The stench of greed permeates every church or religious organization that ventures into the world of politics. Any witness for the Gospel sinks into the cesspool of backstabbing and power grabs. Every single time. In my morning perusal of the New York Times, I found myself drawn to an article I would have usually overlooked, but we are planning on a trip into the Amazon River soon and so am naturally curious about the country. At it turns out, the... Read more
Surely you have heard a faux apology something like this: “I’m sorry if you were offended by [what ever it is that I did that should certainly not have upset you], deflecting all the blame onto someone else? Or perhaps an apology something like this: “I’m sorry you got hurt but if you hadn’t [provoked me, started it, tempted me, not responded the way I wanted you to respond, questioned my authority, etc.], then I would not have had to... Read more
I write for the thousands of “It happened to me as well, but I knew they’d never believe me” stories that were posted all over social media in the last couple of weeks. Even more, I write for the “It happened to me, I told someone, and they didn’t believe me” stories that broke my heart over and over and over again. I have been writing this blog for over ten years now and many of these posts have appeared... Read more
So, to get back to Brett Kavanaugh’s trashed life: if it does go down in flames, it is not because the good people of the US want that to happen. It will happen because he refused to answer questions and refuses to acknowledge that he did, at one point in his life, have a severe drinking problem. In the Monday, October 1, 2018 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Alan Dershowitz, a self-described liberal, Democrat, and Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law... Read more
So, I predict that, no, Brett Kavanaugh will not be sacrificed. I predict that women will yet again be slut-shamed, silenced, and slammed against the wall to be left to bleed out, not yet seeing our hopes for justice to prevail. OK, according to those who support The Honorable Judge Brett Kavanaugh, he has had a stellar legal career and his personal life is above reproach. Well, maybe not the last part of that, but still . . . he... Read more
So what does the Bible have to do with putting sexual predators in office? Everything. Because men are the leaders, the protectors, the deciders of what is good and what is evil, and the little woman’s job is to stay in her safe”protected” sphere, by definition if a woman is not “protected” SHE is in the wrong place!!!!! See, it’s all her fault!!!!! Bible-believing Christians like sexual predators. Our nation, spurred on by the support of the Bible-believers, elected one... Read more
What do our Bible-believing Christians do? Fight for policies and elect politicians who seek to remove hope of health care for the vulnerable, that yank food from their mouths, that make housing even more unaffordable, that deny a communal social good of making sure the least among us has adequate and safe shelter, nutritious food, the kind of medical care that leads to health, not just crisis care with its temporary bandage over pus-filled wounds. I read a commentary the other day... Read more
Any organization based on secrecy and tight hierarchies, with admittance only to celibate males, and with females in hidden, subservient roles, is going to be permeated by a combination of sexual perversion and sexual frustration. Such a system has, by definition, no external sources of accountability and many reasons for lack of transparency. It should not be necessary to say, but it is: Decency of action for those in leadership of a church, a community, or a government, is a... Read more
When Jesus spoke of the first man and first woman (he did not refer to them as Adam and Eve), when he spoke of Noah, he was pulling upon common language and common understandings of God as creator and human as storyteller. Dear Thoughtful Pastor: It seems to me that Christians have really worked themselves into a corner with the Adam and Eve myth. By reading it literally and positing that the serpent is Satan in disguise, their theology is... Read more
Depending on your perspective, the demise of the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec is due either to the evil force of longstanding clergy overreach or the evil force of the feminist movement that began in the 1960’s. The statistic shocks: in the city of Quebec, Canada, 95 % of the entire population attended weekly Mass in the 1950’s. Now, 5% do. Since the ’50’s, 547 churches have been closed, sold or transformed. New owners range from theatrical companies to dance... Read more
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