This is beautiful & reminds me that I've had an essay brewing for a couple years about link btwn male loneliness/depression & cultures that prioritize male comfort & privilege.

https://twitter.com/CBSSunday/status/1754160478413086968

TL;DR: Excusing men of their responsibilities to women & children robs them of purpose & the very ties that bind them to community.

On this fine Saturday morning, a few thoughts re: Alistair Begg...

*cracks knuckles* (For unaware, Begg is a conservative evangelical pastor who holds traditional views of gender & sexuality but who recently advised a congregant to attend her grandson's marriage his trans fiancé. Despite conservative backlash, Begg is standing his ground.)

In response to this article, someone asked me why mid-tier leaders prop up abusive rulers. Are they being blackmailed? Do these leaders have dirt on them?

I cannot reiterate this enough: The mediocrity is the point.

thedispatch.com/article/the-pa… So much political & ecclesiastical corruption can be explained by simple fact that people are lazy & consumptive. They want to live like little kings over little kingdoms & have no higher ambition for life than indulgence. Sloth, greed, gluttony are deadly sins for a reason.

A 🧵about the appeal of rule-based parenting:

Don't underestimate how much of authoritarian parenting is a survival mechanism against personal internal chaos. Folks who experience internal disorder will often try to order their environments & the people in them instead. Sure, authoritarianism is a power grab but to what end? Simply to have power? More likely to use that power as a way to protect/stabilize self--including stabilizing self in the new, unpredictable role of parenting. It's a survival technique.

Repressing emotions is like taking the batteries out of the smoke detector when it goes off. The warning might signal a fire & the need to flee or it might simply be burnt toast. But only the foolish think the alarm is the problem. Teaching children to ignore & repress their emotions is especially dangerous b/c they need these responses to keep them safe in the world. Rather, we teach our children how to recognize, define, & articulate their emotions while helping them engaging with reality around them.

Good morning, all! Looks like some folks are still upset about my article on SNAP participants. And while, I know I don't have to do this, just for kicks, I'm going follow-up on one particular response that I'm seeing. New Thesis: The line about welfare in #RichMenNorthOfRichmond isn't about abuse of welfare so much as about loss of purchasing power & the effect SNAP has on food market by keeping prices artificially high & thus out of reach for working poor not on SNAP.

Okay, this is something I've thought a good bit about as a 44yo woman who recently returned to grad school after marrying young & having children in my twenties. A 🧵

https://twitter.com/sometimesalight/status/1690316812120969216

The idea of "middle age" & all its accompanying associations is very contextually bound. It's one of few ways modern people have to signal momento mori. I.e. "Middle age" = your life is half over & w/ it your ability to accomplish what you want in life. So take stock & get busy.

Also, irt D. Wilson: I'm old enough to remember the Auburn Avenue controversy the first time around. It happened in early 00s & I became aware of it b/c a bunch of my 20-something friends were moving from IFB fundamentalism to whatever fundamentalism Wilson is This was days of print Credenda Agenda & the first offerings of Canon press on family, gender roles, & home life. It was like cocaine for kids coming from baptist fundamentalism. The prescriptiveness was comfortingly familiar but you can drink & swear!

Having a convo w/ my daughter this morning about the difference btwn authentic weird & performative weird & nbd but I think we may have just unlocked the underlying paradox of expressive individualism Thesis: Weirdness as a quality is both defined by boundaries of establishment culture & sits outside it. To be authentically weird, one must be rejected by establishment. Performative weird, otoh, can be chosen & projected in order to intentionally set oneself against culture.

A word for theologically-minded complementarians:

Piper's understanding of m/f dynamics is pervasively modern in that it assume atomized gender identity that doesn't adequately account for 1 Timothy's focus on household. In a word, it lacks a category of covenant. This question is larger than how you understand 1 Timothy 2. It's about the categories one carries into it. And the entire book assumes a communal, covenanted life w/ varying responsibilities & relationships based in household. In a word, gender in not hermetically-sealed.

