If you love music, music history, or musical artifacts you should check out–and considering contributing too–the MI Music Experience.
If you love music, music history, or musical artifacts you should check out–and considering contributing too–the MI Music Experience.
I encountered a headline recently that Bethany Christian Services will update their protocols and policies to no longer allow LGBTQ+ couples to foster or adopt. This is a reversal of a policy and protocol change they implemented back in 2021.
A couple of quick observations and some nuanced thoughts I think are worth highlighting.
Reporting from the NYTimes back in 2021 dedicated the top half of their coverage to discussing religious exemptions pressures, particularly in Blue/progressive municipalities as a part of the calculus for a more open stance on LGBTQ+ fostering and adoption BUT I was always intrigued by the second half of their coverage that dug deeper into some of the Protestant organizational and cultural fault-lines the decision revealed. Bethany gave a decent amount of autonomy to its local boards/governance structures and their 2021 policy change was meant to lean into the diverse perspectives on this issue you would naturally find for an organization of their breadth and depth.
It’s worth noting that there are individuals, congregations, and whole denominations that consider themselves BOTH affirming of LGBTQ+ identities (with a whole spectrum of positions on how to define that term) AND Christian. Of course, particularly in evangelical circles, the immediate next question after declaring one’s position on sexuality in conjunction with Christian bona fides is to then start a whole line of debate about who truly gets to define themselves as Christian. Also, the evangelical movement’s braided relationship to fundamentalism means that the borders and boundaries of evangelical social/civic engagement has a proclivity to define itself by who must necessarily be excluded from collaboration rather than by defining itself by the breadth of its ecumenism (whether within Christian traditions, other faiths, or those with no faith at all).
I’ve written about this elsewhere. What may look like prudent decisions to protect the integrity of an organization in the face of an immediate crisis or area of internal strife might actually be paving a pathway to long term decline. Whether it’s a shooting or a culture war, all warfare involves a large dose of fluctuating vision-scapes and unpredictability. The institutional capacity and relationships one severs today may include vital connections or social capital that could become invaluable tomorrow.1
Note the substance of Bethany’s governance changes:
One can affirm the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds, or biblical authority (though possibly not inerrancy) and take radically divergent positions on human sexuality, gender roles, church ecclesiastical structure and so-forth. In the U.S. right now it feels to me like the borders of what counts you as inside or outside the circle of the “Evangelical” movement are your stances on sex and gender. That’s a shame, because 1) It wasn’t always like that and 2) I think evangelical churches and organizations have an important role to play in shoring up the wobbly legs of our multicultural/multiethnic pluralistic democracy. I’ve don’t think the answer for how best to do that is to take a “everyone gets their own corner of the sandbox and you aren’t welcome in my corner” approach to civic engagement. We’ve got to figure out how to live together and find excuses to build stuff TOGETHER. To extend my analogy, Bethany may have a constitutional right to take their toys to their corner in the same way that a socially progressive non-profit has a right to select its staff and volunteers with whatever standard it deems pertinent. But I really wish Bethany had chosen to keep working on the shared castle in the middle of the sandbox.
I’ve set aside any consideration of “religious liberty” concerns wrapped up in this whole discussion about Bethany. Frankly, this Supreme Court is one of the most magnanimous towards faith-based institutions EVER, and apart from a sequence of untimely deaths or radical court-packing I doubt that will change. Legal or constitutional principles open or foreclose avenues for organizational behavior, they shouldn’t necessarily define how organizations make decisions. One could argue, “organization X should take action A because it will shore up our religious freedom precedents;” but I would prefer an organization is making decisions in alignment with Christian empathy, generosity, love, and mercy–constitutional considerations be damned. ↩︎
For Skye’s definition go to 14:04 here: https://holypost.substack.com/p/crotch-christianity ↩︎
Contemporary bioethical practice seeks a prudential treatment of how questions, but it often leaves aside most questions about why. Evans says this change can be described as a “thinning” of the entire structure of bioethical discourse. For the matters in our lives that demand the most informed analytical precision and vivid philosophical imagination — demanding, that is, a thick rationality — we have the flimsiest, floppiest of discursive planes.
Shout out to all the dads out there who, like my dad, didn’t have a father in their household but became great dads anyways. You can do it too.
Wondering about steampunk, but for carpentry and wood based technology. Nautical culture through the Napoleonic wars would be where you start. Maybe one could include Master and Commander or Moby Dick as early examples.
