Many years ago, more than half a lifetime by now, I took my first steps into gamer girl territory. Except I didn’t really see it as being a gamer girl. To me, I was simply a gamer, full stop. Now Read more
American hardliners in Catholic leadership are dragging their religion closer and closer to schism. They absolutely despise Pope Francis, and lately they’ve been ramping up their defiance of him. The hardliners’ defiance hit a fever pitch last month at a Read more
In Chapter 8 of Before You Lose Your Faith, contributor Jay Kim continues the book’s fine tradition of trying to set the rules of engagement for evangelical doubters. This time around, deconstructors are not allowed to use ‘hammers’ to dismantle their beliefs. Now, they’re supposed to use only ‘precise tools.’ And what are those tools? Oh, just the same ol’ emotional manipulation, dishonest reframing, and apologetics bullshit that probably got those people doubting in the first place.
After years of hearing evangelicals declare that their political opponents are, in fact, evil, I got a kick out of seeing Samuel James condemn that exact mindset as the result of improper Jesus-ing
Nowadays, these games studiously court players who might only have a few minutes a day or a couple of days a week that they can spend ingame.
When an abusive evangelical pastor, Christian Watts, tried to downplay his grooming of a teenager decades earlier, he described his predation as ‘my past sin.’ That’s a time-honored tactic for people caught in his exact circumstances. Let’s take a closer look at this tactic to see why it works so well in evangelical culture.
This time around, evangelical leaders want Gen Z evangelicals to do a lot of friendship evangelism. But they also want to train older evangelists in how to better bamboozle young adults.
In a lot of ways, this chapter really exemplifies evangelicals’ inability to engage meaningfully with the dealbreaking flaws in their flavor of Christianity—like the Bible’s amazing ability to twist and contort to fully support any opinion that any Christian could ever possibly have.
Sure, it’s gallows humor. But maybe sometimes we need a good laugh when things are on fire all around us.
To save his job, Christian Watts clung hard to a time-tested, long-honored evangelical get-out-of-scandal-free card: calling upon Christianese to escape the writing on his wall.