I've been thinking a lot lately about the cult of offendedness, the drug of smug, the reassuring substitute for legitimate anger that has come to dominate and to shape the politics and the religion of my evangelical Christian tradition. So it was fortuitous, or maybe providential, that David Dark was kind enough to arrange for me to receive a review copy of his latest book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, which deals, in part, with that very topic. The thing... Read more
Tribulation Force, pg. 61 This Sunday morning gathering at New Hope Village Church is a very strange worship service, mostly because the authors don't see anything strange about it. It's a church service and we all know what church services are like, so why should this one be any different just because the entire world is different? Thus our service begins with some praise choruses, just like any typical evangelical church service would: The music had begun. Buck stood to... Read more
What's the absolute minimum number of people required to copy edit a daily newspaper? One way to find out, it seems, is to conduct an experiment. Take a functional copy desk and subtract 20 percent of its staff. Look at that — they still managed to somehow get everything read and onto the page. With headlines even. OK, then, try again. Let's eliminate another 20 percent and toss in some rolling furloughs so that the full complement of remaining personnel... Read more
Every job comes with a set of minimum standards. An entry-level volunteer firefighter, for example, must meet a basic standard of physical fitness as well as be able to demonstrate a basic capacity for learning the craft of firefighting and a basic commitment to keeping the community safe. Every once in a while, though, someone slips through the screening process and reminds us that every job also comes with a set of sub-minimal requirements. A volunteer firefighter, for example, shouldn't... Read more
I started working at the paper in Delaware in 2001 and every year since then they've introduced legislation to include sexual orientation in the First State's antidiscrimination laws. Those bills never passed. "Discrimination against gays still legal in Del.," read the headline on the paper's Web site, year after year after year. That headline was celebrated, each time, by Christian conservative groups who were always ferociously opposed to the idea that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons should enjoy the... Read more
SCENE: A secure, undisclosed location somewhere deep beneath Washington, D.C. Representatives from every conservative PR tank and farm team have gathered for an emergency meeting. Tony Perkins looks nervous, unsure if he should be glad he gets to go first. He reaches out and makes his choice. Grinning broadly, he holds up the long straw for the others to see and, chuckling to himself, makes his way to the back of the room. “It’s not fair,” says George Weigel of... Read more
Tribulation Force, pp. 59-60 It's the third Sunday after the End of the World and everyone's going to church: Rayford was glad he and Chloe had decided to go early to church. The place was jammed every week. … "Every week" here meaning that New Hope Village Church had been "jammed" the previous two Sundays. This is, again, kind of hard to explain. The Event whisked away every member of NHVC except for Bruce Barnes and Loretta. Now, despite the... Read more
“North and South?” the people of Lineland said to our hero. “That’s nonsense. There’s no such thing as North and South, only East and West.” Our hero is the main character in Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland. He is a square — a literal square, a four-sided, geometric figure in the two-dimensional world of Abbot’s transcendently weird mathematical parable. And there I was, telling this story again because an honest question deserves the most honest answer we can give, particularly when the... Read more
We watched the last of these last week, leading to a discussion of, among other things, scenes or lines or moments that "get you every time." Not a bad topic for a Monday morning, so here are 10 of mine. Feel free to agree or scoff or offer your own in comments below. 1. "Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy." From a movie that's basically Terms of... Read more
Tribulation Force, pp. 56-59 I confess that I still can't make any sense out of what Nicolae Carpathia is supposed to be trying to do in his dealings with Buck Williams. It doesn't help that I also can't figure out what Buck is trying to do in his dealings with Nicolae. The trouble comes from the fact that Buck isn't very, very dead at this point. Or at the very least in some secret dungeon at the United Nations* being... Read more
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