The Weekly Sift

This week I’m releasing a post that has been sitting unfinished in my draft pile for months: “How did Christianity become so toxic?”, subtitled “Six ways conservative theology undercuts the teachings of Jesus.”

I started writing this piece to explain what I see as a paradox: Any time you’re out there working to make the world better in some way, chances are that you’re elbow-to-elbow with somebody who goes to church and is trying to live by the Sermon on the Mount. But at the same time, organized Christianity is your biggest enemy. The people who are either creating the problem you’re working to solve, or making it worse, claim to be championing “Christian values”.

How the Hell did that happen?

My answer is that Jesus’ enigmatic, person-to-person teaching style left room for subsequent generations to build a structure around his teachings, one that offers simple answers rather than mysteries and challenges. By now, the structure that got built in Evangelical churches has Jesus completely walled off.

I pick out six particular ways that works, like “Focusing on the Devil opens people to conspiracy theories.” I also explain how denial of evolution blazed a path for denial of climate change, of Covid, of systemic racism, and just about anything else people don’t want to believe. Stuff like that.

Anyway, this article that started with a paradox is itself a paradox: It’s simultaneously a denunciation of Christianity and the most Christian thing I’ve ever written. Go figure.

I’ll try to get it out by 10 EDT. The weekly summary should follow noonish.

One policy of this blog is that I try not to spread my ignorance. If I don’t know anything, I don’t say much; and if I do repeat rumor and speculation, I try to label it correctly. Over the last few weeks, that policy has kept me from devoting many paragraphs to the biggest story in the news: the possibility that Russia might invade Ukraine.

But this week the invasion actually started, and suddenly the problem is that there’s too much information. Every network has correspondents talking over the roar of bombs and artillery. In multiple countries, government officials are announcing specific actions, rather than deflecting questions about actions they might take in response to events that might not happen.

In addition to watching and reading my usual news sources, I spent much of the week glued to the #Ukraine hashtag on Twitter, where ordinary Ukrainians posted videos shot on their phones and retweeted stories they found important. It presented the usual problems of raw intelligence — for about half an hour I believed hackers from Anonymous had taken over Russian state TV — but it was also incredibly moving. (I really hope this young couple is still alive.) Some of it was also funny, like the clip of the Ukrainian motorist who passed an out-of-fuel armored car and offered to tow it back to Russia.

So anyway, I’m going to try to sort through all that in this week’s featured article, which may not be out until 10 or 11 EST.

With all that going on this week, who even noticed that Biden made a historic Supreme Court nomination? Or thought much about Covid? (“This decade is kinda sucking so far, no?” one of my Facebook friends commented.) Or the January 6 investigation? Or the baseball lockout? Or any of a hundred other things. I’ll get to all that in the weekly summary, which might not appear until after noon.

This is an I-do-your-homework week. If you want to make a difference in the November mid-term elections, who should you be sending money to or volunteering for? I’ll go through Senate races, House races, and governorships, while reminding you not to lose sight of state legislatures and school boards.

That should be out maybe around 10 EST.

The weekly summary covers the Canadian “Freedom” Convoy, the latest Trump revelations, Omicron’s continuing fade, Super Bowl commercials, and a few other things. That should be out maybe noonish.

A week ago, I did not anticipate that I would spend so much of this week thinking about the Holocaust. Sure, Thursday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, but that usually comes and goes without me paying much attention. This year, though, a Tennessee school board’s decision to take the Pulizer-winning Holocaust-themed graphic novel Maus out of their curriculum went viral, and for a couple days that was all anybody on my social media feeds wanted to talk about.

A lot of people jumped to one conclusion or another, but it turned out that you didn’t need to speculate that much about what was going on: The minutes of the board’s meeting were available online, and so were PDFs of Maus. I do my best to sort it all out in “McMinn County’s Maus Problem”, which should be out by 10 EST.

Not that the week lacked for other news: Justice Breyer announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, so the partisan wrangling over his replacement has already begun. Every day brings new speculations about whether the Russians are about to invade Ukraine. The Omicron wave of Covid began to recede. A blizzard hit the Northeast. GDP and inflation numbers came out.

So the weekly summary has a lot of ground to cover. I’ll try to have that out by noon.

So we had the January 6 anniversary.

In this week’s featured post, I’ll lay out my theory of news-event anniversaries: News and History interface badly. News inevitably tends to be detail-focused, and to lose track of the larger story in favor of the new detail we just discovered. History, on the other hand, waits for all the dust to settle, which could take years. In the meantime, there’s a need to occasionally take stock of what we know so far, and retell the whole story as we now understand it, putting things in the perspective we expect historians to take eventually.

That’s what anniversaries are for. News may claim to be the first draft of History, but an anniversary report is a much-needed second draft.

So that’s what I’ll do today in “One Year Later”, which is still under construction. I’ll guess it comes out between 10 and 11 EST.

Meanwhile, the Omicron surge continues to push daily case-counts to record highs, and hospitalizations and deaths are beginning to rise as well. The Supreme Court heard arguments about Biden’s vaccine mandates, a case that has implications way beyond the current pandemic. The daylong traffic jam on I-95 may not seem like a big story nationally, but a WaPo columnist turned it into an attack on electric vehicles in an article that got a lot of national attention; that fear-mongering column needs a rational response, which I try to provide. The guys who lynched Ahmaud Arbery got an appropriately harsh sentence, Sidney Poitier died, and a few other things happened.

All in all, I thought the week needed an escapist closing, so I went with a video from the National Zoo of their panda cub enjoying his first snow. But the Covid horse race call was also irresistible, so I decided to have a double closing this week. We deserve it.

The weekly summary should be out between noon and 1.