Kiwi2021
In GEN. More on Medium.
An appreciation of how wonderfully, revolutionarily boring Joe Biden has been as president
What’s President Joe Biden’s position on the legal travails of Representative Matt Gaetz? Where does he stand on the removal of some Dr. Seuss books from publication? What public comments did he make about the Japanese golfer who won the Masters last weekend? What does President Joe Biden think about NFTs? After copious research, I believe the answers to those questions are none, he doesn’t, he didn’t, and he almost definitely has no idea what that is.
I keep trying to articulate just what we are currently experiencing as a country, and I think I’ve found a good comparison. Do…
A new academic study looks at the shame gendered by a religious system of enforced masculinity
In a tweet, social scientist Samuel L. Perry posed a thesis: Evangelical subculture fosters masculine insecurity, especially when it comes to a self-perception of penis size. “But how to study penis insecurity?” Perry wrote. If you tried to survey people, he thought, everyone would lie. “But NOBODY lies to Google.”
This month, Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, sociologists from University of Oklahoma and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis respectively, published a study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR) in which they found the preponderance of evangelicals in a given state consistently predicts greater numbers of Google searches…
Edgar Sydenstricker dug into the pandemic of 1918 and found income level was a key factor in who lived and who died
Edgar Sydenstricker, the preeminent epidemiologist of his generation, showed how the 1918 flu pandemic was hardest on the poor, as were so many of the health conditions he studied. He had a plan to fix it. Today, we’re finding, and debating, the same things.
As the flu pandemic of 1918 circled the United States in wave after wave or two years, the poor died in droves. It was a predictable outcome. …
The Christian influencer and Bible teacher has been a towering figure among evangelicals willing to criticize Trump
Beth Moore fills a commanding niche in women’s evangelical circles. She has nearly a million Twitter followers; she runs Living Proof Ministries, a Texas-based Bible organization for women; she has headlined sports-arena-sized conferences; and she hosts a television show.
Moore is a petite, blonde, Southern belle with an Arkadelphia, Arkansas, folksiness and a televangelist’s urgency. She’s charming, self-deprecating, and can with conviction call Satan a liar and Donald Trump an example of “gross entitlement & power.” …
Pastors tend to the spiritual needs of their congregations. Conspiracy theories have made their jobs a lot harder.
Vicar Derek Kubilus, a United Methodist pastor, has one of those voices — knowing but full of levity. When we attended church camp together as teenagers, I often wondered if he was telling a joke I didn’t quite understand. Today, I hear a matured version of this voice on his podcast, Cross Over Q, which offers healing for QAnon followers and family members from a Christian perspective. …
