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Long story short

Long story short

Last updated on: September 26, 2026 at 11:48 am by Fred Clark

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Long story short 2026-09-26T11:48:33-04:00 Fred Clark

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• James Bratt on “Angelina Grimké and the Turmoils of Perfection.”

Grimké is a fascinating figure — and not just because of the epic scowling she does in every portrait we have of her. She was an early abolitionist and an advocate of women’s rights.

I first came across Angelina and her sister, Sarah Moore Grimké, in Donald W. Dayton’s odd little history Discovering an Evangelical Heritage. That book profiles a host of 19th-century American Christians who might be categorized as “evangelicals” — in a Bebbington Quadrilateral kind of way — who were at the forefront of abolitionism and other struggles for social justice.

Dayton’s book was important to me back when I was working for a white evangelical nonprofit in the “progressive evangelical” orbit of Ron Sider, Jim Wallis, and Tony Campolo. Our status within white evangelicalism was perpetually contested and challenged, so Dayton’s evidence of this lineage seemed to affirm our legitimacy within a tradition that otherwise seemed determined to find some excuse to expel us.

But Dayton’s book also made me a bit anxious, given that it included so many people like the Grimkés and Angelina’s husband, Theodore Dwight Weld — people who started out very much within the “evangelical” tradition but who ended up very much somewhere else. Some jumped, some were pushed, but many of those earlier evangelical advocates for social justice were not able to remain “evangelical.” Many of those that retained their “evangelical” character lost their fervor for justice while many of those who retained that commitment to justice transformed into something more vaguely Emersonian than evangelical.

Bratt’s discussion of Angelina Grimké makes a case that she was an extremely devout evangelical — perhaps too devout. Her devotion to moral perfection was ultimately unsustainable, and she was greatly disappointed by the Great Disappointment.

Bratt hooks me in by promising that this is the first in a series of posts looking at other 19th-century “evangelical” activists who followed a similar arc: “The searing conviction that launched their crusade burned itself out. Next time we’ll look at how this happened for Theodore Weld and what that reveals of the character of American evangelicalism.”

If I could propose a name for Bratt’s series, I’d suggest “Discovering an Exvangelical Heritage.”

• Pittsburgh’s City Theater has a big hit with its revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

The only thing stopping every theater from enjoying the same success is, alas, that this requires being able to cast an actor who can pull off this part. The article linked above says Pittsburgh has one in the wonderfully named Treasure Treasure, but quadruple-threats (acting, singing, dancing, glam-rock panache) aren’t always easy to come by. It takes more than just a spectacular assortment of wigs.

Still, if you can cast it, Hedwig is not just a terrific show, but probably an important one these days. The fact that it helps theaters sell tons of tickets is just an added bonus.

(Or again, if you’re not big on musicals, how about Twelfth Night? “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?“)

• This story is notable in light of our recent discussion of the social nature of knowledge — how “we” know lots of things that you and I and any given one of us may not know individually: “New wild cat species is identified for first time in 100 years, researchers say.”

For the first time in a century, researchers say they’ve identified a new species of wild cat previously unknown to science.

Leopardus tilcayo — or the tilcayo tiger cat — is slender and spotted, with rounded ears. It is smaller than a typical house cat and lives in the Bolivian Yungas, the cloud forest where the Andes mountains meet the Amazon basin. The species was described for the first time in the journal Current Biology.

You’ll want to follow that link to see the photos, because these little tigers are adorable. But they’re not really “new.” They may have been “previously unknown to science,” but they were not previously unknown to the indigenous people who live in the Bolivian cloud forest. That’s why those who “discovered” these cats for science appropriately chose to keep the name those people have been using for as long as they can remember:

Nogales-Ascarrunz said, however, that local communities in Bolivia have been aware of the species’ presence for generations.

“This cat, they call it tilcayo. And when you ask, ‘Does it have some meaning in Quechua or Almyra and other Indigenous languages?’ they say, ‘No, my grandpa told me that’s the tilcayo,’” Nogales-Ascarrunz said. “This is a traditional knowledge that they have in the community. We want to preserve that knowledge and we didn’t want to give it another name.”

“We” didn’t know what these folks’ grandparents already knew. But now we do. “We” are learning.

• James McGrath remembers Rachel Held Evans and recommends the new collection of her work, “even if you are sure you have read everything that she ever wrote.”

• On the last day of August, for some reason, I wrote about the Song of Deborah and its brutal mockery of Sisera’s mother. Here’s Kim Paris Gunter from the first day of September, turning to that same passage for insight after watching the documentary series “Death of the Pastor’s Wife.”

The oldest passage in the Bible still has new things to say.

• “You know … for the kids.”

• On Bluesky I was musing, again, about “Steve” — the mysterious figure, neither begotten nor made, who according to white evangelical tradition inhabited the Garden of Eden along with Adam and Eve. (Hence, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”). That prompted this response:

And the Stephilim were on the Earth in those days

— Blake C. Stacey (@blakestacey.myatproto.social) 2026-09-18T23:13:03.382Z

And henceforth, I will be using the term “Stephilim” whenever I am asked about this mysterious, extrabiblical figure, this Melchizedek of primeval queerness, who features so prominently in white evangelical lore.

Steve, we should note, was not expelled from paradise after the sin of Adam and Eve. Steve, who was not himself forbidden, did not partake in their forbidden deeds, and so he remains there, in Eden, ageless and deathless and unfallen.

(The next time I go four or five days without posting here you can just assume I’m feverishly writing a 2,000-word essay on Tom Bombadil as a “Steve” figure, and then deleting it because I couldn’t decide whether or not my dumb joke about Goldberry being “gender-fluid” was in good taste.)

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