Constructive Faith

1 Timothy 1:12-17

An unverified legend claims that shortly before the Second World War, a puff piece by an American journalist wrote that Magda Goebbels made a great strudel. The wife of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, Magda was held up as the ideal German woman. Her husband, who gained power and wealth by promoting hatred and inciting violence, was as guilty in the Holocaust as the men who operated the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Magda joined Joseph in murdering their own children before committing suicide in the final days of the Nazi dictatorship cult.

Charlie Kirk was the Joseph Goebbels of our age. Would you ask Jews to mourn for Goebbels? To do so would be gaslighting of the highest order.

Like Goebbels, Kirk gained power and wealth by promoting hatred and inciting violence. He described the stoning execution of LGBTQ individuals as “God’s perfect law.” He did not need to throw a stone. All he had to do was activate an unstable member of his own lunatic cult. His assassination at the hands of Tyler Robinson, a follower of a different branch of America’s Neo-Fascists, is nothing to celebrate. But he was not a hero. 

When people like Donald Trump, Representative Nick Langworthy, and Chemung County Legislator Joe Brennan use it to further divide and antagonize, they tell us a lot about who they really are. As do organizations like the National Football League, which held a moment of silence for Kirk on Thursday night, and has invited teams to do so today. It is increasingly clear that much of professional sports in the United States is just a modern version of the ancient Roman “bread and circuses,” all in the service of oligarchs.

It is sin, and we would be advised to do an examination of our consciences, for each of us is complicit in our own way.

It is estimated that the cancellation of the international PEPFAR program under the Trump-Musk race war will kill twenty-two people while we sit here this morning, two of them children. Analysts expect eleven million preventable cases of HIV/AIDS.

Sin is a tough topic. It is a sort of unwritten rule among progressive Christians, those of us who lean into the expansive justice of the prophets and the unearned grace of the gospel, that we do not preach about sin, and if we do, we make it a vague societal sin, avoiding the intimate and personal, and therefore avoiding personal responsibility.

Continue reading “What Is Sin? : 14 September 2025”

Philemon 1:1-21

I was, as previously reported, raised in the South, with both grandmothers from old southern families. That meant being initiated into the cult of the Lost Cause, the narrative in which slavery was mostly benign, Confederates mostly noble, and the war anything but civil. 

Of course, I know the truth now. I am also, I like to think, capable of handling a bit of nuance. I can acknowledge George Washington, a distant cousin actually, as an enslaver, as less than ethical in some of his real estate transactions, and at the same time, as someone most white men experienced as a honest and heroic leader, even before his story was embellished and he was canonized as the holiest of the Founding Fathers. 

Re-thinking another Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, requires the same sort of nuance, especially when it comes to Sally Hemings. The great political and religious thinker likely fathered several children with Sally, a person he enslaved, who was his property under the evil laws of that age. 

Apologists for Jefferson want to claim that despite the DNA evidence and the rumors going all the way back to Jefferson’s own lifetime, it was another male in the Jefferson line, and any male relative will do, but certainly not Tom himself, who fathered the children. 

At the other end of the spectrum are those who look at the power dynamic between the two and declare that Jefferson was just one more brutal rapist, for so many enslavers and white overseers in an economy based on human trafficking were exactly that, rapists.

There is no denying the power imbalance, but in truth, we know nothing about the domestic relationship between the two. We do know that Jefferson never really recovered from the death of his wife and four of his six children, that he had promised Martha on her deathbed that he would never remarry. We know that Sally had only one enslaved grandparent, and that she and her children by Jefferson were set apart from others enslaved at Monticello. While we do not have a record of manumission for Sally, her children were all freed, and she was allowed to live as a free woman in Charlottesville after Jefferson’s death.

The institution of slavery was absolutely evil. No question. Jefferson was an active participant in a system of evil. I need neither wholly innocent Tom nor wholly evil Tom. I’m okay with imperfect Tom, and I am okay with knowing that we will never know whether Sally was a victim of sexual violence or a beloved life partner in that wretched system. 

Those who insist that they do know tell you more about themselves than they do about day-to-day events and domestic relationships long erased by time.

Today’s reading from the Christian Testament deals with slavery in the Biblical Age. It is one of the authentic letters of Paul preserved in scripture. Of those authentic letters, one is a theological treatise to a community he has never visited, one is this personal letter to Philemon, and the rest are pastoral interventions in congregations he helped establish.

