"Reading's not that important."

We're now about a month into the Donald Trump presidency I never believed would happen. And I'd like to think I've come to terms with a few things things. The electoral college, for example, isn't going anywhere. And liberals like myself have a tendency to project a certain smugness and intellectual superiority that may be off-putting to conservative voters. We need to work on that. But here's the thing that I still cannot understand about this election: the way in which Christians in this country tripped over themselves to support someone who, lunacy aside, was so completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. So. Completely. Antithetical. Like, in a different era, I don't doubt the political opposition would have employed the term "antichrist".

Divine Disdain: Revisiting Mark Driscoll this Election Cycle

I once felt very drawn to the movement that is popularly referred to as neo-Calvinism. The most accurate way to explain the attraction would probably be that the harshness of it felt authentic. I'd never liked myself very much, was fairly certain God didn't like me (the feeling was sort of mutual), and thought an ideology which affirmed my utter worthlessness and depravity must have the answers. It was as if a fitting narrative framework could resolve this strange, anxious relationship I'd had with God my entire life. Also, I'd never seen the kind of passionate preaching that is the trademark of the movement's leadership before. As someone easily affected by emotion, I thought that what I was hearing really resonated. No one can make you feel quite as terrified of your own well-deserved damnation as a Calvinist, or as eager to accept an escape route.

Battling in the Deep

One of the really fascinating things that came up for me in reading The Book of J was Bloom's overview of ancient Israelite creation stories. The idea that there was more to the oral tradition of creation than what has come down to us in the Genesis account was eye-opening, and to be quite honest, I was first inclined to disbelief. I assumed I would have heard of this by now, after years of professional anthropological inquiry and amateur theology. And yet, there it was. I felt like I had made some sort of discovery. It underscored for me just how disciplined I had become over the past thirty-or-so years in reading the Bible through a very narrow, normative (to use one of Harold Bloom's favorite words) lens, and how I intuitively disregard or skip over things that don't quite fit the narrative to which I've grown accustomed; like they're literary white noise.

On Orlando

I remember feeling this exact wave of fear during the Belgium attacks. The fear that maybe it is something about Islam. The fear that we're really not safe. The impulse that tugged at me to slip into a black-and-white, us-versus-them cosmology like it was a thick down comforter I could use to block out the world.