I have good news and bad news. First the bad news: I won’t be able to update the blog for a few weeks. That means you’ll be getting a series of “best of” posts. But the reason I can’t update the blog is (cue good news) I’m working on a[…]
Christianity
What Old Books and Rwandan Bishops Have in Common
The last couple weeks have been depressing. Of course, there’s the usual stuff: hectic job, crowded schedule, and the existential horror of finding a grey hair in your mustache scruff. The social mediasphere is as toxic as I’ve ever seen it. It’s getting to the point where each new development[…]
CS Lewis Was Right About Dialogue
CS Lewis once quipped that, “The more ‘up to date’ the book is, the sooner it will be dated.” Novels with teenage characters are a great example of this principle. Writing dialogue for teen characters is hard. New words, phrases, and expressions shuffle in and out of their speech so[…]
Do Evangelical Celebrities Really Have Worse Kids?
You may have noticed this post is a couple days late. That’s because my original post was *gasp* shrouded in CONTROVERSY. Sort of. My original post’s argument went like this: (1) a declaration that the children of evangelical celebrities are, on average, worse people than children of normal evangelicals; (2)[…]
I’ll Say It: Summer Is Better Than Fall
We are now in the final days of Summer, and the opening days of Fall. That means it’s time to re-ignite a debate as old as human civilization in temperate climates: whether Summer or Fall is better. What started as fights between serfs and minstrels has now migrated to Facebook[…]
Twitter Cranks and Evangelical Identity
So I’ve been doing something new and exciting—for me anyway. I’ve started buying some Twitter ads for this blog (it’s going well, thanks for asking). As you can imagine, exposing my tweets to a large number of strangers has done some . . . interesting things to my mentions. Random[…]
Good News: Our Great-Grandchildren Won’t Care About Trump
I want to share a comforting thought. For this thought, I want to take you to to the year 2068. I’m sitting on my front porch, scratching my wrinkled head with a finger from my robot body.1 Two of my grandchildren, Xenon and Zorpo, play in the surf2 with my[…]
Conservatives Have Weasel Words, Too
A couple weeks ago, I argued that “toxic” was a weasel word that progressive Christians use too much. On my Facebook page,1 a reader2 pointed out that conservative Christians have their own weasel words. One in particular caught my attention: liberal. I think that’s spot-on. And yes, I have several[…]
Of Trojans and Turtles
I noticed something strange when I walked past Target’s toy aisle. It was dominated by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This is not a criticism. As someone whose boyhood was in the 80’s and 90’s, I loved the Turtles. I watched every show, practiced every ninja move, and collected every[…]
Let’s Quit with the “Toxic” Talk
There’s a term that gets thrown around a lot that drives me crazy, both for rational and irrational reasons. That term is “toxic.” It seems especially popular with Christians on the Left1 for describing things they dislike on the Right. Traditional sexuality is toxic. The concept of hell is toxic.[…]