2008 was a difficult year. My wife and I lived in a trailer on my parent’s property because we couldn’t sell our out-of-state house. I lost a lot of money in the real estate & stock market crash. My wife was severely depressed because she couldn’t get pregnant. I lost my faith in Christianity and God and was learning what it meant to be a “non-believer” and “apostate.” Did I mention I lived in a trailer? When it rained, brown… Read more
It’s been a smidge over five years since I first posted at Unreasonable Faith. It starked as a lark. I’m not sure how it stretched on for half a decade. In those five years I completed a masters degree and generally scrounged for work in the public history field. I’ve worked as a contractor for several museums now, and just recently I’ve found myself serving multiple institutions at once. I’m sure the drain on me has been observed in my… Read more
This looks to be the Ballard satellite branch of Marc Driscoll’s Mars Hill. Someone doctored a billboard with Banksy’s iconic “cops kissing” image: As good a use for graffiti as I’ve ever seen. Read more
One of the “joys” of working in an archives is hearing about everybody’s research. Sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes it’s dead boring (hello, genealogists, I don’t care who your great-great-uncle was), and sometimes it makes me want to claw my eyes out. People come looking to us to validate their wonky theories about this or that historical person, and you have to be polite as they spin moonbeams. I’m under orders not to engage on a certain topic. I don’t mind…. Read more
I have to agree with Chris Hallquist’s take on the Brian Eich mess particularly his closing: There’s a tradition of arguing that, as John Stuart Mill put it, society’s informal sanctions can “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression.” It’s possible to imagine situations where that might really be true—if there were a Pope of Liberalism, who unlike the real Pope people actually listened to, who in spite of having no legal authority could in practice… Read more
From the LA Times: Marie Barnard was delighted when, after decades of silence on the topic, Mississippi passed a law requiring school districts to teach sex education. But the lesson involving the Peppermint Pattie wasn’t what she had in mind for her sons. The curricula adopted by the school district in Oxford called on students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became. “They’re using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a… Read more
Self proclaimed paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan loves him an anti-gay, bear-back ridin’, judo flippin’, ex-KGB operative named Vlad. It’s just about the most absurd thing imaginable, and it’s all under the title “Which Side is God on Now? In his Kremlin defense of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond. Crimea, said Putin, “is the location of ancient Khersones, where… Read more
Richard Bartholomew reports on the return of an old friend. Rick Joyner, dominionist preacher in charge of MorningStar Ministries, is having a little get together, and guess who one of the speakers is … Mike Warnke – “I’ve known Mike for many years. When I first heard him speak, I thought he was the funniest man I had ever heard. We need humor, and we’ll need more of it as these times unfold. Yet we also need the other great… Read more
A pair of historians recently claimed that a chalice in a Spanish church is really the Holy Grail. Here’s The Guardian: The two historians – León University medieval history lecturer Margarita Torres and art historian José Manuel Ortega del Rio – identified it as the grail in their book, Kings of the Grail, published last week. They said two Egyptian parchments they found in 2011 at Cairo’s University of al-Azhar set them on a three-year investigation. Their studies led them… Read more
From Terry Firma, I find out that Barbara Ehrenreich has a new memoir coming out. Ehrenreich is the author of the wonderfully skeptical book Bright Sided, where she takes on various popular versions of New Thought and “positive thinking.” But this new memoir, Living With a Wild God, sounds a bit odd. On the surface, the book is about certain dissociative experiences Ehrenreich experienced in her youth. That could be interesting. Ehrenreich’s experiences with cancer led her to analyses the… Read more
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