{"id":68590,"date":"2025-01-08T15:00:22","date_gmt":"2025-01-08T20:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=68590"},"modified":"2025-01-08T17:30:20","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T22:30:20","slug":"all-this-time-the-river-flows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/","title":{"rendered":"All this time the river flows"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

James McGrath<\/a> writes about the need to build solidarity beyond stereotypes and misinformation, \u201cOne day at a time. One conversation at a time.\u201d And thus I come back to an argument I\u2019ve been having with Sting for more than 30 years now.<\/p>\n

\"\"It\u2019s maybe more of a conversation than an argument, as I\u2019ve been going back and forth on whether or not I agree with his thesis. And, of course, it\u2019s an entirely one-sided conversation, given that I don\u2019t actually, like, hang out<\/em> with Sting.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a line in a song of his that has me thinking, and has had me thinking, ever since that song came out back in the early \u201990s. It\u2019s from The Soul Cages,<\/em> a melancholy 1991 concept album full of songs dealing with the death of his father a few years earlier. The biggest hit was \u201cAll This Time,\u201d which tells the story of a young boy watching two priests arrive to administer last rites to his dying father. I\u2019m pretty sure it\u2019s the only song about that to ever crack the Top 10 on the Billboard pop chart.<\/p>\n

Anyway, here\u2019s the conclusion of that song, and the thing that I have still, more than 30 years later, not settled on agreeing or disagreeing with:<\/p>\n

All this time
\nThe river flowed
\nIn the falling light
\nOf a northern sun
\nIf I had my way
\nI\u2019d take a boat from the river
\nMen go crazy in congregations
\nThey only get better one by one
\nOne by one
\nOne by one, by one
\nOne by one<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the specific context of the song and its semi-autobiographical story, the \u201ccongregations\u201d here is the Catholic Church. Sting is from Newcastle, England, but \u201cAll This Time\u201d reads more like something Irish<\/em> \u2014 like an invocation of Parnell\u2019s ghost in the long tradition of Joyce and Yeats and Sinead and Panti Bliss.<\/p>\n

But on another level, \u201cAll This Time\u201d offers a general, universal thesis: \u201cMen go crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one.\u201d<\/p>\n

This parallels much of the prescription coming from those who study \u201cdisinformation\u201d or the contagion of moral panics and their cult-like manifestations in things like QAnon. To liberate someone caught in such a false reality \u2014 and false identity \u2014 they say requires relationship, and trust, and time. This is the gist of that post-election challenge from James McGrath in that first link. One by one. One by one by one.<\/p>\n

Henry Farrell suggests we may be looking at this all wrong. \u201cThe bigger problem isn\u2019t disinformation. It\u2019s degraded democratic publics<\/a>.\u201d And solutions designed to address the former problem won\u2019t affect the latter one.<\/p>\n

You may be familiar with Farrell from his many years as a contributor to the Crooked Timber blog,<\/a> a site I greatly enjoy even though when reading it I sometimes feel like I\u2019ve enrolled in a graduate level class for which I skipped the prerequisites. His post on all of this is a bit like that in places, engaging a long academic conversation that I\u2019m not up to speed on, but the gist of it is something I think most of us laypeople can follow:<\/p>\n

We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of\u00a0disinformation<\/em> \u2014 that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals<\/em>\u00a0about what is true or untrue but that it creates\u00a0publics with malformed collective understandings<\/em>. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The analogous context that got Farrell thinking about things this way came from \u201can article published in Logic<\/em> magazine in 2019, about Internet porn.\u201d This makes me feel better about using Sting lyrics as a framing device for this discussion.<\/p>\n

But the porn analogy actually helps to clarify what he means by \u201cmalformed collective understandings\u201d:<\/p>\n

The article\u2019s argument is that the presentation of porn \u2013 and people\u2019s sense of what other people\u2019s sexual interests are \u2013 is shaped by algorithms that respond to the sharp difference between what people want to see and what people are willing to pay for. The key claim:<\/p>\n

