at some of those biblical families. Today's entry: Shaharaim and Hushim, Baara & Hodesh. Read more
Is the deadly sin named after the gentle, slow-moving creature, or is the creature named after the deadly sin? Read more
Survey respondents readily confessed to being tempted by over-eating, procrastination, laziness and worry, but they were far less inclined to admit to temptation to lie and cheat. This is ironic, given that responding to this survey is, itself, a tempting occasion for lying to make oneself seem less prone or susceptible to temptation. Read more
Christianity Today says it isn't fair that workers own their wages. It is, after all, a religious company with religious values, and it seems to them to be a violation of their religious values if the pay they pay their workers can be spent on things like alcohol and pornography. Labor law, they say, restricts their religious liberty to ensure that wages they pay are not later spent on anything that would contradict their core religious convictions. Read more
"We support biblical families," Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy says of his fast-food corporation. So let's take a look at some of those biblical families. Today's entry: Abner, Rizpah, Ishbaal and Saul. Read more
How Rachel Held Evans is kind of like the Velvet Underground and/or Willow Rosenberg. And why people who think leadership is about collecting fame and power don't tend to notice the kind of leadership that's based on empowering others. Read more
To invoke Stephen in the defense of some alleged Christian "right" to deny workers the health care they have earned is inexcusable. To presume you're the heirs of Stephen because you're fiercely defending the "religious liberty" to neglect the neglected isn't just immoral, it's biblically illiterate. Read more
It's very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to separate out the various threads of tribal identity as distinct factors. The tribal anxiety that comes from the idea of a zero-sum world is all of a piece. Antitribalism struggles to be "intersectional," but tribalism has always been intersectional. Tribalism was intersectional before intersectionality was cool. Read more
And whenever she gets another memo from Mr. Acme informing her that product-units-per-hour must yet again be increased, she thinks, "Screw you — I'm going to keep making good chairs, the best chairs I can, no matter what you tell me, you dim-witted, overpaid moron." And exactly that — her perverse, rebellious commitment to doing good work as a way of doing justice for the customer and simultaneously flipping off the bosses — that's pretty much all that's keeping corporate America afloat. Read more
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