there are a lot of people working in the government right now who want to intentionally trigger an apocalypse to create the conditions for the return of jesus christ and I know how crazy that sounds but its absolutely true

OFFS. When Iran tried to interefere in 2020, researchers caught them and called them out. Then the Benz-Weiss-Taibbi-Musk-Jordan-Trump axis labeled those researchers "censors" ... and set about defunding them and dismantling their organizations.

This is intensely wtf and yet on a smaller scale I think a lot of writers find factual mistakes in professional book reviews that make you think hmmm.

AAR/SBL folks: We're very excited about our CFP for the Science, Technology, and Religion unit this year! Have a look and consider submitting something by the March 6 deadline! @aarweb.bsky.social @sblsite.bsky.social

After the arrests of powerful men across the world, you might be asking why the US has so much trouble holding its leaders accountable for lawbreaking. Since Nixon, all three branches of government have worked hard to ensure they can break the law with impunity www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Just finished reading @collincornell.bsky.social's terrific short book Monotheism and Divine Aggression. I was able to download a pdf through my university library. Highly recommend! doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Look, you guys, you don't have to praise Tucker Carlson for criticizing Christian Zionism *while being an antisemite.* I've been criticizing Christian Zionism for 20 years, and I've never needed white nationalists to help me do it.

The reason we're here is that tens of millions of people will punch a hole in a wall if they hear someone used food stamps to buy soda but they're fine if the right-wing podcaster turned fbi director uses his taxpayer funded private jet to go party whenever he feels like it bsky.app/profile/thed...

Instead of watching Trump lie and ramble for an hour tonight, you should watch, listen, or read the latest Theory of Change episode in which @jeetheer.bsky.social and I discuss how tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are literally basing their politics on sci-fi novels.

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

What this technology is going to do is not end higher education, but it is going to undo so much of the baseline work on accessibility by pushing overworked professors to take things back to offline modalities, in person timed exams, keeping tech out of the classroom, etc.

Two of America’s most astute thinkers—Andrea Pitzer and Jamelle Bouie—on our slide into a concentration camp society and how to fight it. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/o...

Some day we'll all regret this & we'll hold hearings & rend garments & pledge "never again" & we'll be just as full of shit as we were last time.

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

George Wallace in 1962: "I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes and I couldn't make them listen. Then I began talking about n**rs and they stomped the floor." Donald Trump in 2023⬇️

Kurt Vonnegut stop being so applicable to all time periods of American life, you can’t do that Kurt Vonnegut, your insights are too evergreen Kurt Vonnegut

So why did ICE detain her, and keep her locked up for so long? As Karen got to know the guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center where she was held, she kept hearing the same thing from them: that ICE officers are paid a bonus every time they detain someone. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Hey! Scholars! If you're using someone's work in your class, sometimes it's nice to email them and tell them, because then they might feel good about their research instead of entirely crushed by the academic humanities' ongoing descent into the grave

From Doug Wilson’s 1996 book on the History of Slavery.

Ossoff: "Among today's false prophets are the election deniers who indulge this president's obsession with overturning the 2020 election. Hear me when I say this -- they tell a lie so absurd, and therefore so debasing, that the act of telling it proves the teller's total and humiliating submission."

(1/11) If you live in NY, you’ve probably started seeing a new warning: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” This mandatory disclosure went into effect late last year, and it’s the first attempt by a US state to grapple with a new generation of surveillance pricing.

“AI giant Anthropic ran a massive program called Project Panama where they spent tens of millions of dollars to hoover up used books, which they then sliced, scanned, and pulped.”

Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.

