The Bad Guys asks viewers to check their biases and assumptions about who is “good” and who is “bad.”
Twitter is a strange thing — if it’s any singular thing at all. If it does come to an end, I hope we’ll look back reflectively and carefully, learning from what we got right, what we got wrong, and growing into the future.
The women, in their songs, engage their community with authority, devotion, resolve, and assurance, offering praise for God’s work among and with them.
While Rethinking Sex maintains a nearly secular perspective throughout, toward the end of the book she draws on 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas’ definition of love, which is that we should be “willing the good of the other” and creating goodwill in our relationships and interactions with other people.
“We don’t think the death penalty is in line with Christian values,” said Cameron Vickrey, a staff member with Fellowship Southwest, a network of churches dedicated to social service. While she has always opposed the death penalty on compassionate grounds, Vickrey said Lucio’s case caught her attention because of new evidence demonstrating the likelihood that Lucio is innocent.
Jesus rose on Sunday, but my heart is stuck in Lent.
Last week my church gathered our first in-person Holy Week services since before the pandemic. We sung Charles Wesley’s classic Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” our trailing alleluias slightly out-of-sync as we remembered how to blend our voices. But when we got to the line, “Where, O death, is now thy sting?” the words stuck in my throat. Love’s redeeming work is done — I do believe that — but fresh examples of death’s sting aren’t hard to spot.
There are two common responses to climate fear in light of our planet’s alarming trajectory. One is escapism, which manifests as a selfish naivety that embraces a future hope of heavenly bliss and ignores the destruction around us. The other is despair, or an inability to see beyond our current disaster. I’d like to suggest a third response: an active, paradisiacal hope that doesn’t disconnect from the present world, but instead meets our planetary problems head-on.
I wish I could say that my journey into beekeeping began in some profound manner, especially as a person who has spent years working on policies that impact the environment and food security. But the truth is that I started playing The Sims 4 to keep myself entertained during the pandemic, and the game had a beekeeping feature. As I played, I thought, “I can do this.” And that is how my beekeeping journey began.
Recently, Florida House Bill 1557, more commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” was signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Speaking from a podium adorned with the slogan “Protect Children, Support Parents” DeSantis, a Catholic, wasted no time vilifying the bill’s critics as sexual indoctrinators. He was hardly the first to do so. During the initial backlash to the legislation, Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’ press secretary tweeted from her personal Twitter account that opponents of H.B. 1557 were probably sexual groomers: “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year-old children.”
So when I read about people like Katie, one of many affirming parents who are leaving Texas because of the threat of having their transgender child taken from them, I think of the way the women at the tomb fled in fear. And when I hear Maddie, a trans girl in North Carolina, say, “If I didn’t have my hormones or my [puberty] blocker, I’d be very unhappy, and I wouldn’t want to leave the house sometimes,” I think of the disciples with the door locked on Easter evening.