Group items tagged

Here’s how it generally went down, according to Stephen Nissenbaum in his book “The Battle for Christmas.” On Christmas Day, the lower classes would dress up in strange costumes to “invert” their roles: Men would dress up as women, young boys as bishops, and the lowliest peasant or the town drunk might be declared the “Lord of Misrule.”

They would gather into a mob and go around to the houses and estates of the well-to-do, making a racket, singing bawdy songs and demanding entry. Amazingly, most of the time they were let in and given alcohol, food and even money. There was gambling and promiscuity (often leading to marriages at the end of the misrule). Once the mob was satisfied, it would move on to the next rich person’s estate.

If it seems surprising that rich people would willingly let a drunken mob in their homes and get them even drunker, that’s because the alternative was worse. If a homeowner tried to block entry, the mob would break in, destroy property, assault the homeowner, frighten his wife and children, and then take the food and drink anyway.

President Donald Trump defied logic at his Michigan rally Friday, claiming that physicians “get more money” when they falsely inflate the number of COVID-19 deaths.

Trump falsely insisted to his Michigan crowd that reports of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. inflate the actual toll because doctors, for some reason, collect more money from coronavirus fatalities

“You know, in Germany, if you have a bad heart and you’re ready to die, or if you have cancer and you’re going to be dying soon, and you catch COVID ... we mark it down to COVID. Our doctors get more money if somebody dies of COVID,” Trump said.

"Holding a half-million-person rally in the midst of a pandemic is emblematic of a nation as a whole that maybe isn’t taking [the novel coronavirus] as seriously as we should.”

It’s not just that Sturgis went on after the pandemic sidelined most everything else. It also drew people from across the country, all of them converging on one region, packing the small city’s Main Street and the bars and restaurants along it.

And in contrast with participants in the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, many Sturgis attendees spent time clustered indoors at bars, restaurants and tattoo parlors, where experts say the virus is most likely to spread, especially among those without masks.

It didn't take long for Neff to find the hashtag's meaning. "Where We Go One We Go All" is one of several mottoes of QAnon, a collective of online conspiracists.

The pastor and his wife, who live in Arcola, Mississippi, began watching the vast collection of QAnon videos posted online by "researchers" who decipher the cryptic messages of "Q," an anonymous online persona who claims to have access to classified military and intelligence operations.

Since its inception in 2017 QAnon has quickly metastasized, infiltrating American politics, internet culture and now -- religion.

The West, according to an account beloved by Catholics, rose out of a providential encounter between reason and revelation in antiquity. Though occasioned by conquest, the encounter yielded an authentic synthesis: between a Greek rationality in search of the deepest origin of reality and a Jewish God professed to be just that, the very ground of being (cf. Ex 3:14). Later, that same God identified himself even more starkly and intimately with reason (cf. Jn 1:1).

Tragically, the story goes on, this synthesis eventually lost its supremacy in the West, owing foremost to opponents inside the Church determined to distill a “purer” faith, unmottled by “worldly” philosophy. The result was a stingy account of reason that excluded things divine and paved the way for a narrowly scientistic rationality

Today, we are the victims of this dis-integration, a process of Christian de-Hellenization centuries in the making.

. In the 1970s, secular Americans (often called the Nones) made up just 5 percent of the population; now, that number has climbed to at least 30 percent. The data suggest that religious groups must be suffering tremendous losses as the Nones continue to increase in size and influence each year.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, the number of white Americans who started identifying as evangelical actually grew.

What is drawing more people to embrace the evangelical label on surveys is more likely that evangelicalism has been bound to the Republican Party. Instead of theological affinity for Jesus Christ, millions of Americans are being drawn to the evangelical label because of its association with the G.O.P.

In the mid 20th century conservatives were at war with people of color. Poor Whites were let into the conservative tent to help exclude and attack non-Caucasians. 

In the late 20th century and now conservatives will accept Blacks, Jews, Latinos, or anyone who hates liberals. The way "liberal" is understood is not the individual freedoms types but anyone who supports civil rights, human rights, animal rights, social welfare programs, the environment, or any form of inclusive rights-based and rule of law beliefs based on generosity and compassion. Conservatives have never followed the Prince of Peace but some form of Machine Gun Jesus. 

The Clash of Civilizations is not between Islam and Christianity (Trump's embrace of Saudi Arabia shows this) but between selfish, greedy, brutal authoritarians and conscientious, generous, fair, and compassionate liberals. Hatred versus kindness is the eternal struggle. 

A Catholic bishop who was accused of repeatedly raping a nun in southern India over a two-year period was acquitted on Friday, bringing an end for now to what appeared to be the country’s first case of its kind.

“Praise the Lord,” he said after the verdict in the city of Kottayam in Kerala State.

The case, believed to be the first in India in which a bishop was charged with raping a nun, highlighted deep divisions within the Catholic Church in the country. The church was slow to react to the nun’s accusations against Bishop Mulakkal, and it did so only after five of her fellow nuns protested publicly in support of her.