Paul is imprisoned when he writes to Philemon, a member of the Colossian church. He is writing about a slave, Onesimus, who is carrying the letter back to his owner.

Slavery in the Biblical Age was different. First, and most important, it was not racial. Race did not even exist, would not be invented until it was needed by Europeans in the 16th century to justify their colonialist depravity. There were tribes, but tribes were about belonging, not being.

Continue reading “Imperfectly Tom: 7 September 2025”

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Though I am still a few years from Medicare, there is little doubt that I am getting old. My body tells me every day. Then there is my mailbox, snail mail not email. Most afternoons there is at least one, sometimes more than one, print magazine. I also read news online, but I still like long-form journalism and good writing on paper, and despise the meme wars, which seem a one way road to stupidity and evil.

I receive a range of publications, from the Christian Century, the magazine of record for Mainline Protestants, to the Guardian Weekly and the Nation, progressive news and opinion, and mainstream cultural magazines like the New Yorker.

And it seems like every one of them these days has a full page advertisement for a nationwide speaking tour by Lech Walesa, former president of Poland and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Walesa was the trade union activist who confronted and eventually unwound state communism in Poland, then a satellite of the Soviet Union. 

For our younger worshippers, that was a communist nation-state that controlled all of northern Asia and much of eastern Europe, either directly or through puppet governments. It was centered on Russia. And if you wonder why I just had to explain that, you are in the geezer club right along with me. The Soviet Union has been gone for 34 years. There are parents with no memory of the Soviet Union who have kids in high school.

I have no idea what Walesa has to say to our current situation, whether he will speak to crowds or empty halls. There is an irony that it was workers who brought down state-communism in Poland when communism was supposed to be a worker’s paradise, and that Poland itself descended into nationalism and adopted a rapacious capitalism along the United States model instead of embracing the pro-worker social democracy model to be found just across the Baltic in Scandinavia. 

The union and movement Walesa led was called Solidarity. The word indicates common interest and mutual support, which is to say, the word indicates what it is to be part of a social species. 

And since it is Labor Day Weekend, originally a celebration of organized labor, I will land there after a brief detour into scripture and theology.

Scripture tells us that when the ancient Jewish tribes were afraid of the new immigrants arriving on the coast, they went to Samuel and asked for a king. God’s response, as popularized by a recent meme, was “You don’t want a king. Kings suck.” 

But the people insisted, making them just like every other dictatorship in the region, ironic since their own collective story was about escaping an evil king, the ruler of Egypt. 

Continue reading “Solidarity: Labor Day Sunday 2025”

Luke 13:10-17

Elizabeth Agassiz did a good thing. She was co-founder and the first president of Radcliffe College, the one-time women’s division of Harvard University. Today, you can find her name attached to a professorship, a building, and a gate at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the successor institution now that the university itself is co-educational. 

Elizabeth was also the spouse of the Swiss-born Harvard scholar Louis Agassiz, a much more difficult figure. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1847, and served as a professor and as curator of the school’s Museum of Comparative Zoology until his death in 1873. The Agassiz name is still on the museum building, though it is unclear if it originally honored Louis or he and Elizabeth’s son, Alexander, who succeeded his father as curator.

A bit of a celebrity scientist in his day, Louis Agassiz is now remembered mostly for his work in race science, including his support of polygenism, the long-debunked idea that human races evolved separately. He proposed that God created new and improved human races after each ice age. This supported his belief and the belief of other racists in his day that the white race was unique and superior. In fact, he claimed that the black race had never produced a civilization. 

Agassiz also helped establish Harvard as a hotbed of eugenics, the pseudo-science of selective human reproduction embraced by white supremacists from the enslavers of the 19th century to the Nazis of the 20th and even Elon Musk today in the 21st.

In the United States, government policies in support of eugenics resulted in the involuntary sterilization of more that 60,000 individuals, including Carrie Buck, the victim and plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme Court decision that upheld the practice. Buck had been declared feeble-minded and was sterilized after a relative of her foster family raped her. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. infamously wrote in that decision that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

This toxic history still haunts us, as so many remember state institutionalization as a tool used by the powerful against those deemed inconvenient or dangerous to their privilege. Today, it is human services orthodoxy that involuntary commitment is always wrong, no matter how deadly the consequences.

