Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. That’s the age-old nugget of wisdom that people have struggled with, since as long as humans had language. Do you remember the old scenario with Lucy Van Pelt and Charlie Brown, in the comic strip Peanuts? Lucy would promise Charlie Brown that she…
Continue readingLiberal Lucy Van Pelt and Conservative Charlie Brown
Chapter I Monuments, Totems and the Veneratio Antiquitatis The prologue of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, a narrative about the martyrdom of two Christian women in Africa in 202 CE, begins with this statement about the nature of a text’s authority and its antiquity: If the old exemplars of faith, which testify to the…
Continue readingWhat I wrote about monuments and totems in 2002 (when I was liberal)
It’s hard to believe 10 years have passed since I wrote this paper. I was on my way out of the military at the time. I presented this at an Ethnic Studies conference in early 2011. After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. showed a dramatic change in…
Continue readingOn Not Loving Monuments. This is what I wrote ten years ago
“Conspiracy theorist!” Like the now-banned words “retard” and “lunatic,” the charge of conspiracy theorist is a classically Soviet slur. It is designed to make you think that your judgement is so distorted that nothing you conclude about the world could possibly be real. “Conspiracy theorist” is akin to calling someone an enemy of peace and…
Continue readingConspiracy as theory and practice: How much of 2020 has been pure coincidence?
Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a Molotov cocktail. It presents a complex legacy of America’s racial history. The book’s length and experimental prose style make it dizzying. But that’s arguably the point: America has been driven so crazy by its irresolvable racial grudges that the only truthful response to racial problems is dizziness.…
“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” So cries Richard III just before he dies, bringing down the Plantagenet line in the late fifteenth century. Shakespeare captured the tragic figure of the deformed and unloved, but power-hungry and ambitious pretender in the five-act tragedy named after its protagonist, King Richard III. Ralph FIennes…
Continue readingShakespeare’s take on the firings at Southern and Albert Mohler
If you do not want taxpayer money to be used by corrupt SBC leaders to entrench themselves even further and engage in their usual swamp nepotism, then let your concerns be known to these people: Nancy Pelosi https://pelosi.house.gov/contact-me/email-me . Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, the highest ranking member of the House of Representatives.…
Continue readingWhom to contact to say NO! to federal financial support to SBC leaders
In a May 7, 2020 post at the ERLC website, Russell Moore showcases a letter he sent to Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell. In this letter Moore pleads for more federal dollars so that religious organizations like the SBC can weather the coronavirus crisis better. He wants charities, charitable nonprofits, and…
Continue readingRemember “we ain’t gonna play Sun City”? How about “we ain’t gonna fund SBC”?
I’ve seen a lot of people posting about the killing of a black man by vigilantes. It seems always that racial strife comes back each time we think we may have moved past it. Each generation alive, it seems, has to experience racial conflict as a new and shocking betrayal when we are youths, then…
I have been freed from the shackles that oppressed me when the Southern Baptist Convention employed, and therefore controlled me. Now I do not have to feel bad about quoting taboo writers anymore. For instance, let’s take Friedrich Nietzsche. When you work in an evangelical college, whenever the topic turns to literature or philosophy, you…
Continue readingTime for some Old Testament wisdom, and a drop of Friedrich Nietzsche
