It's fascinating when ideology keeps people from seeing what is coming next. On October 7, a friend told me to read their Israeli relative's account of what had happened for "another perspective," and I immediately knew it would be hell for Gazans in the coming months, but they had no clue.

AOC: “I understand that VP Vance believes shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, & I do not — That is a fundamental difference between VP Vance & I — I do not believe the American people should be assassinated in the street”

When I post things related to religion/theology with no incendiary political angle, there's typically no real response on here. When there's a political connection? Tons of reposts/replies show up. The incentives on here are heavily tilted in favor of politics posting, unfortunately.

Also, this has almost nothing to do with "housing policy." There are relatively empty areas around, e.g., Erie, Pennsylvania or New London, Connecticut because most people want/need to live in or very close to large population centers with jobs, not in remote deserts or mountain ranges.

"Baptized in the Holy Spirit" is a distinctively Pentecostal/charismatic concept, but "revival and reformation" is even more particular to NAR theology: "Revival" includes conversions and shifts within the church; "reformation" is the result of "NAR" people taking political dominion over society.

Like the OP says, it’s just so sad to me. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the Word made flesh. He proclaimed an upside down kingdom and died on a cross to shatter the chains of death and open a gate to everlasting life. These guys want to trade *that* for gender roles?!

Taps the sign bsky.app/profile/godw...

It's incredibly sad how many (most?) conservative Christians have reduced "Christianity" to mean "patriarchal gender roles." That reduction is the subtext for almost every claim now about how "the culture" needs to be resisted or restored.

"A growing trend has taken over the Pittsburgh airwaves, one that signals a telling shift away from rock blocks and morning DJs into spiritual and political ideology." www.pghcitypaper.com/arts-enterta...

Pittsburgh isn't an outlier - CCM sounds are taking over radio waves across the country. More and more radio stations trade local music for conservative evangelical theologies and political ideologies: www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

A German friend gave me a new reprint of some of Dorothee Soelle's (1929-2003) poems. During my years in Germany, Dorothee became a personal friend, and it's wonderful to have these poems--like picking up on a conversation years later. Here's the first poem (English translation in the Alt text).

"It is for us to see the Kingdom of God as always coming, always pressing in on the present, always big with possibility, and always inviting immediate action. We walk by faith." - Rauschenbusch

"When we submit to God, we submit to the supremacy of the common good. Salvation is the voluntary socializing of the soul." - Rauschenbusch

Harold Lindsell, explaning to Wagner exactly what kind of asshole he (Lindsell) was.

From a 1979 letter Peter Wagner wrote to Ron Sider admonishing him to be sensitive about the need to minister to the wealthy.

It's really fantastic how I'm searching for a way to edit the file name of a PDF, but all I'm seeing are ways to use "CoPilot" or something to do AI things I have no interest in doing.

One big Holocaust education issue in the US is that people don't know the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp (though the two were often linked), so they assume that people referring to a "concentration camp" are being unfairly hyperbolic in a case like this.

I think it's possible that he wouldn't have said this and his audience wouldn't have approved so strongly without the academic/journalistic construction of "Christian nationalism." (For one thing, this is not how US Catholics have traditionally approached things.)

Here we go, friends. www.commonwealmagazine.org/carpenter-an...

I'm leaning toward supporting Biss, who has experience and has taken courageous positions on both immigration and housing (both of which have entailed real risks).

In other words: it came to be believed that the most shameful thing is to be cringe, that moral sincerity is cringe, and thus that the only one who is safe from being cringe is the shameless edgelord, which is incredibly cringe. The inevitable self-defeat of the logic of the online.

One of the weirdest and most widespread NIMBY myths is that housing is expensive because "Blackrock" or "Blackstone" bought single family homes to rent them out, but (erroneous facts aside) you don't see anyone blaming the cost of cars on Hertz buying them to rent them out.

The spread of the idea that the ultimate sin wasn't cruelty or selfishness but rather "virtue signaling" has horribly corroded public morality over the last decade. A sizable bloc of the public now openly believes that supporting violent domination is preferable to advocating traditional virtues.

vague, un-falsifiable, and asymmetric motion. But the real issue is the lack of Hegelian representation to argue that the state is the march of God in history.