While pseudo-scientific racism, including eugenics, was used to justify slavery and colonialism, it really reached its gruesome zenith with the Third Reich, and not just in the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and Queers. The groundwork for later crimes against humanity was laid three years before “The Final Solution” was articulated at the Wannsee Conference of 1942 with what came to be known as Aktion T4, named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the street address of the relevant government office. 

Aktion T4 was the systematic murder of Germany’s disabled, ordered by Adolph Hitler in October 1939 and giving the disabled what the Nazis euphemistically called a Gnadentod, a “good death.” Like recent cuts to Medicaid here in the U.S., this freed up money that could be redirected to state violence, and of course, served the cause of eugenics. Over 93,000 beds were emptied in just two years. T4 allowed the Third Reich to perfect the art of mass killing with gas, saving the bullets that had been used in the regime’s earliest crimes against humanity. The gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau used technology developed in Aktion T4.

Continue reading “Gnadentod: 24 August 2025”

Luke 12:49-56

Humans move. 

This basic concept, the reason our species spread beyond Africa and eventually mated with other species to create what we are today, a hybrid species, seems to escape many of our fellow Americans, every one themselves the result of migration. 

While migration is a biological fact, the form of migration known as colonialism is a particular evil. It relies on the notion that some ethnic groups are superior and entitled, or worse still, that some individuals are superior and entitled, something that goes against the core values of multiple religious traditions, including Buddhism, Islam, and of course, Christianity, where we are taught that everyone is our neighbor.

Imperial Rome had a colonial system that in some ways foreshadowed what would develop in the 17th century, though the colonial enterprise in its racist form reached its zenith in the decades before the Second World War, when Britain and France led the world in the exploitation of overseas colonies and peoples, and the United States was managing its first significant overseas colonies in places like the Philippines. 

Even at their worst, which was pretty bad, the crimes of the British and French overseas paled in comparison to Belgian King Leopold’s personal colony in the Congo, which he ruled as an absentee dictator from 1885 to 1908. The atrocities there prompted the Rev. George Washington Williams, a distinguished American of African descent, to use the term “crimes against humanity” in an 1890 letter to the U.S. Secretary of State. That term had first been used in December of the previous year by President Benjamin Harrison in speaking about the ongoing slave trade in Africa.

Though the international order after the Second World War, especially the formation of the United Nations, was intended to prevent future crimes against humanity, that system failed, and we see reports of atrocities and genocide daily, especially in places like Ukraine, Palestine, and Sudan.

The Book of Joshua in the Jewish Scripture recounts and endorses crimes against humanity, specifically genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Canaan, the Promised Land of the Exodus people and the location of today’s Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Scripture tells a tale of ethnic purity that is a complete fabrication, a lie exposed not only by archeology, but by the text itself. Today’s reading, from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, hints at the reality. 

Continue reading “Hammer and Fite: 17 August 2025”

Hosea 11:1-11

SERMON “Son of a”

America’s most sin-sick have been whining about “cancel culture” for years, though it is hard to feel sorry for them when rapists and racists have more power and wealth today than at any other point in our nation’s history. 

In fact, as far as I can tell, for every Bill Cosby who is “cancelled” for being a rapist or Rosanne Barr who is cancelled for being a racist, there are a half dozen progressives driven from the public eye by the Left’s circular firing squad in pursuit of what one person recently described to me as “ideological purity.” 

The Chinese had their Cultural Revolution, and we have ACLU attorney Chase Strangio declaring that there is no such thing as a “male body.” Then again, there are elements of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Trump’s cult of personality as well, for it too attacks scientists and intellectuals.

Cancel culture also cancels culture, not just people, and sometimes for good reason. It is almost impossible to stage “Othello,” “The Merchant of Venice,” or “The Taming of the Shrew” without addressing the racism, antisemitism, and misogyny of those plays by the playwright we call Shakespeare. Though efforts have been made to surgically remove these barbarisms from the text, it never really works.

In the same way, it may seem easiest to just cancel the Jewish Scripture’s Book of the Prophet Hosea, to avoid it altogether, for a flat reading of the text is unkind to women. Yet, there is another layer there, one that signals a theological innovation, one that has meaning for us in our progressive tradition.

