A Sound of Sheer Silence

This Sunday, the Washington National Cathedral, which is technically the cathedral of the Diocese of Washington of the Episcopal Church, invited Max Lucado to preach.  Lucado is an evangelical author and speaker, known (at least in my sense of things) as one of those guys who writes those novels that fill up the massive shelf space in the "Christian Living" section of Barnes & Noble.  But, he's written other stuff, too.  And you will not, I suspect, be particularly surprised to learned that he is against gay marriage and gay relationships.  In reading through the quotes attributed to him, they seem to be pretty standard anti-gay conservative talking points--the Bible says no, if we let gays get married bestiality is next, etc., etc., etc.  So, it's bad, but it is bad in the usual way.  He's One of Those. I want to talk about this, and why I think the decision of the Washington National Cathedral to invite him to preach is incomprehensibly stupid.  ...

On Sunday, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times , continued a series of interviews he has done from time to time with Christian religious leaders and thinkers.  This time, his conversation partner was Serene Jones , the President of Union Theological Seminary in New York City.  She said a number of things in this interview, some of which I agree with and many of which I do not, but the one that got the attention was her somewhat dismissive handling of the idea of Jesus's physical resurrection on Eastern Sunday (or, more accurately, Holy Saturday evening).  When I first saw the criticism of Rev. Jones circulating on Twitter, I made the cardinal sin of online takes and fired off some Tweets without reading the article when I got home from Easter Vigil early Sunday morning.  Rev. Jones and Union have said some, in my view, kinda dumb stuff in the past that I have dragged in this space , and I assumed this was more of the same. Having now read the inter...

I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially. — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 7, 2019 Episcopalianism is to Christianity what Rice Krispies are to rice. It may have once been the later, but now it's just a hollowed out puff prone to snapping, crackling, and popping. — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 8, 2019 Right-wing political commentator and self-professed evangelical Christian Erick Erickson decided to talk shit about my faith and my religious tradition over the last few days, and as such I feel entitled to respond. One can approach this response from a number of directions.  One obvious direction, and one that I saw commonly in the Twitter response to Erickson, is to interrogate this notion of "the roots of Christianity," which the Episcop...

All of these stories point to why I'm sadly pessimistic about a #metoo -style cultural shift in evangelical Christianity (and, to an extent, the broader Church). I'm pessimistic because of the deadly combination of patriarchy & (as discussed recently) evangelical exceptionalism... — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) January 10, 2018 As I've stated before, evangelical exceptionalism understands "the world" or "the culture" to be filled with darkness & sin, teeming with people who are "lost," and evangelicalism & evangelicals to be the sole bearers of light, the counter-cultural path to salvation... — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) January 10, 2018 ...White evangelicals perceive "the world" to struggle with racism & sexual immorality, but not themselves. Because of this, it's rare to see serious efforts made at examining the ways racism & toxic masculinity/patriarchy are embedded in evangel...

1. I was on a business trip Wednesday in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was raining.  I had a meeting and a walk to get to that meeting, so I went into the hotel gift shop and bought an umbrella.  I bought the smallest and least expensive (I would say cheapest, but it was not cheap) umbrella they had, without really looking at it.  After I had completed the purchase and got ready to get out into the rain, I noticed that it was a Kate Spade umbrella, one of those transparent plastic bubble-type domes.  As I made my way through the streets of Atlanta, I felt overwhelmingly, profoundly self-conscious.  I noticed I wasn't willing to make eye contact with dudes carrying their more macho black umbrellas, as if I was avoiding their judgment for my umbrella and its femininity. How dumb is that?  Here I am, in a city that I know no one, which I hadn't been to in fifteen years and probably won't be back to for another fifteen, and I am worried about what random strange...

Six years is not a long time.  I've now lived in Columbus for six years, and it seems like a blink of an eye since I was living out on the West Coast.  But not all blocks of six years are created equal.  Six years in your thirties, as the last six years have been for me, is not the same thing as six years when you are younger.  Context and timing matter. From August 1990 to August 1996, I lived in Jacksonville, Florida.  That period of six years corresponded with my two years of middle school and my four years of high school.  I was 12 at the beginning of that period and 18 when it ended.  There is an argument to be made that this is the most significant six year period in any person's life, and I am coming to the conclusion that it is the most significant period of my life, by far.  And it was spent entirely in a strange place called Jacksonville, Florida. If you have never been to Jacksonville, you probably have certain associations with "Fl...

As many, perhaps most, of you know, the UK had a rather consequential election last Thursday.  Theresa May and her Conservative Party got a pretty good kicking, as the Brits would say, especially in light of the fact that when she called the election on April 18th the consensus opinion was she was going to win in a landslide.  [As an aside, I cannot possibly express how jealous I am of my UK and Canadian friends that a "long election season" is something like 10 weeks, as compared to the 18 month Bataan Death March that is US elections].  Anyway, May and the Conservatives fell short of a majority in Parliament, and so in order to form a government, she had to look around for coalition partners.  And it appears she found them, in the form of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Now, it is very likely that forming a coalition with the DUP will have severe negative consequences for peace in Northern Ireland , and at the end of the day that is the most i...

I have a friend who is going through a tough time.  Her sister is an alcoholic, and she and the rest of the family are trying to get the sister into treatment.  I am very fortunate that I have never experienced alcoholism or addiction in my family or friends, so I have no direct experience of what my friend is going through.  But in listening to my friend talk about the difficulties she and her family were having, I was struck by the parallels with something that I have experience with--mental illness. The biggest difficulty in talking with people who are in the grip of mental illness is that you can't rationally convince them that what they are doing is illogical or self-destructive.  That's because, as I have said before , the nature of mental illness is that it creates a filter through which everything is seen and experienced.  You can't convince people that what they are doing is illogical, because as seen through their distorted lens, everything they are ...