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The kingdom of heaven is within

The kingdom of heaven is within

Last updated on: November 18, 2025 at 4:03 pm by Fred Clark

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The kingdom of heaven is within 2025-11-18T16:03:48-05:00 Fred Clark

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• “Of course, it doesn’t feel right to want IT to HAPPEN. And it’s obviously not okay to try to make IT HAPPEN. That’s not what this is ABOUT, just to make things CLEAR LEGALLY as far as VARIOUS AGENCIES are concerned.”

“But regardless, IT is going to HAPPEN. So you’re allowed to think about IT.”

• “Former MAGA Judge Josh Kindred Finally Gets the Disbarment He so Richly Deserves.”

Kindred got a lifetime appointment to a federal district court seat in the first Trump administration, but he sex-pested his way out of that job in just a few years with a host of ethics violations. And since those violations involved lawyers with cases before his court, some of those cases will now have to be reconsidered.

I’m posting about this mainly to take issue with this comment from Kathryn Rubino’s piece on Kindred’s self-destruction: “Not to tell the Federalist Society how to run its orientation sessions, but ‘don’t accept explicit photos from someone litigating in your courtroom’ should really be on page one.”

Right, as Rubino says you wouldn’t think anybody would need to be told not to do that. But since apparently some people do need to be told not to do that, it should be on page one of the ethics manual.

Alas, however, page one is only one page long. And one page is not nearly long enough to list all the specific things that you would need to tell someone not to do if they’re the kind of person who needs to be told specifically not to do that.

And even if space one page one were limitless, you would never have sufficient time or imagination to list and enumerate all of the many creatively awful things this kind of person would need to have listed and enumerated for them. You can never come up with enough rules to govern the behavior of someone who has no principles.

I am not a lawyer, and my objection here comes from my theological outlook — the Isaiah/Jesus/Paul view that looks for overarching and underlying summaries of all of the law and the prophets in a Golden Rule/”love is the fulfillment of the law” kind of way. But it seems like this would also have important applications for a federal district judge seeking to interpret, say, the 10th or the 14th Amendments.

And also, while I am not a lawyer, I apparently was lawyer-ly when I was a little kid, which is why my mother cut out an old Dennis the Menace cartoon and hung it on our refrigerator with a magnet for years. It showed Dennis sulking as he was being made to sit in the corner as punishment, angrily insisting that “Nobody ever SAID I couldn’t paint the toilet bowl purple!” That was her way of pointing out that she couldn’t possibly list all of the rules on “page one” that would need to be listed there if I insisted on being the kind of person who required all of the rules to be listed for me. Lesson learned (eventually).

• Ryan Burge frets about “the Political Divide Between Mainline Clergy and Laity.” Kinda dumb to be doing this for free when groups like IRD get tons of right-wing foundation money for covering this beat.

That piece is full of gee-whiz graphs designed to illustrate his superlative adjectives — “huge,” “striking,” “an absolute chasm.” This is how his graphs and analysis characterize data like this: “Among Episcopalians, 35% of members are Republicans compared to just 7% of their pastors.”

Shocking. Now graph this: One third of all white evangelicals insist that abortion should be legal in most circumstances. That’s a consistent finding over the last four decades of polling on the issue. Compare that with the percentage of white evangelical clergy willing to say that publicly (0%) and with the percentage of white evangelicals whose paychecks come from evangelical institutions who would be allowed to agree with that stance on the record (also 0%).

Seems like a huger, more striking, absolute chasm to me.

• “Nip, Pray, Tuck: Christians are clashing over whether faith and fillers (and much more) can ever align,” by Avery Stone.

“I’m a Christian living under grace,” the 35-year-old says. “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. When we get plastic surgery, we shouldn’t be doing that on our own. We have to talk to God first.”

Take, for example, that God allowed Dupra to undergo an upper blepharoplasty — a surgical procedure that removes excess skin from the upper eyelids this year. Days after recovery and still swollen, stitched, and bandaged, she posted a TikTok for her 946,000 followers, breaking down her decision with her faith in mind. “My eyelids were, like, hanging down; I felt like 35 was hitting me hard,” she tells me of her mindset. “I thought, ‘I do a lot of livestreams where I preach the gospel.’ Maybe he’s fine with me having a little more confidence in front of the camera.”

Put another way: “I’m advancing the kingdom,” she says of getting an upper bleph. “But how am I advancing the kingdom with my butt?”

This piece may make you boggle a bit at the notion that getting plastic surgery is seen by some as a means of “advancing the kingdom,” but we need to take a few steps back from that to first consider how boggling and boggled it is that these folks first regard proclamation evangelism via social media to be the entirety of “advancing the kingdom” and all that is missed and mixed and messed by that.

• The title for this post comes from, among other places, “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow,” by Funkadelic.

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