Okay, so last thoughts on this.
I am all about amateur scholars trying to learn more about the Bible. The trick is doing it well.
If you are interesting in the Bible- I think in the US we are really conditioned to think that there’s some big secret about what the Bible “really says” and that makes people want to go after the esoteric stuff like trying to come up with wild translations or speculate about lost books.
Here’s the thing.
The place where people misunderstand the Bible the most isn’t that way. It’s taking your modern assumptions to a text.

Okay, so let's have a learning party. We're gonna have a teachable moment.
Words mean things in context. They aren't codes. That means words, and phrases, can have more than one meaning.
So let's say I'm teaching you to read English and we hit the sentence "I made him a cake."

https://twitter.com/naomirwolf/status/1780386286307582061

I say that this means "I made a cake for him." You say that the same phrase can mean two things: it can mean "I made a cake for him" or "I transformed him into a cake."
You're literally correct about that but if you say "it can mean both, or either," it context you're probably

This is tired but I think in part when we're talking about kids in public we're talking about changing etiquette norms, which do tend to roll over generationally.
The etiquette in question being "in a restaurant, are the tables islands, or should you expect to hear and see what other people are doing?"
And this actually might be changing with adults too.
I think when I was a kid the expectation was "you don't, and you don't use common spaces like aisles except to go to the bathroom."
And I actually don't think that's the etiquette now.

In 2004 this graph would have had my church dancing in the aisles

https://twitter.com/nancyrpearcey/status/1779922373589794868

I'm not trying to be glib and I know that a lot of this data correlates with feelings of depression and loneliness, but I also think we need to find a way forward from cyclical freaking out about the young and wild over correction.

Okay, so, here's why you can't make policy based off of vibes and movies.
I guarantee the logic here is this idea that "well, if they know they'll get the death penalty, then child abusers will stop taking kids in Wal Mart!"
Because they literally have no idea how child abuse

https://twitter.com/FLVoiceNews/status/1778079769801670703

actually works and who commits it. They still think that an effective way to fight child trafficking is to not let kids walk alone on sidewalks.
Here's the thing. The vast, vast majority of child abuse happens within families. Parents, siblings, step siblings, caregivers, etc.

First, I’m sorry to put such fungal content produced by the journalism equivalent of a plantar wart on your timeline, but - you know what always stands out to me when you read survivors’ accounts of sexual assault in church?
No one ever remembers being told what to do in the event of an attempted assault.
The irony is there’s literally a biblical instruction about it- scream your head off, and if you hear screaming, come running and throwing hands, in Deuteronomy. It’s what Susannah does.
But again and again you see stories of people coming out of

So I look at some of these answers and I worry a little that “they’re anxious” or “they’re traumatized” is becoming the new politically correct version of “their culture doesn’t value education.”
The tyranny of low expectations.
Yes it’s been a bad few years but I don’t think

https://twitter.com/ProfessaJay/status/1778492644458418358

it’s realistic to think that students’ mental health is going to get better in the long term if they don’t have skills and can’t apply them to any curiosities, hobbies, or interests.
To be clear, I think rubrics are good but I think what he’s getting at is the broader issue of

Maybe this is the thing:
The thing that makes a good teacher is not the same thing that makes someone a good entertainer.
Pastors aren’t entertainers.
There’s a difference between challenging someone, and upending their preconceived notions, and using sticky images

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1778055677379784753

to illustrate, and creating discomfort in your audience THAT way, and doing edgy jokes and thereby creating discomfort in your audience.
You can be a funny teacher but humor is part of the teaching set.
If you’re just standing up there at a pulpit cracking wise and enjoying

Okay, I want to try out a word on you guys.
"Helicopter pastoring."
I think part of why this conversation interests me so much is because the word "deconstruction" implies a social context where you need a word to describe the phenomenon of asking the kinds of questions that

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1776978825772945529

might lead you from becoming a nondenominational Protestant to a Methodist.
The fact that people need a word to describe something that on paper looks very minor is really, REALLY noticeable.
And I can't help but wonder if there's something going on there with a confluence

"Deconstruction" is an odd word to me and one I don't use for myself because I think there is a meaningful distinction between leaving a religion and joining a different sect within it (and "deconstruction" means both, confusingly) but I think the fact that the word emerged at all is itself an indicator of a strange phenomenon: the widespread expectation that people's faith should not change between ages 6-30 and something noticeable and destabilizing is happening if it does.
And I just don't think that's a reasonable goal for any religious community

