I added a thing to my auto-correct that automatically turns “ye” into þe (back when I learned about this, several years back). I always forget about it until I either get to typing too fast and make a space before finishing “yes” or making Kanye jokes (rare these days tbh) or quoting from the King James Bible (much more common than you’d think).
I think þ is just neat and I do wish it would return to þe English alphabet.
I always see it as T-rexes with a table saw lol
I’m an Episcopal priest. At a parish I served in some years back, we had a custom of giving kids animals from the nativity scene to carry in procession and place around the manger at the Christmas Eve service. I would be at the end of the procession to place the Christ child in the manger and then cense the scene before saying the opening prayers. I do so and happen to catch something out of the ordinary: a tiny rubber dinosaur has somehow made it into Bethlehem. So I start the service by noting this and the church has a good chuckle.
No one ever fessed to putting in there, but it became a fixture in the parish’s nativity scene from then on (with kids occasionally clamoring to be the one to carry the dinosaur in the procession).
The Bible is not a single volume but a collection/anthology of writings put together over many centuries. Further, the canon of scripture was decided after several hundred years after the writing of the most recent book (Revelation). Which is all to say that the Bible, at least in the cited references, cannot be self-referential because “the Bible” didn’t exist at the times of those references. They were all individual writings. So Revelation, for instance, is referring to the words of the prophecy contained in Revelation, NOT the Bible.
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Oh hey, my neighbor is in this strip!
The librarian at my grad school had a book cart in her house and would not let her husband put a book anywhere but on that cart once he was finished with it. Power move.
Same!
I also loved when, on David Spade’s Hollywood talk show from back in the day, Enrico Colantoni (Elliot) would appear as a kind of guest correspondent he’d always refer to Spade as “Finch.”
A Just Shoot Me meme in the Year of Our Lord, 2025? You, person of intellect and culture, are to be applauded.
“Chicken pot, chicken pot, chicken pot pie!”
I’ve stuck Mint on two Apple machines (which I affectionately call my iMint and Mintbook, respectively). Ive been thinking about making a little green Mint logo for the laptop to either stick onto the bitten off part of the Apple logo, or just on the middle (to indicate “Mint inside”). But I also really like yours!
Aloha. Episcopal priest here. I applaud your valiant efforts at evangelism in this corner of the fediverse. It takes a degree of courage to be so open about your faith in a place that can be consistently hostile to the Christian religion. Thank God for people like you.
Now, I want to offer a little push-back on your soteriology (fancy term for the theology of salvation for those who don’t know). You’re espousing a version of substitutionary atonement theology as though it is the universally held view of Christianity in regards to the “mechanics” of salvation. It is not. Not only are there multiple views within substitutionary atonement itself, there are a plethora of ideas, stretching all the way back to the earliest days of Christianity, to try and make sense of how Jesus’ death on a cross and resurrection from that death serve to “save” humanity. So let me, humbly, offer my view (which, the more I read it, seems to be the most supported biblically), which I call the Expository view of the Atonement:
The death of Jesus is meant by God, primarily, to lay bare (that is, to expose) the true nature of sin. God, incarnate, chooses to become the “conclusion” of what sin is all about. Every sin, then, is defined by the murder of God, the murder of Jesus. This helps us better understand how wicked human sinfulness can be. Kids in Gaza being systematically starved? That’s being done to Jesus. Trans people being ostracized or driven to suicide? Being done to Jesus. Supporting a regime that kidnaps people off the street? Wealth-addicts who exploit entire societies and make a mockery of the Christian religion? You get the idea. Even “small” sins like lying and cheating are covered here because doing these goes against what is universally understood as “good” and all goodness originates in God. Therefore this is tantamount to telling God His expectations for us don’t matter and that He may as well be dead. Matthew 25 more or less lays this all out when it talks about what happens when we do things “to the least of these.”
This all needs to be exposed so that we can see the fullness of what we’ve done, that there is a theological dimension to our actions. God takes our evil actions personally. Jesus on a cross is a visceral symbol of all this. But it’s also a powerful thing because it is on the cross that Jesus declares that we are all forgiven. This is the literal sense of us being saved “from our sins” (which is the actual good news that is preached all throughout the book of Acts).
Salvation is not about Jesus saving us from God’s wrath. It’s Him saving us from our worst impulses. If Hell is a factor in any of this, then Hell is a thing of our own making and somewhere we effectively place ourselves.