Hosea’s active prophetic mission takes place in the Northern Kingdom, Israel, and in roughly the same era as Amos, who we recently considered and who precedes him, and Isaiah Bin Amoz, the original prophet whose name is attached to that text tradition, who comes a generation later. 

Hosea may have lived through the reign of as many as seven Israelite kings, a combination of personal longevity and national turmoil. 

Neo-Assyria, located to the northwest, was gaining power in the headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley. Israel and the neighboring kingdom Aram tried to draw the Southern Kingdom, Judah, into an anti-Neo-Assyrian coalition. When the king of Judah refused, they declared war, with one Jewish kingdom invading the other.

Amos had issued dire warnings about economic inequality in Israel, and Isaiah would spend much of his energy on this dangerous geo-political situation, but Hosea was primarily focused on religious fidelity, condemning the people for worshiping other gods. Or maybe that is over-simplifying. 

Like a biblical detective, Hosea is looking at the evidence, and building a case against the people. If Yahweh is a good god, then the looming catastrophe must be deserved. 

Hosea models the crisis in his personal life in a way that is extremely problematic by today’s standards, marrying a woman named Gomer who he knows will be unfaithful. We are led to believe that her three children are not Hosea’s, and they are given names that reflect the prophet’s mission, including a daughter named “Not Pitied” and a son named “Not My People.”

While we may rightly stumble over the patriarchy and misogyny here, we’d be missing something important, leaving us unprepared for the major theological shift that takes place in this morning’s reading. Hosea’s faithfulness to Gomer, despite her infidelity, is meant to reflect God’s faithfulness to Israel. Yahweh remains the faithful and forgiving spouse, while Israel is sleeping around with other gods. 

This is not Yahweh as powerful king who smashes anything in the way of his divine will. Love is a type of powerlessness, as you invest value in something outside of yourself, something that you do not control, either because you cannot control it or because you reject the violence of control. It may seem trite, but love is an open-hand and an open-heart.

Then, in today’s reading, the relationship is recast again. Suddenly, Yahweh is a parent, and the Jewish people are God’s children, language Jesus will also use. God moves from anger to compassion and promises restoration. “Our Father,” “forgive us as we forgive others”… the prayer we say every week, that we parsed last week, reflects this theological framework. 

Continue reading “3 August 2025”

Luke 11:1-13

A couple of months ago, I discussed one line in the received version of the Lord’s Prayer, the version from the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew. In particular, I took issue, still take issue, with the line that says “Give us, this day, our daily bread.” 

It makes us passive, and while I am okay with humans receiving unearned grace from a loving Creator, I am not okay with sitting around and waiting for God to fix things we can fix ourselves, or for God to drop manna from the sky in some modern day version of the Exodus story. If we want bread, we need to plant some wheat, knead some dough, and chop some wood. And while we are at it, we should bake some extra bread for the neighbor who has been under the weather lately or lost their job or whatever. Though I’m not really sure how I’m going to feel if my neighbor knocks on the door at midnight asking to borrow three loaves…

There is another, more technical problem with that line in the prayer. The Koine word “epiousios,” translated as “daily” for centuries, is totally made-up, occurring nowhere else in Greek literature. The prefix and root word mean roughly “over substance,” which means nothing. Centuries of priests, translators, and scholars has simply fallen in line with the consensus translation, though some have suggested that instead of meaning “give us this day our bread for today,” it might mean “give us this day our bread for tomorrow,” pointing to the fact that day laborers during the time of Jesus, the working poor, used today’s earning to buy bread for their family tomorrow. If there were too many days when they could not work, the family went hungry. 

I’m not sure it means either of those things, daily or for tomorrow. It may be that the author of the original text layer, the lost text we call “Q,” was trying to capture a word in Aramaic, the language of the streets in 1st century Palestine, and we simply don’t know that word.

This morning, we’re going to move past that one particular problem, a problem of translation and theology, and do a deep dive into the Lord’s Prayer itself, for our gospel reading lifts up Luke’s version. Like the physician’s version of the Beatitudes, Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is shorter, and in many ways more concrete. We’ll work from Matthew’s more familiar version.

