Even for someone like me whose theological background is old school Calvinism, 2020 managed to leave me with a bleaker and more cynical take on human nature than I had going in. And that’s quite a feat. There are no two ways about it, Americans are cruel. Like the rest of the world, we were […]
Category: Humanity
Five Things I Learned in 2020, Part 2: RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM IS STUPID
It doesn’t take a degree in human psychology to look around at our COVID-riddled planet and realize that either this virus is smart enough to focus its attack on people with eagles on their passports, or we Americans have something wrong with us. I am referring, obviously, to the fact that the United States, despite […]
Five Things I Learned in 2020, Part 1: EVERYWHERE IS RACIST
Yeah so 2020, amirite? It sucked, blah blah blah. Here’s some stuff I learned: Thing #1: EVERYWHERE IS RACIST Before 2020 hit, I, like most normal people, thought that racism (the everyday conversational kind, not the institutional kind) was mainly confined to the usual places. You know, like Michigan and Missouri. Oh, and also Ohio. […]
Unity is Overrated
The 2020 election has been called today for Joe Biden, and already we are hearing Trump supporters and other Republicans lecturing us about unity. John Kasich is warning us about whom the president-elect must consider (and must not consider) for his cabinet, The Independent is urging Biden to pardon his predecessor “for the good of us all,” […]
If We Hate You, It’s Not For Your Christianity
According to Baltimore’s most sage and snarky journalist, the “martyr complex” is a real thing: “The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and […]
VATICAN’T (Catholicism Without All the Uplifting Parts): Week 9 — God’s Risky Atheism
As we wrap up our Vatican’t series I’d like to explore a bit further something I alluded to in my last post. Speaking of the effects of the Jesus story upon humankind, I wrote: Or to put all this in (much) less orthodox terms, maybe there is no external divine Agent accomplishing any of this, […]