A little theology for Sunday morning

From The Atlantic:

Rev. William J. Barber II: Well, I was trained in theology that whatever you call your spiritual experience, if it does not produce a quarrel with the world, then the claim to be spiritual is suspect.

Sounds right to me. 

Maybe it is time for the NFL to give up on this season

The astonishing thing is that it has taken this long for professional and college sports to arrive at this point. I wouldn't have guessed anybody could get very far this year, and I was wrong about that, but football -- with its rosters of fifty-some-odd people -- has too many moving parts for this not to happen.

 

To schadenfreude or not to schadenfreude?

I am torn by hoping that Republicans' cynical and false allegations of voter fraud come back to bite them by persuading their voters there is no reason to vote again -- costing them elections they might've won -- and a believe that democracy isn't sustainable if a huge chunk of the population doesn't believe the results are legitimate.

Today on the Kansas River

 

One small step to putting civilians back in charge at Defense

NYT reports that Lloyd J. Austin III, a retired Army general, is under consideration to lead the Department of Defense under Joe Biden. I'd prefer not -- not because of anything necessarily wrong about Austin (I know literally nothing about him) but because Trump tried to blur the whole distinction between civilian and military control of the military, which has been a pretty important principle of our democracy. That's how former General James Mattis became Trump's first secretary of defense, even though he required a waiver to do so. There are civilian Democrats with expertise in national security. Pick one of them.

Humans and Vulcans

There's a lot of talk about "Federation values" in the Star Trek universe, but humans and Vulcans are pretty much always jerks to each other, except when they learn the lesson not to be at the end of the episode.

No, journalism is not 'morally indefensible'

Also from Ryu Spaeth's takedown of Ben Smith:

However, every journalist, very much including Smith, at some point will have to face the morally indefensible way we go about our business: namely, using other people to tell a story about the world. Not everyone dupes their subjects into trusting them, but absolutely everyone robs other people of their stories to tell their own.

Oh, bullshit.

At its best, journalism provides journalists a platform not to rob other people of their stories, but to amplify the stories of people who might not otherwise be heard widely. This is especially true of journalists at local papers, who go to church and shop in the same stores and send their kids to the same schools as the people they both serve and cover. It's an imperfect, messily human process, and journalists don't always get it right. I haven't always gotten it right. But to characterize this process, of listening and then passing on what you have heard, as a robbery -- instead of the necessarily flawed process of communication that it is -- is morally obtuse.