Introduction
One would think that after being trapped in nature for two solid weeks there would be much to talk about. Instead, I’ve really got nothing, but the commitment to try and post every Tuesday and Friday. As a result I am going to mention three things that piqued my interest over the weekend the only connecting tissue being that they all were from podcasts I listened to and naturally have opinions on. If this is not edifying perhaps it will at least be entertaining, and I can guarantee, mercifully short.
Podcast and Opinion #1 Life Books and Everything
Starting off with yet another shameless push for Kevin DeYoung’s piece for World Opinions When Roe was Overturned. I can not get enough of this article, now in audio form read by the Author! It brings together so many things I love. Star Wars, Keven DeYoung being snarky, and a much needed rebuke to evangelical pastors and elites who punted on Roe out of cowardice and then had the gaul to say the problem was us for not being nuanced. I will have more to say on this with the second podcast. But this was just near perfection, I had been waiting for this episode of Life Books and Everything ever since the article was published, and DeYoung exceeded my expectations in his reading. Every pastor should be required to listen to this. Knowing they won’t I commend it to you, it can be listened to here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/life-and-books-and-everything/id1526483896?i=1000568974407
Podcast and Opinion #2 Relatable Allie Beth Stuckey
In general I try to avoid any thing from “The Blaze” people. There is just a sloppiness there in the big tent nature of what they see as conservative or allies that bothers me.* I know about Stuckey from her writing on The Federalist and know her to be solid so every once in a while I check in if it looks like she is talking about something I am interested in. And she was promising to take a few cracks at Russell Moore over is silence after the reversal of Roe. Unfortunately, I don’t think she stuck the landing, or to be more accurate she didn’t talk about what I was hoping she would. She had a good monologue about her suspicion that most of the pastors, or ministry leaders who were telling us rather raucous victors that we needed to back it off a notch because some people were taking umbrage to our antics (Or as DeYoung put it in his also excellent “Let the Little Children Come to Me article, “We don’t need a thousand Michals telling David to stop leaping for joy.”). Those people were never involved in the fight for life in the first place and so if they were going to be on the couch while we fought to end abortion then they should stay on the couch and shut up after we ended abortion.
By in large I think for many of the Twitterati this is a very safe read of the situation. However, the reason I was tuning in, and probably many others, was because the description was about Evangelical Elites, namely Russell Moore and Beth Moore.** Which I think weakened Stuckey’s argument. For a little as I think of the Moores they are both smart enough to have covered their abortion bases early on in their careers. So in times like these they can point back to things they have said or done to contradict their current hypocrisies.
Podcast and Opinion #4 Doctrine and Devotion
Ok these really stacked up while I was away and I managed to get through just enough to confuse me on which episode exactly Joe said the thing I am going to pick at. I think it was in the riotous Variety Pack episode, but I could be wrong. That one and several of the others I listened to were just so much fun I remember laughing out loud several times. When Joe and Jimmy are on they are on. So this is the most good natured nit pick I could possibly level. But saying that Narnia books should not be used in sermons to illustrate, Joe… Joe, for shame sir. For, shame. if I may paraphrase my master, Lewis, ““We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it… None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only Joe Thorn’s books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of Narnia blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading The Chronicles of Narnia.”
*For more on that you can read this previous post pointing out that if it was bad for Russell Moore to platform Francis Collins then it is also bad for The Blaze people, who claim to be reformed Christians, to platform a tranny alongside a former pornstar lesbian simply because there happens to be some political overlap. https://southernreformedsmoker.com/2022/02/18/this-is-a-problem/
**No familial relation, but perhaps one as siblings under the Son of Hell family.
Southern Reformed Smoker 