Kiwi2021
In GEN. More on Medium.
Protection against illness and death should be enough to convince people to roll up their sleeves. But since it isn’t, let’s bring on the gimmicks.
“You can’t win if you don’t play!”
“Odds are, you’ll have fun!”
These are slogans I knew growing up, along with a 7:30 pm prohibition on any child-made sound as the Ohio Pick-3 aired on TV. My dad would strategize, consult tattered books listing previous winning numbers, carefully choose his number combination, and lay out a dollar or two he’d almost always lose. But he won enough to keep him interested, betting his luck might change.
There’s a certain brilliance in Ohio Governor Mike DeWine’s “Vax-a-Million” announcement. Over the next five weeks, each week a $1 million dollar winner will…
The family’s recent response to his child pornography charges only underscores how complementarianism elevates men over the vulnerable, leaving women to deal with the fallout
This week Josh Duggar appeared in court on child pornography charges. Duggar became a public figure after starring in the TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting, which was canceled in 2015 after news surfaced that, as a teen, Duggar had molested four of his sisters and a family friend.
At the child pornography hearing, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent described the more than 200 images said to have been downloaded on Duggar’s devices in May 2019. They depicted sexual abuse of children ages 18 months to 12 years old. …
There is rage, yes, but also endless disappointment
Before I even got out of bed this morning, I read this long piece in Slate about Blake Bailey, the author of the recent Philip Roth biography whose publication has been frozen amid allegations of rape and sexual assault, as well as grooming young students. I can’t stop reading about it. There are more stories, memories, allegations surfacing from his former students, and it’s bringing up feelings. I was fortunate to talk to a couple friends who are also women writers about this over Zoom the other night. …
In her new book ‘The Making of Biblical Womanhood,’ history professor Beth Allison Barr reveals centuries of women that modern leaders keep trying to erase
I was seventeen years old in 1997 and thought I might be receiving a call to the ministry. The places I felt safest were in prayer, head bowed over my Bible, or in church, considering this precious, complicated world as a gift and thanking the God who I thought gave it to us.
I even had a good role model, a witty, vibrant associate pastor who told stories that wove together her gentle humor and a faith I saw as beautiful. But as I began exploring what Christian faith might look like, I expanded out away from her curious, humble…
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. …
GEN
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