Reading Time: 9 minutes The Respect for Marriage Act finally passed a its last vote. It’s now on its way to the president’s desk, where he’ll likely sign it into law on Tuesday. But it got there over the kicking and screaming of the Christian Right, a loose-knit assortment of hardline evangelical culture warriors and creepily-authoritarian hardline Catholics.
Captain Cassidy
ROLL TO DISBELIEVE
"Captain Cassidy" is Cassidy McGillicuddy, a Gen Xer and ex-Pentecostal. (The title is metaphorical.) She writes about the intersection of psychology, belief, popular culture, science, politics, the arts, and gaming -- video, board, tabletop, whatever. She lives in Idaho with her husband, Mr. Captain, and their squawky orange cat, Princess Bother Pretty Toes the First. No matter how many bookcases she stuffs into her house, at any given time she's running out of bookcase space.
Posted inGaming
From gamer to ‘gamer girl’ to gamer again
Reading Time: 14 minutes Many years ago, more than half a lifetime by now, I took my first steps into gamer girl territory. Except I didn’t really see it as being a gamer girl. To me, I was simply a gamer, full stop. Now that we’re nearly at the 40-year anniversary of the classic Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series, […]
Posted inReligion
Catholic power politics boil even closer to schism
Reading Time: 9 minutes American hardliners in Catholic leadership are dragging their religion closer and closer to schism. They absolutely despise Pope Francis, and lately they’ve been ramping up their defiance of him. The hardliners’ defiance hit a fever pitch last month at a big conference, which makes schism even more of a possibility. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file Catholics in […]
Posted inGaming
The rise of the casual MMORPG player
Reading Time: 11 minutes Nowadays, these games studiously court players who might only have a few minutes a day or a couple of days a week that they can spend ingame.
Posted inReligion
Why Christian hypocrites describe their darkest deeds as ‘sin’
Reading Time: 12 minutes When an abusive evangelical pastor, Christian Watts, tried to downplay his grooming of a teenager decades earlier, he described his predation as ‘my past sin.’ That’s a time-honored tactic for people caught in his exact circumstances. Let’s take a closer look at this tactic to see why it works so well in evangelical culture.
Posted inGaming
Using games to defuse frustration in the Dark Ages of Twitter
Reading Time: 9 minutes Sure, it’s gallows humor. But maybe sometimes we need a good laugh when things are on fire all around us.
Posted inReligion
Pastor Christian Watts tried to negate abuse accusations with Christianese
Reading Time: 14 minutes To save his job, Christian Watts clung hard to a time-tested, long-honored evangelical get-out-of-scandal-free card: calling upon Christianese to escape the writing on his wall.
Posted inReligion
‘He Gets Us’ can’t possibly clean up Christians’ tainted brand
Reading Time: 11 minutes Recent stories indicate that the evangelical-backed He Gets Us campaign is still going strong. But the evangelicals responding to it have missed an important point that destroys whatever goodwill they might be fostering through their endless billboards and carefully-placed ads: their god does not have a brand, but his followers certainly do—and this tragically misguided […]
Posted inGaming
The one unforgivable sin in tabletop roleplaying games
Reading Time: 11 minutes Cheating may be reviled throughout most of the gaming world, but all too many players seem perfectly comfortable with doing it. Entire websites exist whose entire function revolves around providing cheat codes and methods to interested gamers. In turn, multiplayer online games fight constantly against cheating. The smaller the venue, the more intimate the players’ […]
Posted inGaming
Gaming through the fear of failure
Reading Time: 12 minutes It’s not your imagination: games really have gotten easier over the years. The reason has everything to do with my generation’s fear of failure, and our need to get payoffs we can’t get in real life.