People should read this.

Feels very Presbyterian. Let's have a committee to study whether we should have a committee to organize a task force to study the possibility of a working group to study whether or not a motion should be submitted to Session to discuss the possibility of a committee to study...

The fascists want to talk about how to do Christian nationalism “after Trump.” A multi-day symposium for terminally online right-wingers in Dallas will surely solve all the problems in evangelicalism!

Four books that you must read.

Liturgical Presbyterianism is the completion of the system of German idealism. I will not elaborate further.

I’m not even a Marxist (methodologically), but I’m proud to stand behind the rigorous and incredibly important tradition of Western Marxism. Gabriel Rockhill, as some keen observers have noted, is a conspiracy theorist and not to be taken seriously.

I am fairly certain the $30 million in question here was USAID money that was obligated to GHF as one of the last actions of many USAID staff before departing the Agency or transferring to State. I have a little more info below, all from former colleagues who saw it happen...

The most significant debate in the American political unconscious.

it seems really transparently obvious that Bezos is doing "the common people shouldn't have to pay taxes" slopulism to try and head off any kind of reckoning with how billionaires must be utterly destroyed as existential threats to a free and democratic society, right?

“I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.“ – Michel Foucault

Feeling very Presbyterian (just attended Session).

If your byline sits atop a think-piece this morning about how Donald Trump is still a powerful political monolith because he can get GOP voters in deep red districts to heed his endorsement in primary contests, you need to go find an actual journalist and let him use you to wipe his ass clean.

Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges, two police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 insurrection, are suing to block Trump’s $1.8 billion payout to himself and his fellow insurrectionists. The lawsuit calls Trump’s fund “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century.”

If evangelicals actually knew who Bonhoeffer was and what he believed theologically, they would hesitate to endorse him and appropriate his legacy like the charlatan Eric Metaxas has done.

Wish our lives could quit revolving around this sonofabitch.

I want to see this “industrial proletariat” so bad - this mythical aggrieved white coal miner who would earnestly vote for a Democrat if only he were wooed by the DNC. Jacobin-adjacent thought is really sloppy and tiresome.

mfw people haplessly search for the Ursprung instead of doing a critical history of the present

No one is going to teach you compassion for yourself; you have to learn it by practicing it earnestly every day.

الَّذِينَ إِذَا أَصَابَتْهُم مُّصِيبَةٌ قَالُوا إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ

Your God-concept should not be a source of psychological terrorism. God is not a policeman.

I only use the King James version of the Denny’s menu

BREAKING: A prosecutor announced charges against an ICE officer in the nonfatal shooting of a Venezuelan man during the crackdown in Minnesota.

Bonhoeffer would have plotted to sabotage “Rededicate 250.” Eric Metaxas is a fascist scoundrel. If there is any justice in the world, and it seems like there may not be, everyone who attended this event would be excommunicated; a moot wish because evangelicals don’t believe in accountability.

I think we’re probably much more screwed than we realize…

Very interesting post.

I have just today discovered Scottish novelist Muriel Spark (1918–2006). Came across one of her biographies at a bookstore. I didn’t buy the bio, but I did get “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961) and “The Driver’s Seat” (1970). I also want to read her autobiography, “Curriculum Vitae” (1992).

The problem with this is that annoying atheists are still around, they're too busy saying we need deport all Muslims and nuke the Middle East to care about Republicans

Just bought my copy!

We have to smash the suffocating instinct to pretend that this is all normal. Nothing here is normal. You are living through the most open, shameless corruption of government in American history.

Jill Lepore in @newyorker.com : Something big is happening, something fascinating: we can talk to machines. “We do not have language yet for this twist in our plot” —Leif Weatherby (Language Machines) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Prayers ascending for all affected by this senseless violence at the San Diego Islamic Center. May God protect them and the whole Muslim community in Southern California.

To remember.

It bears repeating that interpreting the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, in a cinematic, thoughtlessly “literal” way is very stupid and also a product of more recent hermeneutic trends. The epistemology surrounding the text’s composition is not one we share in any meaningful sense.

There’s nothing wrong with attaching oneself to a particular intellectual genealogy. In many respects, doing so is a precondition for saying something original and interesting. Asking counterfactual questions (what *would* this theorist have said had they been looking at my question?) is good.

"The Word of God as it is spoken to man thus constitutes his knowledge of himself as such a free subject of his life. Otherwise what would be the sense of God speaking to him and not simply disposing of him?" – Barth, CD III/4, 330

New book review published advance access by @jich.bsky.social Christopher Hill reviews "Contaminated Country: Nuclear colonialism and Aboriginal resistance in Australia" by Jessica Urwin www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

New book review published advance access by @jich.bsky.social @kittmann.bsky.social reviews "Britain and Oman, c.1945-1980 The Silent Relationship" by Tancred Bradshaw www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I’m not in a position to give any writing advice, but this is more of an “applied observation.” Look at artists who have periods or phases in their work. Picasso’s Blue Period, for example. We miss the point if we see these as transparent periodizations that artists worked…

If your goal is convincing someone of something, you must begin with sincere epistemic humility verging on self-effacement. Speaking collaboratively and with equanimity has been the only way I know to make even a small degree of progress with people who believe terrible things.

My favorite visual artists: – J. M. W. Turner – Vilhelm Hammershøi – Emil Nolde – Anna-Eva Bergman – Agnes Martin – Vija Celmins

One of my favorite memories is visiting the exhibition of Anna-Eva Bergman’s art at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in 2023.

I pray that the Spirit would be present where she is needed, that she would be with those who labor in treatment centers, that she would hold the dying in their fear, that she would comfort the families who must watch from outside isolation wards, and that she would bring abundant healing quickly.

I think we've all had the experience of tracking down a citation in a book to include in your own writing & lo & behold, the author missed something or misinterpreted the data, etc. When that happens, cool new scholarship emerges. Historiography happens. That is a different than hallucinated sources

"What the state needs, within the framework of a particular law of Church and state, is a free Church, which as such can remind it of its own limits and calling, thus warning it against falling either into anarchy on the one hand or tyranny on the other." – Barth, CD, IV/2, 689

Corporate sponsors of Trump’s Christian nationalist prayer rally today Rededicate 250 include Mastercard and United Airlines

Y a de quoi réfléchir.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There is no Father angry with the Son who placates him in death. The triune God acts in self-consistent unity, and the suffering of the Son is God’s own suffering in God’s identity with the human Jesus. The cross constitutes who God is and the death of Jesus Christ is not transactional.

I refuse to believe that THAT MANY people care so much about the racial identity of the actors playing mythological figures that they're willing to spend days posting about it rather than watching the playoffs with their friends, baking cookies, or reading comic books. Nothing is real anymore.