Joel Mathis

A funny thing happened while reading Tim Alberta's new book. I thought about becoming a Christian again. That's maybe not the reaction you would expect to have to "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," a deeply reported look at how (mostly white) evangelical Christians have deeply compromised their supposed values to embrace the corrupt and vulgar Donald Trump — not just lending him their votes transactionally, but enthusiastically embracing his slash-and-burn style of authoritarian politics. The corruption, grifting and thirst for power on display is all pretty well-documented by now, but it's still galling (again) to read it all in one place. Is *this* what Jesus would do? Alberta doesn't think so.  Jesus "talked mostly about helping the poor, humbling oneself, and having no earthly ambition but to gain eternal life," Alberta writes. "Suffice it to say, the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed are the meek ... Blessed are

 From "The Blind Assassin":

 Trump’s Menacing Rosh Hashanah Message to American Jews This Semitic sorting never ends well, because justifications for abusing Jews have a way of metastasizing. Permission structures for anti-Semitism are rarely restricted to their original target. Once a society starts accepting attacks on entire swaths of Jews—for being too liberal, too religious, too secular, too pro-Israel, too anti-Israel, too whatever—that acceptance will grow. And when Jewish existence becomes conditional on staying in the good graces of a non-Jewish actor or movement, it becomes an impoverished existence—provisional and precarious, forever looking over its shoulder.

 How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern: And it rankles her that men whom she considers self-appointed guardians of the Western canon have questioned a woman’s fitness to do Homer justice. “Any woman who has lived with male rage at close range has a better chance of understanding the vulnerability that fuels it than your average bro. She learns firsthand how the ways in which men are damaged determine their need to wreak damage on others.”

 New Yorker: In one column, Douthat offered his own approach to assessing fringe ideas. “To be a devout Christian or a believing Jew or Muslim is to be a bit like a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that you believe there is an invisible reality that secular knowledge can’t recognize,” he explained. “But the great religions are also full of warnings against false prophets and fraudulent revelations."

"A declaration made by the poet and scholar Eve Ewing in 2017, at an event in our stores, resounds. 'No more than ever,' she said, 'I am sick of people saying, Now more than ever . ... By saying, 'Now as ever," by looking not to the next new thing but to the last enduring thing, we are more likely to grasp our unique and not not so unique challenges..." Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

There are sunflowers on the counter.  And a customer’s pottery  And another customer’s prints on the wall.  And families And students And the manager’s dog And readers like me.  And it all fills my soul.