The resurrection of Jesus goes beyond all of this to demonstrate that even our worst mistakes are not beyond God’s ability to overcome. This is why Saint Paul can declare in Romans that “nothing can separate us from the love of God.” And him also saying that “grace abounds” in inverse proportion to our sinfulness.
Now, this forgiveness is not equal to being “let off the hook” or “getting off scot free.” Rather it becomes an open space where the contrite heart can begin to find healing. And healing can be a painful experience—and it’s proportional; the more serious the disease, the more painful the healing process. So, there are those of us who will suffer even after death. But that suffering is in service of our healing and restoration, not so much our punishment. It’s consequential (in a literal sense), but not because God hates us or whatever. But because we need healing.
I would argue that the more conventional views of substitutionary atonement are logically inconsistent (at best) and/or outright heretical.
You’re in my prayers as a fellow servant of God. Keep the faith and test the spirits!
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Makes me think of the sign I wish I’d made this past weekend:
Trump couldn’t get Greenland so he turned us into ICEland
Okay, so story time (and PSA, it’s going to get real and contains passing references to sexual abuse… I’ll put the whole thing behind a spoiler tag):
In May of 2002 I learned that the pastor of my church in Central Florida was unexpectedly resigning. I grew up with the guy, two of his kids were practically brothers to me; Thanksgiving and Christmas always involved a stop at their place, etc. The reason for the resignation was that he’d been caught on a hidden camera in his office in an act of “sexual indiscretion.”
The woman? My mom.
Turns out she was a victim of sexual abuse for nearly a decade, but none of us realized that for awhile (it wasn’t until counseling that my mom would have the language to articulate what had happened to her). Some church folks assumed the pastor was up to something, so a guy hid a camera in the office when he’d been tasked to install a security system on the property. (Of course, for them, this was just an affair and they blamed my mom just as much.)
Anyway, the night I learned about it, me and a group of friends (including the pastor’s son) just bolted for downtown Orlando and wound up on the banks of Lake Eola, which is in the middle of the city. I felt like my entire world was coming down, someone I loved and trusted had betrayed me and my family, the person that had helped shape my own faith, and I wasn’t sure what was next. Even with close friends around, I felt almost cosmically alone.
Then there was some impulse. I believe it was God, your mileage may vary on that, but that impulse directed me to all the lights in the windows of the buildings. And I had the clearest realization that each “light” (as OP puts it) was a person and living a life. Maybe they were working late and wanted to get home. Maybe it was a boss sleeping with his secretary. Maybe it was someone having the best day of their life, or maybe the worst.
Whatever the case, I suddenly realized that I was not alone and that my problems were not as earth-shattering as they felt—at least not in a literal sense. And those lights almost seemed to blend into the stars above and I had a great sense of perspective. My mom and I would get through this.
Anyway, I know this random, but I’ve not seen anyone else talk about something similar before and this conjured a memory I return to often.
Only the one button down for the four dudes?
Just yesterday I was at a cat cafe with two of my kids. My 9y/o is with me as we are petting a British “blue” shorthair and I tell it “you CAN haz cheesburger.” He laughs and is like “dad, what is that?” And I realize that that meme is practically ancient history for him. So I pull out the phone and show him the kernel of all he finds funny today.
Going down it looks like that Mac and Me clip that Paul Rudd brings with him whenever he’s interviewed by Conan O’Brien
So, the term “Antichrist” is kind of complicated. It only appears in the letters of Saint John (never showing up in Revelation, despite popular belief), where it tends to refer to a spiritual power that is “anti” Christ. But prophecy people over the centuries have turned this spiritual power into a certain figure they call The Antichrist. The imagery of this figure makes use of the “Beast” in Revelation 13 (specifically the Beast from the Sea). Which is all to say that “the Antichrist” and “the Beast” are, in a sense, the same figure. Curiously, and more to your question, Revelation 13 also refers to another Beast (from the earth) making an image of The Beast from the Sea that can speak and convince people that the image is alive. And this image forces people to take on the “Mark of the Beast” in order to participate in the economy. So, AI Trump?
Say what you will about the movies and scripts, but Chris Pine was damn fine casting as Kirk.
I REALLY hope NYT doesn’t settle on this and goes to court. All the stuff that would need to be proved by Trump, like him NOT squandering his dad’s money, etc.
“Let me guess: sOmEoNe StoLe yOuR sWeEt rOll?”