Some fun photos of the Turtle from the American revolution:
The physical manuscript is also remarkable in a variety of ways. The notation on each page is remarkably neat, rivaling some of the master composers and arrangers whose collections are held by the Music Division. Nearly every shanty also includes multiple handwritten verses, showing a variety of lyrical inspirations…
![In the three smaller lines below the shanty’s title, James Dwight Dana notates two Indigenous musical traditions as inspiration for “My Tent beside the Oregon.” The top line is attributed to the Chinook tribe, and the bottom two lines are attributed to the Chekalis [Chehalis] tribe. ML96 .D26 no. 1, Music Division, Library of Congress.](https://blogs.loc.gov/music/files/2026/05/ShipboardSongs_Image4-scaled-e1780004893193.jpg)
What an utter travesty. I demand to speak with MSU’s supervisor. I can’t even see the bottom of the reflecting pools.
Steve Rosenberg reporting from Moscow:
But on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin said nothing about the drone assault. The news bulletins on Russian TV channels barely mentioned it.
When Russian newspapers reported the story the following day, I detected a common thread in their coverage: a coordinated message, perhaps, for the domestic audience.
It can be summed up as this: “However bad it is for us, Ukraine’s suffering more”.
Ghost in the Shell TV shows (I’ve seen the films, haven’t spent time with the Manga) remain one of my favorite artistic expressions of a creative studio trying to articulate the sociological implications of an information economy driven society. We’re about to get a new reinterpretation.
🎓📚Reading more Williams and Da Silva on postliberalism:
“Milbank remarks that “‘post’ is different from ‘pre’ and implies not that liberalism is all bad, but that it has inherent limits and problems.” Moreover, the inherent limits and problems that Milbank sees in liberalism have little to do with its institutions (Milbank is no opponent of electoral democracy and civil liberties), but rather with the philosophical anthropology and (tacitly) theological presuppositions that actors within these institutions usually take for granted.” Williams and Da Silva, 2025, p. 68
I don’t understand why I have to be completely logged in and awake before I can plug a Dell Laptop into a Dell Docking station hooked up to 2 Dell Monitors for the monitors to activate. Shouldn’t I just be able to plug the laptop in and go?
📚 My daughter (first child, almost five and a half) has expressed to mom that she wants to start reading Chronicles of Narnia at bedtime, and both of us are basically treating this whole situation like encountering a flighty horse on a cliff side that we desperately don’t want to spook.
As someone who has come to rely on Markdown as a useful alternative to Word and Google Docs these are a delightful discussion and read:
A deeply nerdy (complimentary) look at the history of Markdown. And more on Markdown, its function and legacy from Anil Dash.
🎓📚Reading more about postliberalism’s foundations today. A summary from Jacob Williams and João Pinheiro Da Silva:
“Postliberal theology thus reflected, among other things, a profound skepticism of individualism as a social ontology, perceiving a need to recover a hermeneutic that recognized its inseparability from the life of a particular community rather than speciously positing an epistemic foundation (whether modern or traditional) lying outside the community.” Williams and Da Silva, 2025, p. 64
Anyone else have a pinboard.in account and having trouble reaching a server?
📚 Currently reading: The Flag and the Cross by Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry. On the deep story progressives have to contend with to truly build a multicultural democratic movement:
Secular progressivism also has its deep story. In that story, a morally and intellectually advanced elite shepherds a backward and benighted mass toward prosperity and enlightenment. In the early 20th century, this deep story was entangled with nativism, imperialism, and eugenics. Today it is tinged with “workism,“ meritocracy and technocracy. And, in many cases, with an instinctive antipathy toward organized religion, which is regarded as a mortal threat to personal autonomy or even a form of “child abuse.“ If they are really serious about liberal democracy, then secular progressives will also have to set aside some of their own most deeply held prejudices, prejudices that have also played an important role in stoking populist resentment and driving political polarization. (P.129)
⛪️ Up North 📷
Some up north 🌳 bathing 📷
Some Up North 📷
Some light reading on a Tuesday from Luke Sheahan:
“From [Robert] Nisbet’s perspective, the post-liberal attempt to redirect state power from individualizing the populace to integrating the populace into meaningful community is dubious because the origins and structure of state power renders it an inherent social solvent.” (Sheahan, 2025, p. 178)
Reading scholarly work as I’m trying to define the contours of a “postliberal” education policy landscape. An early question I have is whether or not any resistance to the subordination of institutions to partisan aims requires a pluralistic approach, or if resisting deinstitutionalization requires a ‘your for us or against mentality on both sides.’
