Historian of abolition here, history tells us how we got here, to put it succinctly “John Brown was hanged for treason and Robert E. Lee was not.”

Holy crap. "Paul Within Paganism," the book I co-edited w/ Paula Fredriksen & @alexichantz.bsky.social, got a long review essay in The New Yorker! Still sifting through the disparate threads Gopnik tries to tie together. Well earned shout-outs in it to @ryancollman.bsky.social @zafulotus.bsky.social

it’s a great day for transphobes to eat shit

Ok, I just laughed so hard that it woke up one of my children…

Mel Gibson pictured with his doctor in 2004

In honor of today’s discourse: consider reading God, Slavery, and Early Christianity! Ch. 3 is esp. meaningful for showing how Paul’s language of slavery and the Holy Spirit gets read as “God the enslaver dwells within you & surveils you” www.cambridge.org/core/books/g...

Looks like my book has a publication date - Misinformation and the Aging American coming from @academic.oup.com in October: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

literally your customer base was 90% parents of young children who want a good future for their kids in which they can be free to be themselves, no matter who they are. you told those people to go fuck themselves. they won't be back

I know the USA Men's hockey team won't hear me, but whatever... -Guys, your 🥇 win was epic & awesome, just like our women's team. Stop listening to US Hockey PR and say: "I'm sorry we laughed along with the President's misogyny. We need to be better. It's always wrong to belittle and mock women."

Here @thomaszimmer.bsky.social captures a consistent feature of actually existing conservative movements: in history, almost nothing in them hits the brakes on going Far Right, violent, authoritarian b/c "the left" is always their bigger boogeyman even if their guy is building concentration camps...

Their allegiance was never to democratic principles, but to upholding (white, Christian) “civilization”. The question has always been: What if society moves away from that order? Do Conservatives accommodate – or seek to impose “civilization” against majority will?

Friends, I am hiring two scholar-advisors this year! Come join the best advising team in the country (for real). Please help me spread the news about this great opportunity! This is a permanent, non-time limited instructional staff position, and I will be happy to answer questions!

Question: if it can log into canvas & see other students’ work… isn’t that a FERPA violation? Students can do waivers for their own products. But they can’t waive FERPA protections for classmates? We’re told we have to use canvas because of data privacy requirements…

A recent NYT op-ed blamed the Trump's regime's lawless violence on 'paganism' while conjuring Christianity as the source of good values. I think this is a terrible way to think about history and gets in the way of cleaning up the messes Christians have made. My latest from @religiondispatches.org

One more time for those in the back: To the extent AI does any of the 'research' things dude 'splains.. 1) No, AI doesn't do actual research 2) AI is unreliable at them, which is why scholars have to check it 3) AI can only do a crappy job at any of this BECAUSE BIG-TECH FUCKING STOLE OUR RESEARCH!

My courses now (w/o accommodation letter) ban all devices in class, have only in-class handwritten or oral assessment, and require printed handouts of readings since university only provides e-versions of books. I often provide handouts, though it's been an enormous waste of my time to make them.

I write boring academic prose, but it too is an art that strains the brain, body, and soul to do well. Even more ‘artistic’ when it’s done on a laptop at the kitchen table with kids running around…

Whoa! Nerdiness about cycling training to explain how to be an effective academic. Yes. Dr. Muehlberger speaks to my cycling and scholarly soul here. Give it a read! We may have seen the apex of BlueSky here…

Good news alert: Just want to shout out Elana Meyers Taylor, the most decorated Black woman in the Winter Olympics, who won her sixth medal and first gold tonight, AND is also one of the only 8% of hearing parents who learn to sign for her deaf kid. Badass through and through.🥇

Editor: You’re late submitting your manuscript. Me: The Dow is over 50,000 🤷‍♂️

Elon Musk is claiming he’s risked everything to protect kids from sexual abuse mere weeks out from laughing while his AI chatbot was generating nearly 8,000 sexual abuse images per hour that overwhelmingly targeted girls and young women

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes your took in college Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Social Psychology Ancient Athens Modern Political Thought History of Education in America (This shaped me more as an educator down the road than the rest combined! May Prof Unks's memory be a blessing)

Some MAGA-sympathetic folks from my past who have kept that under wraps for a decade on social media somehow all decided to open the floodgates after Renee Good's murder. And yes, all of their arguments boil down to this...

I went to Brown University for grad school and routinely studied in the welcoming work spaces at Barus and Holley. Brown is a place full of humans who are wonderfully curious and creative, and now a mass shooting has torn through its thriving life. For shame to everyone who stirs up this violence!

Maybe next year FIFA will rename it the "Peace and War Prize" and give it to Hegseth?

Stop appearing on far-right propaganda networks. Stop posting on their trash sites. Stop sitting on panels with them. Stop being friends with them. Don't shake their hands. Don't try to meet them halfway. Don't gotta hand it to them. Ever. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

With Black Friday approaching, there will inevitably be well-intentioned talk that these deals are only possible because workers are denied a livable wage. Don't buy into this. It's not low prices vs. fair pay. It's the demand for ever-higher profits and shareholder returns that forces deprivation.

