It hurts down here on Earth, Lord
Eliel Cruz's "Faithfully LGBT" project shows us the beautiful faces of the real people often sidelined by the church as an abstract "issue" to be debated. They're not issues -- they're our brothers and...
View ArticleSmart people saying smart things (2.12)
Kali Holloway on "How Delusional Nostalgia Is Killing the White Working Class" (i.e., why Trump is winning). Walter Brueggeman sides with the Gospel against the Bible. Margo Kaplan asks and answers a...
View ArticleSmart people saying smart things (2.24)
Sarah Posner on why apocalyptic American Christians are not "friends of Israel." Heather Havrilesky on true romance. Julie Rodgers on Wheaton. Edmund N. Santurri's crash-course on Reinhold Niebuhr. And...
View ArticleThey have always been here. If you didn’t know that before, it’s because you...
Rick Scarborough seems shocked that many white evangelical Christians have had abortions or know someone who has. He regards this as a sudden and very recent development. It's not. These folks have...
View ArticleHeels
Pat McCrory really, really wants to look in your young daughter's pants. And the North Carolina governor's fascination with inspecting the private parts of private citizens is going to wind up costing...
View ArticleIf I could only give you everything you know I haven’t got
Marc Mauer of the Marshall Project offers an excellent summary of what we need to remember, and to learn from, about the 1994 crime law. The good news is that both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders...
View ArticlePostcards from the culture wars (4.12)
"Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love — so you can’t know him if you...
View ArticleI’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other one is doing something that...
Gordon Klingenschmitt is the kind of far-right fringe nut-job who gives most other far-right fringe nut-jobs the heebie-jeebies. But like dozens of other delirious religious extremists, Klingenschmitt...
View ArticleSmart people saying smart things (4.26)
Rick Perlstein on the unpleasant political lineage of Trumpism. Adam Kotsko and Deborah Jian Lee on the whiteness of white evangelicalism. Andre E. Johnson on the old arguments resurfacing as "bathroom...
View ArticleOotGOism: ‘Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it …’
Mychal Denzel Smith: "When your self-conception is centered on the idea of your own goodness, it prevents you from hearing any critique of your ideology/behavior. Thinking of yourself as 'good' allows...
View ArticlePostcards from the culture wars (5.6)
"In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets."
View ArticleThe Rod D. Horror Picture Show
Rod Dreher's story never happened. The Bad Jackie of the tough Texas suburbs -- if any such person really exists -- is making stuff up. And she's so focused on making her story shocking that she forgot...
View ArticleThe Fall of the House of Graham (ongoing)
The transition from Billy Graham to his son Franklin Graham is a microcosm of the past 40 years of white evangelical Christianity in America. For Billy, the primary thing was always proclamation...
View ArticleChapter and verse
But when I read a story like this, I want to know more. When a member of Congress is leaning on "a passage from the Bible denouncing homosexuality" as the primary basis for his legislative decisions,...
View ArticleWe’ve gotten better at mourning. That’s a sick form of ‘progress’
The enormous change in public response might be more encouraging if the unit of measurement weren't so horrifying. It is, undeniably, evidence of progress that our communities, our media, our...
View ArticleThe crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning
What if we rewrote "The Da Vinci Code" as an extended episode of "Leverage"? That's what you'll find in Ariel Sabar's amazing attempt to determine the provenance of the allegedly ancient papyrus...
View Article‘Religious outreach’
While Donald Trump's evangelical outreach continues to flail -- "We've gotta spiritize this country!" -- another election year brings about the quadrennial ritual of articles fretting about the need...
View ArticleSmart people saying smart things (7.2)
Sonia Sotomayor on lawless police; Ben Moberg on Orlando; Loretta Lynch on being seen; Alex Massie on the consequences of hateful rhetoric; and Carvell Wallace on the "Negro Motorist Green Book" and...
View ArticleRewriting evangelicals’ past to preserve our mistakes
Christianity Today was co-founded by L. Nelson Bell -- Billy Graham's father-in-law and also the founder of The Southern Presbyterian Journal, a pro-segregationist magazine explicitly dedicated to what...
View ArticleCulture warriors have weird ideas about how courts work
Litfin is so eager to minimize the legitimacy of LGBT people's claims to legal and civil equality that he starts from an "activist judges" narrative that fails to grasp even a Schoolhouse Rock-level...
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