First, let me offer a couple of general notes. The Lord’s Prayer is thoroughly Jewish. There is nothing in it that would not have fit into mainstream Jewish belief at the time of Jesus, or for that matter, in this time. Rabbis have noted that it is a prayer both Jews and Christians could pray.

The fact that later authors never “christianized” it leads me to believe in the historicity of the story. 

Continue reading “27 July 2025: The Lord’s Prayer”

Amos 8:1-12

I was raised with felt-board Jesus and all of the traditional Bible stories, from Noah and the Ark to Paul and the earthquake, served up each week by Mr. Bridger in Sunday School. Everyone, adults and kids, went to Sunday School at 9:30 am at my childhood church, then everyone not in the nursery gathered for what we now call inter-generational worship, but that we just called worship back then, at 11:00am. 

I learned how to participate in worship as a child.

And for the record, if anyone had a sense of humor in that church, I was too young to notice. They seemed like nice enough people in that context, but I am so much happier in a denomination that knows how to laugh.

Despite this background, and decades of interest in religion, Christian and otherwise, I arrived at Divinity School twenty years ago this year with little real understanding of the historic context that gave birth to our faith tradition. What makes that even crazier is that I come from a history-loving family. My childhood home was filled with those Time-Life books you got in monthly installments, and family vacations were one battlefield or historic site after another. 

To be fair, the Biblical Age is at a much greater distance than the period covered in the 26 volumes of Time-Life’s “Old West” series. That chronological distance leaves a lot of room for uncertainty, and the events take place over centuries, not decades. The sources are a mess, re-arranged and redacted to reflect later situations, for history is and always has been told through the lens of now. 

Still, there are some broad socioeconomic and geopolitical patterns we can identify in the Ancient Near East, and one of those is that the region where most of the events unfold, roughly today’s Israel and Palestine, was a terrible place to establish an independent kingdom, which may explain why it was so short-lived. 

The land itself was marginal, semi-arid. The real problem was the great river valleys to the northeast and southwest. You see, ancient Jewish culture was based primarily on small-holds, family farm plots that produced enough food to sustain the family, with just enough surplus to trade for other essential goods. 

Those first Jewish tribes were radically democratic, and continued to have active movements of resistance even when they were ruled by monarchs and foreign powers. Democracy fosters innovation at the cost of efficiency.

To the southwest of Canaan was Egypt, with the great Nile River Valley, controlled by autocrats who enslaved and exploited.

To the northeast was the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley, which gave rise to both the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.

Both river systems produced a surplus of food, and surplus food is important. 

Continue reading “20 July 2025: Rent-Seeking”

2 Kings 5:1-14

Years ago, during my first parish internship, the well-intentioned volunteers running the Sunday School chose an all-ages curriculum based on the Books of Joshua and Judges in the Tanakh. The problem, of course, is that these books tell the story of divinely-sanctioned genocide, stories like the fortunately-mythical ethnic cleansing of Jericho.

One boy in the Sunday School, with the very biblical name Jonah, took exception, not only to the slaughter, but also to the bad science, like the sun stopping in the sky until the Israelites had finished slaughtering the Amorites, which, as the boy pointed out, would mean the earth had suddenly stopped rotating on its axis.

I am not sure how Jonah might have felt about my favorite Elisha story from the Second Book of Kings, for I have a favorite Elisha story, and assume you do as well Mine is still gruesome, though at least in the realm of the scientifically possible. It goes like this:

Elisha went up from there to Bethel. As he was going up the road, some children came out of the city. They mocked him: “Get going, Baldy! Get going, Baldy!” Turning around, Elisha looked at them and cursed them in the Lord’s name. Then two bears came out of the woods and mangled forty-two of them.

Talk about consequences!

The Elisha story in today’s reading is definitely less bloody, though it still contains a valuable lesson. Naaman, a great general in the neighboring country of Aram, learns from an Israelite slave in his household that a prophet in Israel can cure his skin disease. Naaman appeals to his own king, who sends Naaman with a royal letter and expensive gifts, asking the King of Israel for a cure. 

Naaman and his entourage are eventually directed to the prophet Elisha, who instructs him to bathe in the River Jordan seven times. The general is outraged that the cure is not more dramatic. Fortunately, his advisors have better sense, the general eventually follows Elisha’s instructions, and Naaman is healed.