It has always been so obvious that the backlash to MeToo isn’t about whether the abuse is happening but whether people are allowed to want it to stop

My new Open Access article! For some reason it felt relevant to discuss the Bible and the LONG history of leaders telling stories about how things used to be great before moral, ethnic, urban, gender, and family corruption bigly happened. #EduSky #Election #Bible journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

So, @vox-magica.bsky.social's new book is an awesome rethinking of not just early Christianity, but how ancient Christians wrote abt Christian history & heroes by developing their own self-serving ways of talking magic, miracles, orthodoxy, and heresy Check out the publications she found helpful!

🧵[CW Sexual violence] William Yoo's book on Presbyterian history doesn't beat around the bush, but explains that most white Presbyterians in 18th-19th cent were ghoulishly immoral and tried to turn the brutalizing and rape of enslaved humans into an issue of Biblical interpretation #AwesomeWork 1/10

🧵[CW Sexual violence] William Yoo's book on Presbyterian history doesn't beat around the bush, but explains that most white Presbyterians in 18th-19th cent were ghoulishly immoral and tried to turn the brutalizing and rape of enslaved humans into an issue of Biblical interpretation #AwesomeWork 1/10

I want to begin a series of posts on scholarship in Biblical Studies & Christian history that does things right! As in, work that's not just interesting & ruthlessly truthful, but activist in disrupting the bullshit paradigms that made racism, enslaving, sexism, homophobia, etc feel ok #AwesomeWork

If you want to learn some awesome and nerdy scholarly stuff, get Dr. Patel's new book. Fellow academics, email your librarians so they can acquire it too!

Since Trump is concerned about getting to heaven, maybe he could do what Jesus told a rich dude who had similar concerns, "Sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me" (Mark 10:21). You'd think Trump's evangelical advisors could tell him?

It is a completely open 'secret' (b/c media don't discuss it) that Evangelical orgs openly fire professors, ministers, and staff who even think-aloud in a way that differs from leadership and donors. They make no apologies and demand they be given this exemption to cultivate their insular spaces.

It is a completely open 'secret' (b/c media don't discuss it) that Evangelical orgs openly fire professors, ministers, and staff who even think-aloud in a way that differs from leadership and donors. They make no apologies and demand they be given this exemption to cultivate their insular spaces.

The stuff Jeffrey Epstein’s friends felt comfortable saying and drawing in grotesque detail with their names attached knowing they would not face consequences is the kind of thing I think of when I think about rape culture and how sexual violence against girls and young women is actually glorified

I swear this #SCOTUS would rule 6-3 that the SS can continue their roving patrols to check if someone is a Jew: 'The questioning is typically brief and the non-Jews may promptly go free' while the SS loads the Jews onto the trains "for deportation."

Serious question: Is there a reason that the Governor and Mayor can't direct State/City law enforcement to monitor and arrest ICE agents for committing (checks notes) crimes like assault and kidnapping?

Interesting. Didn’t know Thiel was working on a memoir.

ON THE WAY! The volume @alexichantz.bsky.social, Paula Fredriksen, & I edited is @fortresspress.bsky.social for pre-order. TOC Below. Truly awesome contributors. Big thanks to all involved. Feels like we've been having a party and finally get to invite everyone! www.fortresspress.com/store/produc...

Coming your way soon-- a great collection with an amazing line up of scholars! More details to come! @slyprofessor.bsky.social @alexichantz.bsky.social 🤓 www.fortresspress.com/store/produc...

As a bright professional spotlight, my third book, Scandalous Christian Histories, is now under contract with the University of Edinburgh Press. Onward!

when people say "this isn't what I voted for" they should be forced to list what they DID vote for

Keep in mind: the NEH’s budget is 0.01% of the entire federal budget. This is not about savings - it is about the destruction of the Humanities and the critical thinking abilities that they teach. 🗃️

Four years after initial inception, and we have a hard copy! I cannot express just how grateful I am for the work that our contributors put into this volume. Cheers, @apocalypsenow5.bsky.social and @drmjcwarren.bsky.social!

💰CHARTS: Since Reagan, the rich have gotten much richer (especially white folks) Now Republicans want to cut programs for the poor and let people at the top keep even more. A redistribution of wealth has been going from bottom to top for decades. www.cbpp.org/research/pov...

The new Trump administration has illegally removed far more people from their jobs because of speech and beliefs in the last month than the entire list of cancelled or pressured people (many of whom were criticized, not fired) compiled by FIRE and others over years. It’s not remotely close.

Was writing about Sirach and misogyny. File this passage (25:23-26) under "Patriarchy is Uncreative Loser Energy." Though from an ancient Jewish text now in Catholic Bibles, it reads like a manosphere bro manifesto about how women exist for the comfort & pleasure of men. 🤮 #BiblicalStudies #Classics