This brouhaha is really important for US religion history and New Testament studies and theology imo

One fascinating thing about biblical inerrancy is that there was a huge battle about it between theological liberals and conservatives from 1880-1930, then conservatives started fighting moderates about it in the LCMS, SBC, and at evangelical institutions.

At the Reflecting "Pool," where a Freemason is arguing with Jehovah's Witnesses about medical ethics and a Muslim guy is praying. America...

This is pretty much out of the pages of Frank Peretti's fiction. The development of these ideas over the last century or so is complex (am covering a bit of it in my book), but Peretti was the key popularizer beginning in the 80s. "Demonic" often mapped onto cultural/political enemies for him.

Bus FOMO is real

They turned my city's Masonic Temple into condos called The Temple Lofts, and I'm not superstitious, but

It's always mind-blowing that the main message so many people derive from the accounts we have of the life and teachings of Jesus is "I should refuse to use people's pronouns."

Elon Musk is 6 years away from sending Iranian nuclear weapons that are 6 months away from Mars.

update:

"Christofascism "knows the cross only as a magical symbol of what Jesus has done for us, not as a sign of the poor man who was tortured to death as a political criminal... [it is] a betrayal of the disappointed, a miracle weapon in the service of the mighty." — Dorothee Sölle

Me, thinking about my book draft when I haven't looked at it in a month: It's probably terrible, needs so much work Me, re-reading parts of the manuscript: Damn, this is a real page-turner, who wrote this

Yeah, this is the thing. LLMs can be very good at a kind of "middle-range" set of tasks that don't require much intellectual creativity or that aren't very embodied, emotional, or physical. A lot of (most?) work is fully in that latter category--working with people and physical things.

What

This is so good! Denial of history and historical theological learning is part of the patrimony of Protestantism. The rhetoric of return to primitive Christianity is powerful and has had its moments where it needed to be said and used. But it is a rhetoric, not a viable theology.

Tried to diagnose the theological mistake underlying biblicist forms of Christian nationalism. I think we often hear a lot about the symptoms and less about the underlying theological assumptions that drive something like "Rededicate250." open.substack.com/pub/stephenw...

Whatever you think about the signs, it's pretty odd to act like the statements they make *contradict* the Nicene Creed.

Bonus content: the one place I've ever directly engaged with DBH's book. zeal.kings.edu/zeal/article...

I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but it's kind of mind-blowing that we're on the verge of full fascism and an opposition plan starts with "there's too much screentime for kids these days."

Imagine that cities in liberal states rationed food while claiming to be welcoming and inclusive (all in the name of keeping greedy food producers from profiting). Meanwhile, millions of hungry people fled to conservative states, shifting political power to those states.

The metro areas adding a higher percentage of new housing units are the ones that will have more affordable housing units and gain political influence for their states. Most of the larger cities in blue states are losing by both measures.

YES. We must teach people (i.e., JOURNALISTS) to stop saying #AI w/o distinguishing between #LLMs -- the source of endless harms like massive IP theft, academic cheating, psychosis, lies, environmental damage -- and purpose-built #ML systems, which advance science, medicine, and engineering.

Seems there is some consensus that theology will need to respond to issues like nationalism, fascism, climate change, etc, not only because they are pressing issues, but also because theology is implicated with them.

I think it barely needs to be said that the alternative to good theology isn't no theology. It's theology done by grifters and authoritarians who appeal to people's worst impulses of hatred and ignorance.

Aside from Brooks's particular ramblings, the truth is that every major values-based institutional structure in the US either has eroded or is in the process of doing so: labor unions, higher ed, religious denominations, public education.

What do we want from theology in the next 10 years?

Compare Alito's description of Trump's racist statements (on the left) to Justice Kagan's anthology of Trump's racist statements (on the right). These are passages from this morning's opinions in Mullin v. Doe.

I've become increasingly concerned about our failure to address the housing crisis in desirable urban areas because it is supercharging fascism on so many levels and so many people who should know better are complacent about it.

