Off-season trades: Prince Fielder signs with Detroit Tigers. Steve Benen signs with MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and The Maddow Blog. Ed Kilgore takes over at Political Animal for The Washington Monthly. * * * * * * * * * Natalie Burris’ post about “The ‘bad’ part of town” reminds me of something I read by Laurie Colwin. There’s a scene where a daughter and mother are walking along the street in an urban neighborhood. The mother is trying... Read more

I enjoyed Tea Party Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mall,” but then I would. I’m not sure how effective it may be with those it’s hoping to persuade. Will Fermia traces the various American mutations of John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” allusion. In a remark much-quoted by politicians since then, Winthrop called for the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be like the city on a hill in Matthew 5: You are the light of the world. A city built on a... Read more

This is from The Alphabet of Grace: Driving home from church one morning full of Christ, I thought, giddy in the head almost and if not speaking in tongues at least singing in tongues in some kind of witless, wordless psalm, I turned on the radio for the twelve o’clock news and heard how a 4-year-old had died that morning somewhere. The child had kept his parents awake all night with his crying and carrying on, and the parents to... Read more

Thinking a bit more about the appallingly cult-like approach to “church discipline” at Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church, I’m reminded again of John Woolman. Woolman was the Quaker abolitionist primarily responsible for the Quakers, as a whole, becoming abolitionist: John Woolman believed slavery was unjust — that it was cruel for those in bondage and corrosive for the bondsman. So he wrote an essay explaining why (“Some considerations on the keeping of Negroes: Recommended to the professors of Christianity of... Read more

American churches remind me of those ads for Bally’s health clubs. You know the ones — they show attractive people with perfectly sculpted bodies lifting weights, running on treadmills and dancing or kick-boxing energetically in perfectly choreographed aerobics classes. The message those ads intend, I think, is that if you were to join Bally’s, then you could look like this. You, too, could soon become an attractive person with a perfectly sculpted body, the ads suggest. (Although it’s not clear... Read more

(Patty Griffin, “Makin’ Pies“) The tradition around here is that posts on contentious subjects ought to be quickly followed by a post on something decidedly not contentious — something widely appealing and nonpolitical. Usually that means pie. But today it means two pies. And not just two pies, but two pies in a cake. This is a “picaken.” Who knew that such glorious monstrosities existed? What immortal hand or eye dared framed its fearful symmetry? I learned of picaken today... Read more