Bears Hawks Sox Bulls

I am decreasingly interested in theology that reduces Christianity to aesthetic preference in service of some generic inner experience of divine love, oneness, etc. Christianity has an aesthetic dimension, but if it’s only that then I still need a fundamental value system to interpret my experience.

You brood of vipers! How can you speak good things when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person brings good things out of a good treasure, and the evil person brings evil things out of an evil treasure. — Matt 12:34-35

Why was I not dismayed? Because I do not fear any of the terrors that can happen in this life. What are those terrors? Death? It is not a terror, for by it we are speedily ushered into the undisturbed harbor of Heaven.

Went and saw Brahms’ 4th symphony today. @poetinbabylon.bsky.social I think I feel about Brahms the same way you feel about Mahler; never quite been able to pick up what this guy is putting down.

Its priests have done violence to my teaching and have profaned my holy things; they have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean, and they have disregarded my Sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them. Ez 22:26

Also, Isaiah 6:1 has got to be one of the most beautiful opening sentences of any chapter in literature.

Within Proto-Isaiah, chapter 21 has always felt to me uniquely nightmarish, compared to the objectively more violent but more straightforward oracles such as chapter 13. I find myself returning to it often in my reading.

Yes it does, because fascist voters are shrieking, shrill men who seek to dominate the people in their own lives. I am begging people to understand that the reason people vote for evil is because they are evil. Now, being evil doesn’t mean you’re subhuman, but it does mean you need to repent.

This one is really sticking with me. My belief in religious freedom is deep, but the truth is that these deranged nationalist and non-affirming churches need to be eliminated, like it or not. I honestly think the courage that Jenna describes here will be the defining trait of 21st century theology.

type of take that would genuinely have a 5th century alexandrian bishop writing a treatise whose title starts with “Contra”

“What managerial expertise requires for its vindication is a justified conception of social science as providing a stock of law-like generalizations with strong predictive power...the salient fact about those sciences is the absence of the discovery of any law-like generalizations whatsoever.”

Homemade burger buns 2026 edition

The last essay of 2025 was a post clarifying that liberation and tolerance might be at odds sometimes. We must have the courage to name that we have no interest in preserving nonaffirming churches/orgs beyond helping them become affirming or close well. invisiblecakesociety.com/2025/11/27/t...

Real Calvinism Has Never Been Tried

The fundamentalists’ takes on public morality have always been so funny to me because they turn around and define Christian moral standards as like “don’t have gay sex” and not as, y’know, “love your neighbor and bless those who persecute you”

The Gospel is more relevant to our modernist-worshipping society than it has been in many generations. All of our self worship, our intellectualism, our economic and military prowess, has led us to a path of destruction. All of our preaching needs an eschatological bent

“I can’t abide by the schadenfreude-laden viewpoint that anyone who ever pulled a lever for Trump deserves whatever’s coming to them as a result. The fact is that this political moment is immiserating good people.” *EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER* (thread cont.)

Spicy take: the most unrealistic part of Wake Up Dead Man is that the fundamentalist Christian nationalist church was shrinking and headcount grew after it became inclusive.

I liked watching Wake Up Dead Man a lot. It didn’t strike me as a particularly Christian movie, more like a church-themed mystery movie.

I read Origen’s Peri Pascha. There’s no shortage of people today who search the Scriptures asking: “what does God teach about this or that marginalized group?” with…varying results. But Origen’s texts remind me to ask: “what do my queer, migrant, and poor neighbors teach me about God?”

Also, why did I mention “movies” here? It’s because this essay and the God’s Not Dead movie series come from the exact same conservative cultural pathology. The people who teach this writing love those movies.

Let me do a quick thread on this, as someone who was raised in a fundamentalist religious academic environment and has many family members still very deep in this world. 1/?

#1 CS Lewis disliker opinion: Here he assumes that “standards of propriety” are always morally neutral and purely aesthetic. Of course, we know these standards are often used to enforce authoritarianism, conformity, or other forms of fascism.

Today I went to a mainline church service AND a symphony so I think based on recent data that makes me the rarest millennial in the country

the funny thing is we put exactly 1 streetcar line back and it’s been an instant sensation with two expansions and continuing record-high ridership that has made all adjacent property into prime real estate, so consumer demand has spoken quite clearly as far as I’m concerned!

“Do they not see the sun in the same way? Do they not alike sustain their being by consuming food? Is not the arrangement of their guts the same? Are not the two one dust after death? Is there not one judgment for them? a common Kingdom, and a common Gehenna?” - Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Eccl.

think I’m gonna keep talking with Jesus the old fashioned way thanks 🙏

TNS MBTL wooooo

Marxism and critical race theory actually should be taught in public school

Also Catechetical Discourse 5.10: “what is similar to the divine in all things must by all means have self-mastery and independence by nature”

tbh even if I were breathing black mold i still wouldn’t be transphobic. built different ig

Autonomy is the basis of all feminism and autonomy is anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-state. Start from there Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

Lately thinking a lot about Gregory of Nyssa’s sermon on slavery ~380 CE and man, this might be only type of theological anthropology sufficient to overcome the dehumanization of colonialism+patriarchy+capitalism the U.S. is based on.

“Maybe this headline/email/atrocity will be what pops the bubble of Trump supporters!” Truly I say to you that the only thing that will pop their bubble is three days of blindness from encountering the risen Lord on the road to Damascus.

May come as a surprise to some but no political party has ever tried to take away my balls or my inherent quality of being a man, which would be difficult and impossible respectively.

Predicting huge GDP growth in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

I find all information entertaining, so to me everything is infotainment.

Pomeranian Homesick Blues

The same dynamics whereby a purity-ring-preaching pastor gets caught cheating on his wife and/or abusing kids with near-mechanical regularity. Bad fruit doesn’t grow on a good tree!

Return to the Railroad (unironically)

This week I ran into an older, non-denominational Christian couple from the suburbs of Chicago who loved reading Josh McDowell. They said “we’re not fans of this admin to put it lightly, it doesn’t look anything like what Jesus teaches.”

Trans rights, Black lives matter, hospitality for immigrants, and food for the poor because the image and likeness of God shall nowhere be diminished, nor subordinated to another.

Refs threw a bad flag and then could’t review it? This is the NFL’s flagship game this week?

Jumping off this post for a quick rant thread regarding what I think are a group of related ideas. On social media I often see a few types of comments whenever Church Social Justice Discourse hits: 1/?

now that i'm 30 I truly understand lcd soundsystem

The Cowboys should defeat the Broncos, if you really think about it logically

mbtl is one of the most beautiful games ever

what’s the deal with the fascists taking over the LOTR aesthetic with these business names? I am not going to be happy with this

high key we need to kick this type of guy out of Christianity completely