A lot of people \u2026 are consumers of internet porn (i.e., they watch it but don\u2019t pay for it), a tiny fraction of those people are customers. Customers pay for porn, typically by clicking an ad on a tube site, going to a specific content site (often owned by MindGeek), and entering their credit card information. \u2026 This \u201cconsumer\u201d vs. \u201ccustomer\u201d division is key to understanding the use of data to perpetuate categories that seem peculiar to many people both inside and outside the industry. \u2026 Porn companies, when trying to figure out what people want, focus on the customers who convert. It\u2019s their tastes that set the tone for professionally produced content and the industry as a whole.<\/p>\n

The result is that particular taboos (incest; choking) feature heavily in the presentation of internet porn, not because they are the most popular among consumers, but because they are more likely to convert into paying customers. This, in turn, gives porn consumers, including teenagers, a highly distorted understanding of what other people want and expect from sex, that some of them then act on. In my terms, they look through a distorting technological lens on an imaginary sexual public to understand what is normal and expected, and what is not. This then shapes their interactions with others.<\/p>\n

Something like this explains the main consequences of social media for politics. The collective perspectives that emerge from social media \u2014 our understanding of what the public is and wants \u2014 are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our personal preferences and beliefs are shaped by what we understand or imagine the preferences and beliefs of most other people are. When that understanding is distorted, we tend to conform to the imagined \u201cnormal.\u201d Any \u201cone by one\u201d approach to countering this distorted social reality or \u201cmalformed collective understanding\u201d is going to occur within that distorted context, making it less likely to bear fruit. It really is more like Joyce\u2019s Ireland than Sting\u2019s Newcastle \u2014 you can\u2019t just opt out of the \u201ccongregation\u201d because the congregation is the entire society.<\/p>\n

The key thing that convinces me that Farrell is on to something here is his discussion of \u201creflective beliefs\u201d or shibboleths. These are the kinds of untrue things that are widely \u201cbelieved\u201d and thus \u2014 because they are untrue and falsifiable and opposed to the facts of the matter \u2014 spark so much concern for \u201cdisinformation\u201d and the need for \u201cfact-checking\u201d and the like. But they are also the kinds of \u201cbeliefs\u201d that no one \u201creally believes\u201d \u2014 the kinds of totemic pseudo-beliefs that I have struggled to distinguish from actual beliefs by saying things like \u201cchoose to pretend to believe.\u201d (See, again, \u201cFalse Witnesses<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Farrell:<\/p>\n

When Republicans said in polls that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, they did not believe this claim in the same way that they believed that water was wet. Instead, their claim had some of the qualities of what Hugo and Dan Sperber call a \u201creflective belief,\u201d and some of the qualities of a shibboleth* \u2014 something that you know you are supposed to believe, and publicly affirm that you believe but might or might not subscribe to personally.<\/p>\n

In short, the technologies through which we see the public shape what we think the public is. And that, in turn, shapes how we behave politically and how we orient ourselves. We may end up believing \u2014 in a highly specific way \u2014 in things that we know we are \u2018supposed\u2019 to believe, given that we are Republicans or Democrats, Conservative or Labour Party members. We may end up not believing these things, but also declining to express our actual beliefs publicly, because we know we\u2019re not supposed to believe whatever it is that we privately think.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When seeking to describe this corrosive attempt to choose to pretend to believe that which you yourself know not to be true, Dietrich Bonhoeffer resorted to the book of Proverbs. He called this \u201cfolly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bonhoeffer\u2019s essay \u201cOn Folly\u201d<\/a> (from his Prison Notebooks<\/em>) offers yet another way of looking at this problem, one that also rejects the notion that this is a problem of disinformation or misinformation or a lack of proper factual education.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think Bonhoeffer\u2019s argument is quite the same as Farrell\u2019s, but their views are, at least, congruent.<\/p>\n

What strikes me, in \u201cAll This Time\u201d terms, is how Bonhoeffer seems to hold a mostly congregational view of both the cause and the cure of folly \u2014 and yet he wavers from that, briefly, just before his conclusion:<\/p>\n

Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved \u2014 indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied, in fact, they\u00a0can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them\u00a0aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel; we shall never again try to convince a fool by reason, for it is both useless and dangerous.<\/p>\n

If we are to deal adequately with folly, we must understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. There are people who are mentally agile but foolish, and people who are mentally slow but very far from foolish \u2014 a discovery that we make to our surprise as a result of particular situations. We thus get the impression that folly is likely to be, not a congenital defect, but one that is acquired in certain circumstances where people\u00a0make\u00a0fools of themselves or allow others to make fools of them. We notice further that this defect is less common in the unsociable and solitary than in individuals or groups that are inclined or condemned to sociability. It seems, then, that folly is a sociological rather than a psychological problem, and that it is a special form of the operation of historical circumstances: on people, a psychological by-product of definite external factors.<\/p>\n

If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of humanity; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of the others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that people\u00a0are deprived of their independent judgment, and \u2014 more or less unconsciously \u2014 give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that they are\u00a0independent. One feels in fact, when talking to them, that one is dealing, not with the person themselves, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of them. They are\u00a0under a spell, they are\u00a0blinded, their\u00a0very nature is being misused and exploited. Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.<\/p>\n

But at this point it is quite clear, too, that folly can be overcome, not by instruction, but only by an act of liberation; and so we have come to terms with the fact that in the great majority of cases inward liberation must be preceded by outward liberation, and that until that has taken place, we may as well abandon all attempts to convince the fool. In this state of affairs we have to realize why it is no use our trying to find out what \u201cthe people\u201d really think, and why the question is so superfluous for the person\u00a0who thinks and acts responsibly \u2014 but always given these particular circumstances. The Bible\u2019s words that \u201cthe fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom\u201d (Psalm 111:10) tell us that a person\u2019s inward liberation to live a responsible life before God is the only real cure for folly.<\/p>\n

But there is some consolation in these thoughts on folly: they in no way justify us in thinking that most people are fools in all circumstances. What will really matter is whether those in power expect more from people\u2019s folly than from their wisdom and independence of mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m uncertain whether Bonhoeffer\u2019s reference to \u201coutward liberation\u201d suggests a change of political context to address the \u201csociological problem,\u201d or if it\u2019s a reference to his Lutheran belief in divine grace as the true locus of agency. Maybe it\u2019s both.<\/p>\n

In any case, Bonhoeffer\u2019s concluding sentence nicely complements Farrell\u2019s discussion of the problem of a democratic public shaped by social media oligarchs. Farrell is concerned with:<\/p>\n

The problems you get when large swathes of the public sphere are exclusively owned by wannabe God-Emperors. Elon Musk owns X\/Twitter outright. Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta through a system in which he is CEO, chairman and effective majority owner, all at the same time. What purports to be a collective phenomena; the \u2018voice of the people;\u2019 is actually in private hands; is, to a very great extent shaped by two extremely powerful individuals.<\/p>\n

\u2026 Can democracy work, if a couple of highly atypical men exercise effective control over large swathes of the public space?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or, in Bonhoeffer\u2019s terms, social media is currently a context in which \u201cthose in power expect more from people\u2019s folly than from their wisdom and independence of mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note those last three words. \u201cIndependence<\/em> of mind\u201d \u2014 and we\u2019re back, again, perhaps, to one by one, by one.<\/p>\n

Still not sure if I agree or disagree with that song. But the mandolin sure is pretty<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

* \u201cShibboleth\u201d is used to refer to the kind of symbols or signifiers that distinguish membership, identity, or allegiance.<\/p>\n

The term has biblical origins, from a bloody story in the bloody book of Judges. This is a story of civil war \u2014 of one group of Israelites slaughtering another group of Israelites. The Ephraimites \u2014 the group being slaughtered \u2014 were trying to flee, but so was everyone else caught in the path of their killers. So, since Ephraimites apparently all had an accent that made it hard for them to pronounce the \u201cSh\u201d sound, their pursuers forced everyone suspected of being an Ephraimite to say the word \u201cShibboleth.\u201d<\/p>\n