Explore

The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.

What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jew

Some historians and psychologists have marveled at how many of the most significant figures in history lost a parent at an early age, either to death or abandonment — from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. These are what one psychologist termed “eminent orphans.”

It’s easy to put Elon Musk into that category

In the midst of that bleak childhood, Musk dived into science fiction, computer games and comics, and in some sense never left. In that world, Musk seems to have been gripped by a story just as fervently as a religious person is gripped by a holy book.

Haley asks, “Dr. King, would you care to comment upon the articulate former Black Muslim, Malcolm X?”King responds: “I have met Malcolm X, but circumstances didn’t enable me to talk with him for more than a minute. I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views, as I understand them. He is very articulate, as you say. I don’t want to seem to sound as if I feel so self-righteous, or absolutist, that I think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of the answer. But I know that I have so often felt that I wished that he would talk less of violence, because I don’t think that violence can solve our problem. And in his litany of expressing the despair of the Negro, without offering a positive, creative approach, I think that he falls into a rut sometimes.”

That is not how King’s response appeared in the published interview. While the top part is nearly identical with the transcript, it ended in Playboy like this: “And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.”

What Haley appears to have done amounts to “journalistic malpractice,” Eig said.

If you want to construct a Christian ethic for immigration restrictionism, you can do it. It’ll be twisty and tortured. It probably won’t be terribly convincing, by the lights of Christianity. But it’s doable. It would go something like this:

Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves and to welcome the stranger—actually, to put them at the head of the table.But we can’t help everyone, everywhere. There will always be evil in the world. The poor will always be with us. Subsidiarity suggests that we focus our efforts closest to home, where we can touch people.So we should devote our resources to caring for the needy in our communities first.

Allowing everyone who wants to come to America to come would overwhelm the country and hurt everyone in the end.So we try to care for our neighbors close to home and send aid to care for our neighbors abroad where they are.And hopefully, in the fullness of time, we can make their lives abroad safe and fulfilling enough that they don’t need to leave their homes.

In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey unpacked lipstick, an iPhone and something else from her purse in one campaign advertisement — “a little Smith & Wesson .38,” she said. A Republican candidate for governor in Georgia declared in a different spot, “I believe in Jesus, guns and babies.”

As the nation reels from a massacre at a Texas elementary school in which a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, a review of Republican and Democratic advertising during the first months of 2022 highlights the giant cultural chasm over guns in America. As both parties have navigated their respective primary seasons, Republicans have been far more likely to use messaging about guns to galvanize their base in the midterms than Democrats — who are largely in agreement on the issue of combating gun violence, but have seen one legislative effort after another collapse.

But more than 100 television ads from Republican candidates and supportive groups have used guns as talking points or visual motifs this year. Guns are shown being fired or brandished, or are discussed but not displayed as candidates praise the Second Amendment, vow to block gun-control legislation or simply identify themselves as “pro-gun.”

When Pence became the focal point of the mob’s rage, it crystalized a religious conflict between two competing visions of religion in politics. The mob’s focus was on power, and through power it intended to “save America” from Joe Biden and the Democrats. Trump—and the riot—were a means to an end, and the “strength” they sought was the strength to disrupt the government and defeat their hated enemies.

Pence’s focus, by contrast, was on justice—upholding the rule of law—and the courage he sought was the courage to ignore the howls of the mob and defy the demands of a deranged president to preserve his office.

upholding the rule of law—and the courage he sought was the courage to ignore the howls of the mob and defy the demands of a deranged president to preserve his office

So why the long face? You’re not the only one to ask that question. It’s been on the minds of experts for a long time, and more than a few Google searches are dedicated to the subject. If those sullen stares hid something, they took their secrets to the grave. 

But sometimes things don’t stay buried. Historians have unearthed several clues that could provide an answer. And as you might expect from the peculiar attitudes of centuries past, they’re not all mundane. The topic of old photographs strays from the unusual to the disturbing. So grab your shovel, because we’re going to dig into the past.

“selfie” to its word of the year in 2013. Well, while self portraits weren’t as common in older centuries, they did actually exist. 

If I could distill the anger about that essay down to a single sentence (besides simply, “Shut up!”) it would be this: “You talk about the problems in Christian conservatism too much. Talk about the Left more.” 

And I get it. I really do. In a deeply divided nation where millions of people have convinced themselves that the church is under unprecedented siege, you want Christians who possess a public platform to “defend the church.” There is a deep and profound human desire for advocacy.

Yet that’s not remotely the model of biblical discourse, especially of how believers talk to each other.

Can anyone teach you how to think? Aren’t we all thinking all the time; isn’t the proof of our existence found in our think-think-thinking, one banal thought at a time?

The truth of the matter is that no one can teach you how to think; but what they can do is teach you how to think for yourself.

my father would say—gently, because there was zero need to say it any other way: “And what is the best argument of the other side?”