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Probably the first and last time I’ll write here about football players.

While Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master provides the latest (and greatest) vantage point, 2011 saw the release of three solid films on the topic. Why now?

Parting Ways is Butler’s attempt to construct a Jewish narrative that coheres with her philosophical and political sensibilities as well as her allegiance to her Jewish heritage and lineage. As a Jew for whom religious practice and the Jewish textual tradition do not constitute her Jewish core, hers is a secular narrative of Jewishness outside the orbit of Zionism. Butler’s concern for Israel is that she believes its present construction is “Jewishly” indefensible (in the terms she develops in her book) and the muscularity with which Zionism is proffered squashes any alternative narrative of diasporic Jewish identity.

For those still in denominations like the United Methodists that are not accepting of LGBT people, go to your church and put a note in the offering plate that says you won’t give until things change. Every time we’ve tried that, the pastors have called people in immediately to talk to them and it opened up a dialogue in that church that was serious because they could see that that could spread among other people who are pro-gay. One thing you can do is withhold your money. Why are we supporting our own oppression?

Restless Heart is quite obviously a labor of love. Someone really, really loves Augustine. Writing critically about it, which I must do, feels a bit like complaining that someone’s terribly earnest, harp-accompanied wedding was tacky, and too long.

The theology that gets you to a point where you can say this.

Renewal Project in Missouri gathers pastors for Todd Akin.

The hope, the change, the Antichrist.

Policy shift has far-reaching impact. Pivotal, even.

I just returned from watching 2016: Obama’s America, arch-conservative Dinesh D’Souza’s election-year documentary, which I went to because I wanted to see it at our former church, a central Nebraska Salvation Army congregation’s “Teen Night.”