I personally believe in affirmative action. I especially believe that public universities should have faculty that local students from marginalized communities can see themselves in. But we can have “diversity the field” conversations and should but WHAT FIELD THERE ARE NO JOBS!

Best of all possible zoos

Remembering canvassing for Harris/Walz and the organizer handing out assignments talked about how we just need to "spread joy," which was so wildly inadequate to the moment. I'm sure I made a face.

Now that I've signed a contract, here's a post about my forthcoming book ("The Head and Not the Tail: The Political Theology of the New Apostolic Reformation"), including some brief chapter descriptions: open.substack.com/pub/stephenw...

Altemeyer’s observation: the one survey question with the strongest power to separate right-wing authoritarians from others was not a political question at all but a question about child-rearing: What is more important, to raise children who are curious or obedient? RWAs choose obedient.

Seeing academic job market discourse, uh oh... imo, there are two sources of ignorant commentary on the issue: 1) people who have never been on the academic job market and 2) people who were extremely lucky on the academic job market.

There's a depressingly closed-minded short-termism and incuriosity in Vought's idea that the only necessary climate research is about "weather." It's what Mark Noll meant about there being "no evangelical mind," and it just might kill a whole lot of human beings, not to mention other species.

Apparently we're doing a national "no room in the inn."

"As religious leaders began to speak more openly about the goodness of sterilization and euthanasia, lay people responded in kind." www.liberalcurrents.com/the-devils-b...

NIMBYism is sometimes seen as an attack on the rights of property owners, but it is more fundamentally an attack on the right of anyone to live where they wish, without begging for permission from persnickety busybodies.

since illinois is joining oregon with "right to die" legislation, here is your reminder that the top reported reasons in oregon for requesting assisted suicide are "loss of autonomy" and "difficulty engaging in enjoyable activities," so: being disabled

There are also preferred victims in the NIMBY scarcity mindset. Everyone has a specific group or two in mind that deserves some of the limited available housing. Sometimes they are ultraspecific and sometimes they overlap with those others see as villains.

this is grim and horrible news for the US

I recently saw an insightful comment that the key to addressing the housing crisis is starting from a standpoint of abundance (there should be more) rather than scarcity, which means excluding someone (immigrants, refugees, gentrifiers, non-locals, students, tech workers, poor people, etc.).

It's weird how MAGA claims to love the history and culture of the US, but when you look for specifics they just have quasi-Nazi nostalgia posters featuring imagined white families and AI chatbots of George Washington. (Not weird given that they don't care about history or culture, but still.)

This is the employment corollary to the NIMBY myth that developers or landlords make money by overpricing apartments or condos and keeping them empty. Markets aren't perfectly rational, but people who own capital or assets generally do want to make money and not lose it.

"Left NIMBYism doesn't exist." Just look at the comments on any Facebook post about new residential construction in a left-leaning area, and you'll see all the tropes about "developer profits," "luxury apartments," and "not really affordable."

The independent charismatic circles where ethnically diverse Christianity is growing most quickly are mostly invisible to cultural elites due to a combination of racial segregation, educational polarization, and liberal stereotypes about "POC."

Not important for amy reason, but at some point in college I met a couple of brothers named Knechtle. One of them was Stuart.

I think "woke" has a certain usefulness in casually describing phenomena like the Oberlin cafeteria situation, but the more seriously someone uses it pejoratively (e.g., describing people as "wokes") the more clearly the speaker is an unserious partisan.

"As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free," goes harder than any Civil War song has any right to go.

One of the most disturbing things about the U.S. government getting themselves into the anti-vaccine game is that it is a time-release poison pill. It will take a few years before the worst of the harm is visible to enough people that they will truly understand what has been done to them.

This is why Zionism, which interprets Jewish history through a tragic lens, is so instinctively appealing to Christians.

The essential difference between the Christian Old Testament and the Jewish Tanach is that the former is a tragedy and the latter a comedy.

There needs to be a real public left-liberal campaign for One Billion US Americans, even if the guy who coined the idea has retreated into irrelevance.

I think the comparison to public perception of crime is helpful here. It can be tempting to do a left-populist "everything is worse/less affordable than it ever has been" shtick, but accepting that falsehood (when exactly were the better times if it is so bad now?) plays into reactionary sentiment.