Scott Paeth responds to the U.S. Catholic bishops‘ efforts to prevent insurance from covering women’s health care. Due in part to my own family’s recent interactions with that bunch, I particularly liked this part of Paeth’s post: In all honesty, my first reaction to any attempt by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to make any kind of moral argument, least of all one involving sexuality, is to want to say “Shut up, old man.” And no Bishop who is... Read more
Two recent stories that I find equal parts confounding and infuriating. First, from Raw Story/Reuters, “Miami students rally for valedictorian facing deportation“: A judge on Monday denied a green card request by Daniela Pelaez, an 18-year-old who was born in Colombia and brought by her parents to the United States when she was four. Her lawyer is appealing the decision. Pelaez grew up in the Miami area after she and her family overstayed their tourist visas. A high school senior,... Read more
Call it debt forgiveness, principle reduction, or restructuring, a hair-cut or a cram-down — call it whatever you like, but it increasingly seems as though some measure of Jubilee would be an immensely practical step for borrowers and for lenders and for the economy as a whole. At this point the idea of such a Jubilee still probably only rates as practical and prudent. Soon it will likely shift into the categories of — in order — “necessary,” “urgently needed”... Read more
“How many people really are so stupid that they don’t know how hormonal birth control works?” BooMan asks. Millions. Tens of millions. But, again, it’s not a matter of innate stupidity. It’s the same willful, voluntary, pretense of stupidity that permits them to pretend to believe in a vast conspiracy of scientists, insurance companies, wildlife and glaciers promoting the “myth” of climate change. The same deliberate stupidity that enables them to look at the night sky without questioning that the... Read more
Here’s the Civil Wars, Joy Williams and John Paul White, performing “Barton Hollow“: In case you needed any further reason to love the Civil Wars, Bread for the World notes that the duo also provided the score for Finding North, a documentary about hunger in America. Here’s Williams on the subject: Forty-four million people go to bed hungry in America and don’t know where their next meal is coming from, and so [Finding North] highlights food insecurity in the United... Read more
The “Beatitudes” — a list of blessings and woes attributed to Jesus — are listed in two of the Gospels of the New Testament. Well, sort of. The version in Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t include the woes. Matthew’s version is also fuzzier — less concrete and forthright — than the version in Luke. Here’s Luke’s version: Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.... Read more
Lisa Sharon Harper: “Black Evangelicals, White Evangelicals and Franklin Graham’s Repentance“ I sat down for a pleasant meal in the home of two great friends — one of them a white evangelical faith leader deeply committed to social justice. Well into the evening’s conversation —when we’d dropped all our pretenses and our exchanges moved well past mealtime niceties — one friend asked me something that caught me entirely off guard. “Do you think Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Christian?”... Read more
Young-earth creationists don’t like astronomy. That’s understandable, since when we look across the vastness of space we’re also looking across the vastness of time. With the Hubble telescope and the other cool toys we’re using to look farther than ever before, we can see that the universe is really, really old. We have the pictures to prove it. Astronomy lets us take such pictures — photographs that show the age of the universe and that show how it has evolved... Read more
1 John 3:11-18 For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be astonished, brothers and sisters, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever... Read more
“We are who God says we are.” “My southern ears hear Franklin Graham’s words clearly. … I hear the dog whistle, Franklin. Put it away.” “It is a living argument from the living gospels, and rooted in the traditions and history within which Cone grew up in Fordyce, Ark., and if that makes people who didn’t grow up in Fordyce, Ark., under Jim Crow quiver a bit in their Christian complacence, well, that’s just the way it is.” “We are... Read more
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