Tag Archives ⇒ AFAIK

Twitter thread of the day

May 31, 2019
· Martin Kelley

So this happened:

So yeah, THAT Lin-Manuel Miran­da. I’m going to have Moana songs in my head all day now. See the line where the sky meets THE sea? It calls ME, And no one KNOOOOOWWS, how far it GOOOEEES. (okay, it sounds bet­ter when my 8yo daugh­ter sings along in the car).

Nicole Cliffe is a for­mer athe­ist turned Chris­t­ian (but AFAIK, not Quak­er (yet)) who told her con­ver­sion sto­ry in Chris­tian­i­ty Today a few years ago. One of her claims to fame is co-founding The Toast, which stop pub­lish­ing in 2016 but still has some­one pay­ing for the web serv­er.

And in case Lin-Manuel swings by, he should know that his­to­ry geek Quak­er hip hop is a thing.

President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminiary on Simon Jenkins article

May 15, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Chalk this one up as anoth­er whisper-down-the-lane. As read­ers will prob­a­bly remem­ber, a few weeks ago, non-Friend Simon Jenk­ins wrote an opin­ion piece in The Guardian about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of British Friends drop­ping God from their Faith and Prac­tice. There were a lot of exag­ger­a­tions in it; the year­ly meet­ing ses­sion was most­ly decid­ing whether it it felt led to start the long process of revis­ing the doc­u­ment of Friends’ belief and prac­tice. Many year­ly meet­ings do this every gen­er­a­tion or so. AFAIK, there was no sub­stan­tive dis­cus­sion on what the revi­sions might bring. At the time, I spec­u­lat­ed that “Jenk­ins is chas­ing the head­line to advance his own argu­ment with­out regard to how his state­ment might polar­ize Friends.”

Now we have anoth­er head­line chas­er. The pres­i­dent of the South­ern Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary more or less reads Jenk­in­s’s piece aloud on his radio show (hat-tip havedan­son on the Quak­ers sub­red­dit). He light­ly skips over the fact that Jenk­ins isn’t Quak­er and admits to lim­it­ed expe­ri­ence of Quak­er wor­ship. The SBTS pres­i­dent, Albert Mohler, repeat­ed­ly calls the Guardian arti­cle a “news report” even though it is clear­ly labeled as an opin­ion piece. If any pub­lic­i­ty is good pub­lic­i­ty then it’s good that non-Friends like Jenk­ins and now Mohler are talk­ing about the decision-making process of a Quak­er year­ly meet­ing, but this is stu­pid piled on stupid.

From a media per­spec­tive, I get it: Mohler has a dai­ly 24-minute pod­cast to fill. He has interns who scan buzzy news items. They rearrange the text with inter­sti­tials like “he con­tin­ues, and I quote” and “he goes on to say” so that Mohler can spend five min­utes read­ing an arti­cle with­out sound­ing like he’s just read­ing an arti­cle. But seri­ous­ly, how does the pres­i­dent of a major sem­i­nary have such dis­re­gard for any­thing approach­ing aca­d­e­m­ic rig­or? Also: how much regur­gi­tat­ed junk is on the inter­net sim­ply because peo­ple need to fill time? The Quak­er cau­tion about giv­ing min­istry just because you’re paid to give min­istry and it’s time to give min­istry seems apt in this case.

Mon­day, May 14, 2018