George Lakoff argues that progressives are in despair because they are trying to do 21st century politics with an 18th century mind. Progressives are clinging to an unworkable model of reason. Another of Aristotle’s persuasion tropes is sweeping across America –…
I’ve seen this movie before
If you live long enough, you can tell when the re-runs are playing. Now eyeing 80, I find some of the re-runs are no better now than the first performance. For instance: When the Southern Baptist wars began in 1979,…
Ungodly? That all depends on what God you serve
Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, has long been an ardent public supporter of Donald Trump. He recently preached that the Biden administration was “the ungodliest administration in the history of our country,” a continuation of ongoing…
Trump will visit First Baptist Dallas this Sunday while on ‘History Tour’ with Bill O’Reilly
Just days after a new tell-all book explained that former President Donald Trump’s June 2020 photo op at St. John’s Church near the White House was his daughter’s idea, Trump has announced where he’ll be this year the Sunday morning…
Dear Robert Jeffress: You’ve called the wrong U.S. president ‘ungodly’
Robert Jeffress used his Dec. 5 sermon to claim that President Joe Biden has the most “ungodly” administration in American history. “The Biden administration is ungodly! I don’t care how many rosary beads they rub, they’re ungodly,” he intoned. “This…
Moral leaders need to speak the truth about COVID and vaccines, Griffen urges
Wendell Griffen seldom minces words. Especially when talking about the coronavirus pandemic and the role he believes former President Donald Trump — and his religious enablers — played in allowing it to spread rapidly and repeatedly across the United States….
The Ahmaud Arbery murder trial encapsulates the two Americas today, but there’s a silent third group
One of the things that’s easy to forget about the conviction of three white men for the cold-blooded murder of Ahmaud Arbery is that there almost wasn’t a trial. There were no arrests for two months after the murder. Two…
The leap from ‘The Bible says’ to ‘Believe me’ and ‘God told me’
I confess to the temptation of dismissing evangelical rhetoric of the political sort as symptomatic of one or another particularly noxious pathology. There’s also my own impatience at what I discern as the absurdity of evangelical political messages confidently delivered…
The violence of rhetoric in our toxic culture
Words have wings and fly where they please. Words provide unconscious but sometimes deadly after-effects the speaker can’t control. Most recently, Congress has censured Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., for his depiction of violent acts against other members of Congress and…