In 1854, after watching the federal government deploy 2000 federal troops and spend $40,000 sending Anthony Burns back into slavery, Boston's Amos Adams Lawrence said “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

The kind of utter confusion Brooks is going to inflict on Yale undergrads.

easy slogan for the next democratic presidential candidate is “i will reform the corrupt supreme court and repeal citizens united”

“When Citizens United was decided in 2010, billionaires had spent $18 million on the 2000 election, $13M 2004 and $16M in 2008. Then came the deluge. In 2012 it was $231M, and nearly doubled again in next three election cycles —to $682M in 2016, $1.2 billion in 2020 and $2.6 billion in 2024.” Gift:

Two days before Christmas, readers of the NYT opinion page were treated to a spectacle of pooh-poohery by an academic who claimed (without evidence) that concerns about the dangerously anti-democracit New Apostolic Reformation are overblown. My response @religiondispatches.org bit.ly/RDonNYTonNAR

"The administration is wagering that the general public will lose interest in sufficient measure to offset the intense outrage of victims and critics, permitting it to move past the Epstein scandal despite having provided scant accountability."

Hi, friends. An FYI for those interested: I've published an article in JSP about Esther as "American scripture." Includes analysis of the Heritage Foundation's "Project Esther" (2024) and its strategies for regulating free speech, higher education, immigration, and foreign policy.

Over the past three weeks, the "nightmare scenario" for November's midterms has grown more plausible www.vox.com/politics/478...

BREAKING: “in my 24th year of my quest to settle the planet Mars, I have just been informed of a basic fact of celestial mechanics.”

From 1975 to 2023, $79 trillion in wealth was transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. www.commondreams.org/opinion/trum...

This is phenomenal. No bullshit and no punches pulled. If you're wondering why our elite political media are failing us so catastrophically (while patting themselves on the back for the great job they think they're doing) this is a good place to start.

I wrote a brief little thing about Sarah Weiss's 1903 book, Journeys to the Planet Mars, or: Our Mission to Ento, which is a very weird document from quite a strange individual.

Dear university administrators, politicians of good will, and the general public, we need the field of religious studies more now than we have ever.

History and social science demonstrate how racial equality is not considered a moral issue for many white American Christians. 80% of white American Christians voted for Trump. andrewwhitehead.substack.com/p/racial-equ...

Pour one out for every professional political pundit, writer, consultant whatever that has spent the last decade trying to pretend that the Trump phenomenon was about trade or opiates and not a big chunk of white america losing its mind over having a black president bsky.app/profile/kyle...

Started mucking around with data this morning. Made a couple interesting charts from data about all the writers who ever got an NEA grant, with data from Xander Manshel + team. Decided I’d write it up for my first post. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Having literally written the book on the National Prayer Breakfast -- borne of the idea that God cares more for the rich and powerful than everyone else -- I can say this is the rare instance where Trump's grotesqueness is deeply appropriate.

Good. Every other elected, please take note. You don’t want to be the last person you know posting on X, the site for creeps and fascists.

Moving elegy for the Washington Post from an old friend (of me, and of the Post). www.dailykos.com/stories/2026...

Jeffrey Bezos is destroying the Washington Post for the same reason Musk destroyed Twitter and Ellison is destroying CBS—oligarchs oppose the free press when if it threatens their wealth and power. They don’t want normal people to see what is happening in America.

"edgelordism has become the currency du jour in the GOP, from the Ivy League through the streets of Minnesota. The MAGA new right seems to be betting that the American polity has a deep reserve of untapped nativist rage" [email protected] www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

If we knew at the time what we know now, many more people would have seen Trump's 2024 campaign for what it was: A campaign of deception to CONCEAL the Epstein files, that gained support by promising to RELEASE them. www.offmessage.net/p/trump-2024...

Hello, looks like independent publishers should beef up our books coverage. If you're into the idea of joining the @flaminghydra.com collective and writing a book review each month (800-2000 word range), please send us your ideas and some clips to [email protected]

Incredible. They destroyed a great newspaper because they hated the people who actually paid for it and read it so much that they'd rather scrap the paper if they couldn't get Tucker Carlson's audience bsky.app/profile/maxt...

This @bostonreview.bsky.social piece by @adambonica.bsky.social and @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social is an absolute must-read, as are many of the responses to it. Spread this one far and wide.