I sometimes offer this condensed version of the story:<\/p>\n

\u201cArt thou an Ephraimite?\u201d
\n\u201cUm, uh \u2026\u00a0No?\u201d
\n\u201cProve it. Say \u2018shibboleth.\u2019\u201d
\n\u201cSibboleth.\u201d
\n\u201cAha!\u00a0Die Ephraimite!\u201d
\n\u201cOh sit.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Farrell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer help me think through my decades-long one-sided argument with Sting. (This is about Elon and Zuck and “disinformation” and whatnot. Sort of.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":68596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAll this time the river flows<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Henry Farrell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer help me think through my decades-long one-sided argument with Sting. (This is about Elon and Zuck and "disinformation" and whatnot. Sort of.)\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"All this time the river flows\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Henry Farrell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer help me think through my decades-long one-sided argument with Sting. (This is about Elon and Zuck and "disinformation" and whatnot. Sort of.)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"slacktivist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-01-08T20:00:22+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-01-08T22:30:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2024\/11\/Thesoulcages.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"300\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"300\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/\",\"name\":\"All this time the river flows\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2025-01-08T20:00:22+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2025-01-08T22:30:20+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47\"},\"description\":\"Henry Farrell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer help me think through my decades-long one-sided argument with Sting. (This is about Elon and Zuck and \\\"disinformation\\\" and whatnot. Sort of.)\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"All this time the river flows\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\",\"name\":\"slacktivist\",\"description\":\""Test everything; hold fast to what is good."\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47\",\"name\":\"Fred Clark\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7083ccd514d4fb8d5043041756d766a0?s=96&d=identicon&r=pg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7083ccd514d4fb8d5043041756d766a0?s=96&d=identicon&r=pg\",\"caption\":\"Fred Clark\"},\"description\":\"Fred Clark is a graduate of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now called Palmer Seminary), of Eastern College (now called Eastern University) and of the fundamentalist Timothy Christian High School (still fundamentalist and still called Timothy Christian High School, but not really thrilled to have a snarky, liberal, tree-hugging, pro-choice, pro-GLBT, peacenik, commie, evolutionist as such a vocal alumnus). A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"All this time the river flows","description":"Henry Farrell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer help me think through my decades-long one-sided argument with Sting. (This is about Elon and Zuck and \"disinformation\" and whatnot. Sort of.)","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"All this time the river flows","og_description":"Henry Farrell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer help me think through my decades-long one-sided argument with Sting. (This is about Elon and Zuck and \"disinformation\" and whatnot. Sort of.)","og_url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/","og_site_name":"slacktivist","article_published_time":"2025-01-08T20:00:22+00:00","article_modified_time":"2025-01-08T22:30:20+00:00","og_image":[{"width":300,"height":300,"url":"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2024\/11\/Thesoulcages.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Fred Clark","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Fred Clark","Est. reading time":"6 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/","name":"All this time the river flows","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website"},"datePublished":"2025-01-08T20:00:22+00:00","dateModified":"2025-01-08T22:30:20+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47"},"description":"Henry Farrell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer help me think through my decades-long one-sided argument with Sting. (This is about Elon and Zuck and \"disinformation\" and whatnot. Sort of.)","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/08\/all-this-time-the-river-flows\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"All this time the river flows"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/","name":"slacktivist","description":""Test everything; hold fast to what is good."","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47","name":"Fred Clark","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7083ccd514d4fb8d5043041756d766a0?s=96&d=identicon&r=pg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7083ccd514d4fb8d5043041756d766a0?s=96&d=identicon&r=pg","caption":"Fred Clark"},"description":"Fred Clark is a graduate of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now called Palmer Seminary), of Eastern College (now called Eastern University) and of the fundamentalist Timothy Christian High School (still fundamentalist and still called Timothy Christian High School, but not really thrilled to have a snarky, liberal, tree-hugging, pro-choice, pro-GLBT, peacenik, commie, evolutionist as such a vocal alumnus). A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}