Reading Time: 8 minutes If someone had told me that anybody could possibly describe the unthinkable suffering going on in Ukraine with an expression of utter childlike delight, I’m not sure I’d have believed them. But here we are.
Good Omens
Posted inReligion
How Religion Hijacks the Weirdness of Liminal Spaces (Pre-Easter Post)
Reading Time: 10 minutes I want to dive into the way that liminal spaces affect us–and how they’ve impacted humanity’s view of religion ever since we realized what they were. Often, they’re at least partially responsible for those sometimes-spooky, mysterious experiences people have that they can’t explain: That One Weird Thing That Happened Once (TOWTTHO), which they often attribute to the supernatural. But they’re not supernatural. They’re perfectly natural. And today, I’ll show you how they work.
Posted inReligion
Meet the Christians Who Are HOPPING MAD About ‘Good Omens’
Reading Time: 10 minutes This time around, our brave widdle culture warriors flew into a lather over a television show called Good Omens. Let me introduce you to them, and show you what they’re so angry about. Then, we’ll look at what that anger means for them–and us.
Posted inReligion
The Just World Belief, Rejected
Reading Time: 9 minutes One mistake in thinking cost me many years. It followed me from Christianity and out of it and past it. Believing it led me into and out of any number of disastrous personal decisions. That mistake was my belief in the Just World. I’ll show you what it is, why it’s such a bugbear for so many people, and maybe a path away from it.
Posted inReligion
You Lost Me’s Push for Discipling: Hold On, Y’All, He Knows Exactly What to Do.
Reading Time: 9 minutes David Kinnaman’s central idea is that The Big Problem Here is that modern churches aren’t properly discipling their youth and that if this starts happening properly, young people will stop leaving and maybe even return to the groups they’ve already left. Today I’ll teach you what this confusing term means–most of the time anyway–and why this author is totally wrong.
Posted inReligion
The Radicalization of Jaelyn Young.
Reading Time: 9 minutes At first it seemed like a pretty open-and-shut case. As the New York Times told it, a young Mississippi couple got caught trying to fly to Syria to join ISIS. One of them was a 19-year-old pre-medicine student named Jaelyn Young, the other a newly-graduated 22-year-old lifelong-Islamic man named Muhammad Dakhlalla with a degree in psychology who was set to go to graduate school in the fall. They were newly married and using their honeymoon as the pretext for their trip, but got arrested on the way to the airport in Columbus on what would have been the first leg of a very long journey. Somehow, the two of them had fallen in with terrorists.
Posted inReligion
Do Not Piss Off Lesbians, And Other Surprising New Revelations About the Duggar Abuse Scandal.
Reading Time: 10 minutes It’s been a pretty weird week for the Duggars and their ongoing sex abuse scandal. Here are a few short tidbits that I thought y’all would find of interest, including what touched off journalists’ investigation into it.
Posted inGaming, Religion
Exiting Far East: Stage-Setting.
Reading Time: 10 minutes I once had an apartment in Sapporo… Sorry, I share with Betty White an unreasonable fondness for the movie Out of Africa. But that’s how I always think about my short time in Japan–this huge journey to another land, a journey that taught me quite a bit but which was, in the end, a bittersweet […]
Posted inUncategorized
Garbaholics Anonymous.
Reading Time: 6 minutes People keep finding my blog through searches related to the SCA and Christianity, so I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while now. (BTW: Hi!) The Society for Creative Anachronism, or SCA, has been around since the 60s, when a bunch of folks, among them now-noted fantasy/sci-fi writers, got together in someone’s backyard for […]