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Smart people saying smart things (9.23.26)

Smart people saying smart things (9.23.26)

Last updated on: September 23, 2026 at 4:26 pm by Fred Clark

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Smart people saying smart things (9.23.26) 2026-09-23T16:26:57-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

Steven Tyra, “How Modern Citizenship Debates Echo The Reformation”

When I first came across Lavater’s sermon in defense of “sojourners,” I found myself wondering not only how Reformed Protestants at the time heard it but even more how their theological descendants would receive it today. It’s a cliché (and a false one) that history repeats itself. Zurich’s struggles with immigration in the 1500s cannot simply be transposed onto, say, the United States in the 2020s. Still, it’s hard not to hear echoes of our own political moment in Lavater’s stern reminder that “our ancestors also migrated from somewhere else.”

Randy Woodley, “Christian Nationalism from Winthrop to January 6th”

Here’s what I’ve learned in fifty years of trying to walk the Jesus Road inside and alongside institutions that mostly couldn’t tell the difference between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of America. The theology that produces crosses carried into a Capitol riot and the theology that produces a farm in the Yamhill Valley where an Eastern Shoshone woman and a Keetoowah man try to grow food in right relationship with the land and its first people — these are not two flavors of the same Christianity, which is why we stepped out. They are different religions borrowing the same name. One Jesus comes through the gate to conquer. The other’s already standing there — with the people who got walked past on the way in.

I don’t know how you repair five hundred years of theological confusion between those two positions.

Marisa Kabas, “Republicans don’t have a Nazi problem—they are the Nazi problem”

There is little to no holistic evidence that Republicans’ Nazi problem is tethered to age. Yes, it’s more likely that a younger person who’s terminally online will post imagery to be provocative, but they’re simply reflecting the values modeled by the Republicans who came before them and for whom they’re now working. Project 2025 and its mirroring of Nazi Germany values, like drastically reducing immigration and persecuting people who aren’t white, wasn’t brewed in a frat house; no, it was dreamed up by grown-ass adults who were forged in the hellfires of the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and Presidents Bush and now Donald Trump administrations, and whose embers landed at the Heritage Foundation.

Joseph Williams, “Converse, Target and the Cost of Who Isn’t in the Room”

Yet when the expertise comes from lived experience — from being Black, Latino, Asian, gay, disabled, Muslim, poor, an immigrant, or simply from growing up in a world dramatically different from others around a boardroom table — suddenly, we’re told that diversity has trumped merit.

Sometimes lived experience is expertise. And sometimes its value is measured by what never happens. That’s what makes Target an especially interesting case.

Maria W. Stewart, “O America” (1831)

Were every gentleman in America to realize as one that they had got to become bondmen, and their wives, their sons, and their daughters, servants forever to Great Britain, like Belshazzar, their joints would become loosened, and tremblingly would smite one against another; their countenance would be filled with horror, every nerve and muscle would be forced into action; their souls would recoil at the very thought, their hearts would die within them, and death would be far more preferable. Then why have not Afric’s sons a right to feel the same? Are not their wives, their sons, and their daughters as dear to them as those of the white man’s? Certainly God has not deprived them of the divine influences of his Holy Spirit, which is the greatest of all blessings, if they ask him. Then why should man any longer deprive his fellow man of equal rights and privileges?

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