"What if the most powerful man on Earth was kind" is such a banger concept. Jerry and Joe were really cooking in 1938.

(When my 2005 iMac died I lost all the songs on that hard drive except for the Twin Cities playlist I had on my phone -- because this was in February. So I've been listening to a lot of the Hold Steady lately. And Prince, and Husker Du.)

"America Reads the Bible" continues today.

They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things
Said "I'm pretty sure we've heard this one before"
And don't it all end up in some revelation
With four guys on horses and violent red visions
Famine and death and pestilence and war?

Every time you see an athlete running like this it's a hamstring injury, 6-8 weeks minimum.

To be fair, Franklin Graham says this about everybody. And to everybody.

Waiter: Our specials tonight include a prime ...

Graham: You should be thanking Trump!

This is why they will one day be able to say, truthfully, "I have read the entire Bible, cover to cover," and also be able to say, truthfully, that they do not recognize the words of Isaiah chapter 1 and think it's some "woke" nonsense invented by a "liberal" pope.

This lesson -- the ability to read selectively for confirmation of pre-existing expectations while utterly overlooking what's actually there -- is what will carry them through Phase 11, the Gospels and Acts, and through all the other phases, all the way through Revelation.

So one of two things will happen here. Either they will read the text as it is and encounter a crisis of faith the youth group is not prepared to help them handle, or else they will learn to read the text selectively, as though it were nothing more than they were taught to expect it to be.

There's a bit of No. 3, and a teeny bit of No. 2 (but not at all in the way they were taught), but the actual text is full of dangerous stuff they'd get in trouble at church for suggesting they believed. The prophets' major emphases and concerns are stuff never discussed in youth group.

Phase 10: The prophets.

Youth group kids were taught to read these books with the assurance they are about 4 things: 1. Predicting the coming of Jesus; 2. Predicting the End of the World; 3. Condemning idol-worship; and 4. Condemning "lust" (masturbation).

This is not what these books are about.

Phase 9: Song of Solomon.

The youth pastor goes on vacation again. Safest thing to do.

Phase 8: Esther through the Wisdom literature. Mostly smooth sailing. Narrative in Esther. Lots of chewy, hortatory, more obviously appropriate for Daily Quiet Time reading stuff. Much more like what young readers were expecting when they began this project.

Phase 7: Ezra-Nehemiah. Everything that tripped up readers in Numbers-Joshua revisited in condensed form. Dollops of narrative mixed with begats, commandments, and more atrocities. The kid in the youth group named "Ezra" has some pointed questions for his parents.

(Confused guy occasionally tuning in to the Pure Flix live read-through): Something's glitching. I tuned in three hours ago and they were on the story of Zelophehad's daughters. And then two hours ago it was the same thing. And now I log on again and it's Zelophehad's daughters again!

This plow-through mentality overcomes the repetitions and rewrites of Kings vs. Chronicles. (Wait ... Elhanon killed Goliath? But ...?) This also causes confusion. (I know I already read this bit, did I put the bookmark in the wrong place yesterday? What's going on?)

Phase 6: Ruth-2 Chronicles. Steady going with a manageable balance of narrative, disturbing, and begats/arcana. Too many J names and Z names to keep track of, but this is a JOB now. The goal is just to get THROUGH it all without getting bogged down or distracted by trying to understand it all.

* begats, dammit.

Autocorrect doesn't know "begats." Autocorrect clearly never made it past Noah in its attempt to read through the whole Bible cover-to-cover.

Phase 5: Things pick back up when we get to Joshua and Judges -- fewer beats, fewer lists of arcane commandments, more narrative! But, also, more really, really disturbing stuff. The youth pastor goes on vacation to avoid kids' questions about Ai or Jepthah's daughter or the Levite's concubine.

Two things happen to the youth-group kids when they reach this stuff. Most kids get in trouble for giving up the whole effort at this point. The others get in even deeper trouble for asking the youth minister why the list of 12 tribes keeps changing. (Both sets of kids will turn out fine.)

Somebody is going to be standing at a podium tomorrow at the Museum of the Bible, reading Numbers 1 out loud. This will be streaming live on Pure Flix.

"from Benjamin, Abidan son of Gideoni; from Dan, Ahiezer son of Ammishaddai; from Asher, Pagiel son of Okran; from Gad, Eliasaph son of ..."

Phase 3: Enthusiasm and momentum hurdles past early obstacles (the patchy stitching together of the Noah stories, the my-wife-is-my-sister oddities, etc.) and plow through the mostly narrative stuff up through the crossing of the Red Sea.

Phase 4: Late-Exodus-Deuteronomy. Where you give up.

This is going to track with every youth-group Christian's first attempt at "I'm gonna read the whole thing straight through."

Phase one: Genesis 1-5. Familiar stories, gets a little bogged down in the begats, but mostly smooth sailing.

Phase two: Genesis 6:1-4. "Nephilim. WTF?"

From "The Century's Decline" (1993).

reflections.yale.edu/article/fait...

"God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men."

-- Wislawa Szymborska

America Reads the Bible | Museum of the Bible Join us in the room for what is believed to be the largest Bible reading in American history as it is livestreamed through Great American Pure Flix. Grab a 3-hour session to experience the Bible readi...

The GOP/Museum of the Bible "America Reads the Bible" event starts tomorrow.

MAGA Christians watching this live Bible reading on Pure Flix will be STUNNED to learn that Isaiah 1:15 is actually from the Bible and not just some "woke" thing Pope Leo made up.

www.museumofthebible.org/events/ameri...

Tennessee's "nuclear family" resolution was obviously written by someone who HATES his mother-in-law but lost the argument with his wife about her moving in with them.

Oh, so you’re one of those fancy elite LIBERAL Christians who doesn’t even believe that Chronicles wrote the books with his name on them.

They've got their Bibles open to Acts chapter 8 -- to the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, the first queer Black guy to be baptized into the community of Jesus's disciples. These folks need more Philip the Evangelist

(Bonus fun: When they cite Acts 8:39, ask them to quote Acts 8:37.)

Phillips is spinning this as Christian supernaturalism vs. secular liberal/Commie. He and MAGA evangelicals are invoking Acts 8:39 ("the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away") to say teleportation is "biblical."

That's silly, but also potentially good ...

I'm an IJFE. (It's Just Forer Effect.)

Corporate Horoscopes are so tedious.