“The next one won’t happen until December 10, 2117, so I’m guessing this will be the last time you’ll be able to see it.” “Pastor Mack Wolford, the son of a snake-handling pastor who died from a rattler bite, lived by faith and died on Sunday, like his father before him, from a serpent bite.” “Another way of saying this is that most Americans are actually pro-choice even if they sometimes identify as pro-life.” “The real battle isn’t India vs.... Read more
Here’s Sarah Posner on the unintentionally revealing invocation of St. Thomas More as the U.S. bishops’ symbol of “religious liberty”: Invoking More as a symbol of religious freedom is highly problematic, for some of the Bishops’ evangelical allies, but especially for how citizens understand our democracy. More, politician, philosopher, counselor to King Henry VIII and later his Lord Chancellor, opposed the Reformation — not just Martin Luther, not just Henry’s efforts to secure a divorce from Rome, but the contemporaneous... Read more
A standard line of argument for sex education says that if young people aren’t taught the actual facts of the facts of life, then they’ll just wind up learning about it “on the streets.” The idea there is that kids want the truth and they need and deserve to hear it. The desire to protect them, to preserve their innocence by preserving their ignorance, will wind up harming them in the long run. If you deny them access to good... Read more
The following unrelated items are not unrelated: 1. Latebloomer, who writes at Past Tense, Present Progressive, tells a familiar story about being an inquisitive kid in the insular world of American fundamentalist Christianity: I was in the middle of writing a homeschool high school essay called “Why I Believe What I Believe,” and one of my points was that the Bible was inspired. I wrote down something like this: “Written over ____ years by ___ authors in different countries and... Read more
“Rats, cats, raccoons, foxes, possums … they all love them some pigeon.” “Beer and cheese, while delicious, both slough off a lot of gas while they’re being made.” “The War of 1812 has complicated origins, a confusing course, an inconclusive outcome, and demands at least a cursory understanding of Canadian geography.” “People are more morally lax after they look at a brownie for a while.” “In the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.” “A decades-long... Read more
Speaking of building bridges, Steve Benen tells us about a bipartisan project in New Hampshire that restored a piece of American history, creating jobs and producing a public park that endures as a beautiful and useful asset for the community. The Sawyer Bridge “is one of the earliest examples of dry-laid masonry vaults in New England.” And thanks to $288,000 in federal funds from the Recovery Act, secured by 28 New Hampshire Republicans, the bridge has been restored in all... Read more
The Thomas More Law Center, a conservative Catholic fundraising group that portrays itself as a defender of religious liberty, seems to be hoping to corner the market on fundraising from anti-Muslim conservative Catholics. That’s bad. But it has had the felicitous side-effect of pushing the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty — another conservative Catholic fundraising group that portrays itself as a defender of religious liberty — to carve out a niche among slightly less anti-Muslim conservative Catholic donors. What happened... Read more
Susan Lawler: “Belief and skepticism: creating nonsense by mislabeling scientists and deniers“ (via) [Climate] skeptics, as portrayed in the media circus, are completely mislabeled. Those who deny actual evidence cannot be called skeptics. They begin by believing in the rightness of their cause, and then cherry pick their facts. No true sceptic would develop an argument based on bias alone. Scientists are the true skeptics. They begin with doubt, rather than beginning with belief. They ask themselves, “What kind of... Read more
Here’s an illustration that also illustrates why I’m a lousy religion blogger. The illustrious Scot McKnight writes about “Cracks in the Bridge“: From a distance the bridge looks healthy, even attractive. Up close, and under the eyes of a careful observer, the bridge has cracks. If the cracks are attended to in the right way at the right time, the bridge can sustain itself — even get stronger. If not attended to, the cracks can bring the bridge down. Marriage... Read more
John Fea points us to Darren Dochuk’s fascinating Journal of American History article, “Blessed by Oil, Cursed with Crude: God and Black Gold in the American Southwest.” Plenty of interesting stuff there about the intersection of evangelical Christianity and the birth and growth of the oil industry. This is something that’s had an influence on American politics well beyond the Southwest: The ideological and institutional phalanx evangelicals built during the interwar period entered the Cold War era ready to expand... Read more
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