Josh Duggar: Excusing the inexcusable

The scandal around Josh Duggar has had a few days to ferment. News sites that previously hadn’t even breathed a word about the scandal are now tiptoeing into the waters with super-carefully-worded pieces about what he did, now that it’s painfully obvious that Christians as a group are talking about it. Mainly, unfortunately, they’re largely defending it.

Josh Duggar and the Anatomy of a Not-Pology.

By now you’ve likely heard about the scandal rocking the right-wing conservative Christ-o-sphere: Josh Duggar, one of the older sons of the fundagelical reality-TV Duggar family, has confessed publicly to being a child molester. Worst of all, it seems clear that at least some of his victims were his own young sisters. The story gets more and more shocking with every single new detail that emerges about it. Just when I think it’s gotten as bad as it can get, I see something else. So tonight we’re going to talk about it.

The Declines of Empires.

Anything that takes effort to build and create can fall apart if it doesn’t get the resources it needs. Online spaces, too, can die; so can religions. The reason it’s so hard to recover from fading glory is because at that point, two things are working against the place, game, or group in question.