The whole affair reminds me a little of the story of hydroxypropyl beta-cyclodextrin, more commonly known under the brand name Febreze. The product really was a remarkable invention, a molecule that traps volatile hydrocarbons, the kind that cause odors. Revolutionary and effective, it didn’t sell at first. The reason is two-fold.

First, people become nose-blind. When I walk into a home with multiple cats, I immediately smell multiple cats, litter box and all. The folks who live there do not. They’ve become accustomed to the odor. In the same way, were you to enter my home a few months ago, you’d have probably immediately smelled old man and dog, though I only really noticed when it was wet dog. It will smell like dog again at some point, though not yet. I once interviewed with a church near a Spam factory, the meat not the email. The whole town smelled like Spam, though I doubt the locals even noticed.

But the second reason Febreze didn’t sell is more interesting. The product has no odor of its own, which is sort of the entire point. They had to add scents like Febreze Bora-Bora Waters and Febreze Vanilla Suede, both of which raise a whole second set of marketing questions, like who is chewing on suede that tases like vanilla? But let’s just leave those aside.

The thing that made things not smell didn’t sell until they made it smell because we associate cleanliness with smells.

Crazy, right?

Continue reading “Drama Llama: 6 July 2025”

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

SERMON “Debauchery and Other Hobbies”

Back in the day, when I was still a Boy Scout, and later a Scout Leader, I wondered about the Scout Oath. I was personally comfortable doing my duty to God and my country. Well, at least I was back then. But I wondered about Scouts who did not believe in God. 

Buddhist Scouts in Buddhist countries presumably had a different oath, one that maybe included the three jewels of Buddhism: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. But what about Buddhist Scouts in the United States? I mean, you could earn a religious medal for a variety of faiths, and Buddhism was one of them, so at least one Buddhist Scout must have existed in the U.S. How did that little fellow swear to do his duty to God and country when he didn’t believe in God? 

I didn’t know about Tibetan Buddhism yet, where Bodhisattvas are a slap-dash paint job over ancient Bon gods, but the point still stands. Buddhists do not believe in God.

I would eventually have my own reckoning with that Scout Oath, for it ends with a promise to be morally straight, and straight was not exactly my specialty, even back then.

If the Boy Scouts of America assumes a particular and personified theism, the World Council of Churches assumes a particular credal system of belief. Not a complete set of dogma, no multi-page catechism, just the Nicene Creed. It is the default litmus test for Christian.

Somehow, the United Church of Christ got to stay in the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches, even after we decided that creeds were not important. You will note that we do not ask you to affirm any creed, Nicene or otherwise, on Sunday morning at The Park Church. We rarely even mention our own United Church of Christ Affirmation of Faith, which does actually exist, and is pretty palatable.

To be fair, the Roman and Anglican traditions don’t recognize our clergy since we aren’t part of the fictional unbroken line of bishops that goes back to Peter. The Lutherans are willing to give us a pass on that. Though everyone is on board with baptisms, as long as they follow the Trinitarian formula.

Fundamentalists, who rarely care about creeds, dislike us because we pick-and-choose different passages than they pick and choose, so they don’t all consider us good Christians. And if you look at Fundamentalism for too long, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that their religion is about sex and gender, who is getting lucky, who they are getting lucky with, and whether someone should be wearing that outfit and swimming in that division. Though to be fair, I sometimes wonder about people’s outfits too, not because of their gender, but because of their taste.

For Fundamentalists, gender is about power and sex must is about procreation, which aligns well with the white supremacist eugenics of Elon Musk and members of the Trump Administration. Except for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who seems hell bent on killing as many children as possible, regardless of race.

The problem, of course, is that most Fundamentalist churches, if you scratch the surface, look a lot like the Harper Valley P.T.A. That smash hit from 1968 was written by Tom T. Hall and performed by Jeannie C. Riley. A mother, chastised by the Junior High Parent Teacher Association for her loose lifestyle and short skirts, shows up at the next meeting and exposes the hypocrisy of the organization’s leaders, themselves a bunch of drunks and adulterers. Feels pretty biblical, since Jesus hangs out with sinners, and warns about judging other, lest you be judged yourself.

Continue reading “Debauchery and Other Hobbies : 29 June 2025”