This past year, toxic Christian leaders have finally come around to viewing deconstruction as a very serious threat to their power. (And it is.) They’ve been responding to that threat in the only way they know: with ‘Christian love,’ which as usual looks like cruelty, false accusations, and endless hateful screeching.
I often mis-say specific words. I know the word I want and I’m thinking of the right thing at the time, but the wrong word consistently pops out. It turns out there’s a term for this situation: semantic paraphasia. Today, Lord Snow Presides over our brains — and the stuff we literally can’t help sometimes.
No way, no how did Burnett Robinson come by his opinion recently. No way, no how did he get any significant pushback for his views from anyone he counted as important — until now, at least. Instead, he was telling us exactly who he was, and exactly who he’s been for a long time. But he also told us a lot of other important stuff.
It wasn’t a boycott. It was an actual walkout. And almost all of the students at this surprisingly-large Catholic school participated.
Evangelical leaders’ attention was always fated to shift from Millennials to Gen Z. Millennials utterly failed to secure a turnaround in the tribe’s fortunes. So now those leaders look to Gen Z to save their bacon.
In a lot of ways, this research really asks about how American Christians engage with the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil asks how suffering can possibly exist in a world governed by an all-powerful, all-good, and all-loving god. It shouldn’t exist at all, and yet here we are, in a world full of suffering.
Interestingly, absolutely nobody has offered a supernatural explanation for this disappearance. And of course nobody has. This is a 100-ton recycling plant we’re talking about, not lost keys or a parking spot or a missed connection on the subway. Nobody’s going to blame this one on demons or pixies or malevolent Neolithic Bell-Beaker ghosts. Nobody thinks wizards cast a spell to shift a recycling plant into the astral plane.
The natural inclinations of awful people tend to be awful. And such people can make an innocent visit to a neighborhood church into a horror story those guests will remember for years.
It’s nice that he accepts the science around climate change — and about humans having brought our planet to the brink of utter ecological disaster. That’s definitely nice to see from a Christian. But he’s trying to use that potential future as a way to terrorize people into accepting his religious claims.
Solid information can only be good to have. If we can’t identify and describe something that’s happening, we’ll have very little chance of predicting outcomes from it or influencing it. That’s why I found Ryan Burge’s recent post on Religion News kinda frustrating.