Justice must be reciprocal. Otherwise it’s not justice. Turnabout is fair play and fair play is turnabout. Justice isn’t justice if it’s not the same when the shoe is on the other foot. Louisiana lawmakers do not understand this: We told you last week about Louisiana’s new plan for educating its youth, which is to stop having a plan for educating its youth and just dump everybody into classrooms owned by private companies that replace teachers with Moses Explains Algebra... Read more
“Is a ‘black evangelical’ a contradiction in terms?” Molly Worthen asks at NYTimes.com: In recent years, conservative white Protestants have made a special effort to reach out to black believers who share their views on theology and social mores. … Black Protestants often agree with white evangelicals on the importance of religious faith and the sinfulness of homosexual behavior. They are no great supporters of abortion rights. They ought to be natural allies in the fight to ‘defend the family’... Read more
CNN’s Richard Allen Greene reports that “Harsh anti-gay preaching alarms gay rights supporters and Christian conservatives alike.” Christian conservatives, apparently, don’t want their anti-gay preaching to come across as “harsh.” Coming across as harsh can make their anti-gay lobbying more difficult: Many conservative Christians would agree with pastors such as Worley and Knapp that homosexual behavior is fundamentally wrong, [Ed] Stetzer said. But that doesn’t mean they support them or their sermons, he added. Charles Worley was the North Carolina... Read more
I would like to say that Rachel Held Evans’ remarkable Mutuality Week series is what made her the Slacktivixen’s new favorite blogger, but actually it was something more recent. Specifically, it was this passage from Evans’ recent post on “Exercising in public and other methods of sanctification“: Now, there are three things that I feel should never be done in public: nudity, teeth brushing, and exercise. (Ask Dan about the teeth brushing thing. He thinks it’s weird that I can’t... Read more
It’s nice to get a link from a high-traffic blog like Andrew Sullivan’s. Unfortunately, that link goes to what I think is one of my more hare-brained ideas — a weird scheme to conscript jury duty into service as an employment office. This is, I think, a Bad Idea — see the comment thread there for a host of reasons why. As I said in the post itself, though, I was mainly hoping it might be the kind of half-baked... Read more
At the convention’s annual meeting, Southern Baptists reaffirmed the magic words. America’s largest evangelical denomination wound up endorsing the revivalist tradition of the “Sinner’s Prayer”: Jimmy Scroggins, chairman of the SBC Committee on Resolutions, told the convention that the committee brought the resolution to the floor because of recent challenges to the emphasis on the Sinner’s Prayer — usually a prayer of repentance to “invite Jesus into your heart” that has become a hallmark of evangelical conversionism. This is the... Read more
Peter Enns offers a powerful one-two punch on the subject of what Mark Noll called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. First up was a post by Enns himself, titled, “‘If They Only Knew What I Thought’: The Sad Cycle of Evangelical Biblical Scholarship.” He discusses both the frustration of students at evangelical institutions, who often feel, he writes, “they have been lied to by their teachers.” And he discusses the flip-side of that same problem, the overbearing pressure on... Read more
Sometimes people think I’m overstating the case when I describe American evangelicalism as primarily driven by culture-war tribalism in service of partisan politics. Or when I criticize that tribalism as a tool cynically employed by hucksters seeking to cash in on the tribal market niche. Or when I suggest that those hucksters are the lackeys and servants of wealthy plutocrats. But I don’t think I’m overstating any of that. That’s from the 1975 Spire Christian Comics publication “Archie’s Parables.” (And... Read more
“If you see me on the street, feel free for the rest of my life to call me Bunk.” “When making a ‘brave’ stance as a public figure, the rule should be to only go after the oppressors.” “He felt that he had been trifled with; that the preacher had deceived him.” “Like it or not, we bring ourselves and our biases to every translation and every reading of the text. We can’t help it.” “The question I would like... Read more
1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 Aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly towards outsiders and be dependent on no one. Read more
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