The article shows that Miller seems to think that "mental illness" is the cause of homelessness (rather than the fact that almost every municipality highly regulates if not bans new housing) and also doesn't understand any distinction between disability and mental illness.

Housing is not an immigration problem, it's a failure to build sufficient homes problem, something which will not be fixed by choking off the supply of needed labor.

Agreed. The biggest impact of NAR ideas comes through triumphant motifs in music from places like Bethel that then gets played on KLOVE or in congregations. It's a subtle reshaping than then leads to, say, AG churches that end up talking about the Kingdom of God but not the rapture.

There's probably only a few per decade. In Systematics most recently probaly Sonderegger. Across disciplines has there been a recent match for Jennings' The Christian Imagination?

The book everyone should be reading is Ziegler’s new devil book.

I also tried to think of what I would add to your list. Jennings' Christian Imagination (2010) Tanner's Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (2019) Hector's Christianity as a Way of Life (2023)

Am I wrong that there just aren't "big books" (ones that everyone is reading, that influence conversations across the discipline) in theology these days? Maybe that's fine, but it's different. The closest I can think of are After Method (Reichel, 2023) and The Theological Imagination (Wolfe, 2024).

I wrote up a piece on the three versions of Jesus that shape public Christianity in the US today. The most important distinction here, I think, is between the personal Lord and Savior of evangelical individualism and the cultural superhero/mascot. stephenwaldron.substack.com/p/prophet-co...

I pointed out this paradox 11 years ago! politicaltheology.com/the-paradoxe...

The fight fracturing Trump's coalition isn't really about Iran policy. It's about 2000 yrs of Christian ambivalence toward Jews. Christian Zionism & Christian antisemitism aren't opposites. They're entangled theological fixations. My latest: matthewdtaylor.substack.com/p/how-christ...

"We think that building housing is part of the solution. We think net zero is part of the solution. We think a car-light development is part of the solution. We think building a sense of place and community is part of the solution." -- leader of the Squamish nation www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/o...

I wrote up a piece on the three versions of Jesus that shape public Christianity in the US today. The most important distinction here, I think, is between the personal Lord and Savior of evangelical individualism and the cultural superhero/mascot. stephenwaldron.substack.com/p/prophet-co...

This is the thing about left NIMBYism. It makes the non-existent "perfect" the enemy of the good we could actually have. Sen̓áḵw is an incredible project, and I wish it could happen in every major North American city: literal land back and legalizing desperately needed housing at the same time.

Finding various lefty people in the humanities kinda annoying but not thinking it is worth burning down every free institution in the west to prevent such people emerging nor allying with the fascists in the process of doing as much? This is a superpower.

I think that the humanities and social sciences are sometimes inappropriately politicized in ways that are self-undermining, but any report that is written by an almost all-white committee and that tries to tell philosophers what view of "truth" to take is wildly off-course.

Chat with the real Augustine at civitas permixtAI

People have to accept this is him saying the n word

Beyond his small-minded racism, the fascinating thing about Joe Rigney's statement here is the way he invokes "Jesus" as a cultural mascot without any consideration of Jesus as ethical prophet and teacher.

it is genuinely insane that a couple weeks ago in his trans piece toby wrote "they may come for the sikhs next," people told him he was being hysterial, and then immediately after they started coming for the sikhs

Kinda disappointing piece here, imo. The footnote saying how compelling Hazony's pro-nationalism argument is gives away how superficial the reasoning is, imo. Then there's a flimsy critique of @philipchristman.bsky.social on climate refugees. triptychjournal.com/article.html...

Lots of reasons for this, but one is that it's not a winnable fight. The left has nothing to gain from debates about what a "real man" is like. The whole "conversation" concedes to a right-wing framing while convincing no one who is in the middle.

The idea that there is a distinct "way to be a man" that is (at least implicitly) defined by being different from a specific "way that women are" is inherently reactionary, imo, and will get us nowhere good.

Yeah, I've gotta admit I don't really see any way to promote supposed gender-specific virtues without reinforcing patriarchy. That's what it always ends up being, in one way or another.