That corruption, McKnight says, is made manifest by the \u201cpowermongering white men\u201d running the show who are intent on \u201cdespising discoveries of racism while defending male sexual predators.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the sort of essay that would\u2019ve gotten McKnight booted off of Patheos\u2019 evangelical channel back when he wrote (t)here. Tim Dalrymple \u2014 the guy who booted me off that channel for writing stuff like that \u2014 took McKnight\u2019s blog with him when he left Patheos to become the president & CEO of Christianity Today<\/em>. Can\u2019t help but wonder if that\u2019s why this essay is on McKnight\u2019s substack and not on his Jesus Creed blog at CT<\/em>.<\/p>\n In any case, read the whole thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2022 \u201cPandemic-weary workers quitting their retail jobs<\/a>.\u201d Good piece from The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0(linked here to the non-paywalled Arkansas Democrat Gazette<\/em>).<\/p>\n Some 649,000 retail workers put in their notice in April, the industry\u2019s largest one-month exodus since the Labor Department began tracking such data more than 20 years ago. Overall, nearly 3% of the U.S. workforce \u2014 or roughly 4 million workers \u2014 quit in April.<\/p>\n In interviews with more than a dozen retail workers who recently left their jobs, nearly all said the pandemic introduced new strains to already challenging work: longer hours, understaffed stores, unruly customers and even pay cuts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The article only gets at this elliptically, but the context here is what it calls \u201cthe easing of pandemic restrictions.\u201d Unemployment is still high, but the labor market seems tight because everything is opening\/re-opening at the same time<\/em>.\u00a0Open a new store or restaurant and you can hang a \u201cHelp Wanted\u201d sign in the window and take your pick of applicants. But if every store and restaurant in the area is re-opening at the same time, then there\u2019s a sign in every<\/em> window and applicants can work their way up and down the block, comparison-shopping for the best offer.<\/p>\n Retailers are begrudgingly starting to realize they\u2019re not making the best offer in terms of pay. Maybe, eventually, if this mass-exodus continues, they\u2019ll also begin to realize they need to make better offers in terms of overall dignity, work environment, respect, etc.<\/p>\n This seems like something very basic that anybody involved in the design of these boxes should know, but apparently it\u2019s not. I\u2019d have thought this basic rule was written down somewhere, but if not, now it\u2019s written down here.<\/p>\n (What\u2019s the point of even having<\/em> a blog if you never use it to vent about nit-picky little annoyances like this?)<\/p>\n \u2022 This piece, by Terry Shoemaker for The Conversation, seems like the 2021 version of a take I\u2019ve been reading for most of my adult life: \u201cWhite Gen X and millennial evangelicals are losing faith in the conservative culture wars<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n I remember being interviewed<\/em> for pieces like this one back in the early \u201990s, when \u201cGen-X\u201d still referred to young people. It\u2019s strange to read the argument now and still see Gen-Xers and Millennials lumped in as \u201cyounger evangelicals.\u201d On the one hand, given the overall demographics of evangelicalism, that\u2019s not wrong. But on the other hand, it\u2019s odd to still find yourself lumped into the \u201cKids These Days\u201d category when you\u2019re 53 years old.<\/p>\n The hope that \u201cyounger evangelicals\u201d would transform white evangelicalism from within seemed overly optimistic, but slightly plausible, 25 years ago but it has become less and less plausible with every annual iteration of that claim. In 2021, it seems more likely that the main way Gen-X and Millennial evangelicals will change their parents\u2019 religion will be by leaving it.<\/p>\n That won\u2019t make white evangelicalism less partisan, less white, or less obsessed with the culture-war issues that have long served as its proxies for its backlash against feminism and the Civil Rights movement. It will make it a smaller, older, angrier and purer distillation of all of that.<\/p>\n \u2022 \u201cJubilee<\/a>,\u201d Atrios writes in regard to this story<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s a nice word.\u201d<\/p>\n Yes. Yes it is.<\/p>\n On a related note, here\u2019s a reminder that anti-Jubilee activist Dave Ramsey declared bankruptcy 31 years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2022 The band is called Airborne Toxic Event and the song is called \u201cDoes This Mean You\u2019re Moving On?<\/a>\u201d and both of those things seem apropos two months after my second shot o\u2019 Moderna.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2021\/06\/UltraTide22-300x246.jpg\")
\u2022 Speaking of retail, here\u2019s a pet peeve of mine that\u2019s far less consequential in the grand scheme of things, but still annoying: The text and images on the top of a box are supposed to be aligned in the same direction as the text and images on the front of the box. That way \u2014 as in the picture here to the right \u2014 a customer looking at the product on the shelf can read both the front and the top without having to read upside-down.<\/p>\n