Before we even get into the satire, let’s start with an actual historical fact that feels like it came straight out of a rejected Left Behind prequel. In 2007, the town of Reeves, Louisiana finally escaped its cursed phone prefix — 666 — after nearly half a century of begging to be freed from the Mark of the Beast via customer service loopholes and senatorial intervention. This is not a joke. The mayor literally said the number had been “a... Read more
Transcendentalism and I would probably make decent drinking buddies. Not best friends. Not partners in crime. But the kind of folks who could sit across from each other with a bottle between us, trading half-formed ideas and wounded idealism, and occasionally nod in agreement when the silence gets deep. I’ve never lived in a cabin in the woods, and I’m not quoting Emerson before breakfast. But the older I get—and the further I drift from the gravitational pull of institutional... Read more
If Christianity were a marriage, it’d be the kind that ends in a true-crime podcast. Hosea’s love story was already wild enough—God tells a prophet to marry a prostitute as a living metaphor for divine heartbreak. Hosea’s wife keeps leaving; he keeps forgiving. It’s messy, tragic, human. It’s the kind of story where the neighbors whisper and the pastor pretends he doesn’t see what’s happening. Then Paul shows up centuries later and rebrands the whole thing. Suddenly, the church is... Read more
Moravec’s Paradox says the stuff we think should be hard—math, logic, abstraction—is actually pretty easy for machines. Meanwhile, the stuff we assume should be simple—intuition, empathy, basic perception—is stupidly difficult. AI can solve a differential equation faster than we can finish pouring a cup of coffee. But ask it to understand why someone is crying in a grocery store? Full system meltdown. The Paradox We Don’t Want to See It’s a paradox of priorities. And, honestly, Christianity has been living... Read more
Empires rarely die in battle. They die in shame. Not with a roar, but with a whimper — the sound of small men convincing themselves they’re gods. Rome had Nero. We’ve got Trump. The tools have changed, but the pathology’s the same: delusion wrapped in divine self-promotion, backed by enablers too hungry for power to tell the truth. The end of empire never comes suddenly. It comes slowly, with applause — the crowds cheering the very men who lit the... Read more
American Christianity has a soundtrack problem. We’ve got the praise playlist on repeat—loud, triumphant, and relentlessly upbeat. “Hosanna!” gets center stage. Palm branches wave, hands go up, lights flash, smoke machines hiss. It’s the church as pep rally. Victory is always a drumbeat away. But when you crank the Hosanna dial to 100 and rip out the lament channel entirely, what’s left isn’t faith. It’s helium. It floats, it squeaks, it looks festive, but it can’t hold weight. One poke... Read more
The Cult of the Overrated America has a strange talent for turning mediocrity into mythology. We crown the loudest, not the smartest. The most confident, not the most capable. It’s why Bill Belichick — a man who hasn’t evolved since flip phones — gets hailed as a football genius, and Donald Trump — a man allergic to reading — got handed the keys to democracy. I live in Chapel Hill, where Belichick’s second coming at UNC dropped like every other... Read more
“Every child had a pretty good shot / To get at least as far as their old man got.” — Billy Joel, “Allentown” (1982) Billy Joel wrote Allentown about a factory town losing its heartbeat. Forty years later, it feels like a national anthem for the disillusioned. The assembly lines are gone, but the machinery of decay hums on. The dream sputtered out long ago, and we’re still pretending it’s alive—propping it up with slogans, cheap patriotism, and whatever’s left... Read more
The Old Testament is a chaotic road trip—full of divine temper tantrums, bad decisions, and people repeatedly ignoring obvious red flags. (Oh look, a golden calf! Let’s worship that!) It’s a saga of migrations, exiles, wars, and prophetic weirdness. It doesn’t move in a straight line; it stumbles forward, backtracks, makes pit stops in Babylon, and occasionally sets entire cities on fire. It’s a travelogue—a messy, evolving account of faith that feels more like a journal of lessons learned (or... Read more
Sunday morning smells like coffee and false certainty. The lobby hums with “How are yous?” that mean “Don’t tell me,” and the band is tuning up for a setlist that promises transcendence in four chords or less. This is community—at least that’s what we call it. Strangers gather, eyes closed, arms raised, feeling connected because they’re singing the same song about the same invisible friend. It works. It really works. And it shouldn’t. None of this holds together without the... Read more
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