{"id":70718,"date":"2025-06-07T19:34:43","date_gmt":"2025-06-07T23:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=70718"},"modified":"2025-06-07T19:34:43","modified_gmt":"2025-06-07T23:34:43","slug":"everyones-invited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/06\/07\/everyones-invited\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyone&#8217;s invited"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>Tomorrow is my birthday. Banks and schools will be closed across the country.<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow I will turn 57 \u2014 the same age Warren G. Harding was when he dropped dead from a heart attack.<\/p>\n<p>I suppose that reminder of my own mortality ought to be grim and ponderous, but remembering that Harding\u2019s sordid presidency came to a surprising and sudden end actually just makes me feel hopeful and cheerful and all warm inside. I know what <em>I\u2019m<\/em> wishing for when I blow out the candles.<\/p>\n<p>Planning a big party for next weekend. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nokings.org\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Everyone\u2019s invited<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEveryone\u2019s invited\u201d is the big theme tomorrow because it\u2019s Pentecost Sunday, which should be a bigger deal than it is. Everyone Means Everyone is good news \u2014 about the best news there could be.<\/p>\n<p>Celebrate Pentecost while you still can \u2014 a holy day and holiday explicitly centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion might not be legal for much longer. If you\u2019re \u201canti-DEI,\u201d pretty much the whole book of Acts is something you\u2019ll need to burn and ban.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, if you\u2019re not a church-goer, you can still <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nokings.org\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">celebrate the spirit of Pentecost next Saturday<\/a> in a non-sectarian setting.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/religionnews.com\/2025\/06\/05\/walter-breuggemann-influential-biblical-scholar-dies-at-92\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">RIP Walter Brueggemann<\/a>, who studied the Bible as if he believed it was true.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 from <em>The Prophetic Imagination<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tomorrow is my birthday. Banks will be closed. The party is next Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":67647,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Everyone&#039;s invited<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Tomorrow is my birthday. Banks will be closed. The party is next Saturday.\" \/>\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\/06\/07\/everyones-invited\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Everyone&#039;s invited\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tomorrow is my birthday. Banks will be closed. The party is next Saturday.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/06\/07\/everyones-invited\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"slacktivist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-06-07T23:34:43+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2024\/07\/NoKings.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"300\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"296\" \/>\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=\"1 minute\" \/>\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\/06\/07\/everyones-invited\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/06\/07\/everyones-invited\/\",\"name\":\"Everyone's invited\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2025-06-07T23:34:43+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2025-06-07T23:34:43+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47\"},\"description\":\"Tomorrow is my birthday. 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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":"Everyone's invited","description":"Tomorrow is my birthday. Banks will be closed. 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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. 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