The response to the trad wife thread that makes me shiver is the “well, that’s not how it’s going to be for me, because we make faith the center of our marriage.”
😬
Look, I’m sure you did, and I really do wish there was a hack to guarantee that what someone says is what they do.
But I can name at least three women whose pastor husbands left them for younger women after 20ish years and the kids were grown.
I don’t think they forgot to make faith the center of their marriage. I think there’s just a brutal reality

One of my working theories for the emergence of the "Trad wife" aesthetic is that it depends a lot on disconnection from women who were actually adults in the 1950s and 60s.
I grew up in a lot of highly intergenerational spaces and the idea that we'd lost some sort of golden age was just never available to me. Everyone was aware of women who had been homemakers and then dealt with spousal alcoholism, abuse, incestuous abuse of the children, infidelity, abandonment, etc. And when I look at statistics from that ear it seems like this wasn't unusual.

Okay, here is my solution to this.
Be kind- look, for you it’s just stuff but I hate the idea of someone burning my books when I die. I want someone to use them.
Also, just TAKE THE CHINA AND USE IT LIKE ANY OTHER PLATE.
My grandma left me china when she died. I eat off it every

https://twitter.com/yooneedmorejodi/status/1775211761219551502

single day. Does the color keep as well if I used it only on special occasions? No. But it’s important to me to try to keep my personal consumption low, and it’s better for something to get used and break than not get used at all.

Okay, I want to give some free unsolicited advice for getting things done:
If you have a problem with an organization, you want to talk to the person who deals with your problem. Not the most senior person you can talk to.
Here’s what I mean. Let’s say I buy a phone from Tony works at the Apple Store. Tony sells me a bum phone. I want it fixed or refunded so I call the CEO of Apple.
The CEO can’t do either of those things for me. He doesn’t know Tony. He can’t fix phones. He will need to go through about 90 layers

Okay, I want to push on the way some of you guys are using free speech language.
I am talking about the US , we don’t have hate speech laws here and there’s no plausible avenue to them I can between the judicial and legislative branches - we’re not going to amend the constitution to prosecute bigoted speech any time soon, and the court isn’t going to reverse centuries of judicial policy on this. It’s not going to happen any time soon, I’m not talking about prosecution for speech. Not a thing here. Not going to be a thing here in the

I’m not going to sit here and fight with the worst people on the internet but for the record:
We don’t have hate speech restrictions in the US . I do think they are a bad idea. I can’t speak to the way this law fits into an extent hate speech code because we just don’t have that in the US.
I think politically active billionaires do not deserve protection from criticism. “Oh but he said something mean about her” yeah she’s a public figure. She’s in politics. That’s kind of how it goes.

This is a thing that’s hitting my ear strangely.
Does anyone else think English speaking avoid the collective phrase “men and children?”
I notice this whenever you see some headline along the line of “now that women are economically independent and happy no one is taking care of The Family or The Home” or some kind of vague, almost euphemistic abstract.
But we don’t actually mean The Home or The Family. A man who lives with his parents is in a family and a woman who lives with her dogs has a home.

You know, maybe this is actually a better approach.
Can we just end the phenomenon of I’m Kind of a Gross Pastor?
I’m Kind of a Gross Pastor is older than Driscoll but it definitely took off then. There is absolutely no reason to be more okay with I’m Kind of a Gross Pastor

https://twitter.com/rickpidcock/status/1774164130305302876

than I’m Kind of a Gross Accountant.
Are you trying to be Kind of a Gross Pastor? Yeah? That’s over. Stop.
Are you worried you’re Kind of a Gross Pastor? You probably are.
Here’s a good rule of thumb: would this be sexual harassment at another job?

Man I know talking about penal substitution on Twitter is cursed but my big takeaway is Americans have an astonishingly broad definition of “punishment.”
Like almost all interpersonal interactions are some kind of punishment. One person forgives another person? The forgiving person is being punished.
A person pays a ransom for another person? The person who pays the ransom is being punished.
A person tricks another person? The tricked person is punished.

So this is something I need people to appreciate:
“You don’t need to interpret the Bible or need experts, you just need common sense” is an instruction to treat the speaker as God.
It’s not the victory for the little guy people think it is.
Here’s what I mean: The odds that you’re going to read the Bible and be confused by it or read it differently from someone else is near 100 percent.
When that happens, you can pull in the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about this in secondary sources, and even if you don’t

This week in Crochet AI garbage, the images are increasingly cursed.

For a woman who is ninety nine yearm she sure likes to dismember babies