The irony of #SBC vote to uphold complementarian position of pastorate is not that it defines office as exclusive to men. It's that the pastoral office itself is not defined consistently across the convention. The rhetorical result is that maleness becomes first qualification for pastorate in SBC. This creates vastly different ministry culture than might exist in a comp denom that has strict definition of pastoral office & process of ordination (of which one qualification is maleness).

Last night I finished a 1000 piece puzzle of the Sistine Chapel & it made me curious about how Michelangelo fits into contemporary modesty debates. I'm familiar with recent kerfuffle at FL school irt the David, but most folks are framing it as a question of what's acceptable in "art" & somehow that seems to miss the point. I think it's about bodies & how we relate to them.

Don't take this the wrong way b/c I'm not fully back on Twitter & I have strong objections to how the platform has changed & I have a lot going on offline, but... a thread: Why We Keep Getting Sex Wrong 1. Insofar as evangelical Protestantism is a feature of modern era, it lacks several categories that are necessary to understanding sex, including robust understanding of embodiment & communal identity. Until we recover these, we don't have a chance.

This thread puts words to my Twitter philosophy: You don't have to agree, but you'd better be respectful.

https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/1601997868516388864

And to be clear, this isn't about tone, being "winsome," or language choice-- although these serve their own purposes. It's not a Q of free speech.

It's the low-hanging fruit of basic, human decency, of honoring the humanity of the person on the other side of the screen.

And to be clear, I have no beef w/ Berry's ability to return to his roots & way of life. His writing wouldn't exist otherwise & we'd be lesser for it. But if we miss it, we'll miss one of key realities that his vision is predicated on & Port William will remain a fiction. I've lived majority of my life in places that *could* or *should* have been Port William so I've spent a lot of time trying to understand what separates reality from the dream.

This is your regular reminder that Wendell Berry *returned* to a place & way of life that he'd received & that the work of stewarding & maintaining community is not the same work as creating it. This is not a critique of Berry. His vision of holistic, generational community is a gift. I agree w/ him that we must understand the responsibility we owe future generations. We must "know that the world is not given by [our] fathers, but borrowed from [our] children."

But.

A quick 🧵 about Xian nationalism, racism, & the challenges of modernity:

Our current epidemic of rootlessness, social fragmentation, & waning religious identity won't be solved by repeating the sins that got us here in the first place. To put it more bluntly, there's a direct link btwn

>stealing people from their homelands
>denying their full humanity
>forcing labor in pursuit of capital gains
>segregating Christian worship

& everything trads hate about modern life.

Part of the reason I love Twitter so much is b/c it is uniquely kind to neurodivergence (at least ime). It provides enough of a buffer to social interaction while also satisfying the itch of both ADHD & special interests. For me, it's like browsing a library--a world of ideas all around you but you also can pull a book off the shelf & sit w/ it for as long as you like. And you can make friends w/ folks who are doing the same.

One thing I *loved* about Twitter is that it actually opened up journalism & held media conglomerates accountable. You know all those problems that folks blame on "MSM"? Twitter helped check them by giving us more direct sources of information. I remember having a strained conversation w/ a relative last year & was inevitably told my views were result of listening to MSM. The irony was I hadn't read a full MSM article in a very long time. I had slowly shifted my sourcing from traditional outlets to direct sources.

Why Twitter Was Perfect (Despite Being Imperfect)

1. Cross-pollination of ideas & fields
2. Direct access to experts & celebs
3. Real time updates from live sources
4. Preference for argument > image
5. Forced distillation of ideas
6. Discoverability of new voices & ideas 7. Opportunity for debate & dialogue
8. Mutuals --> new friends w/ shared interests
9. Growth based on content
10. Enabled making common cause
11. Ability to curate personal feed & lists
12. Cute animal videos

Folks who believe that family is the building block of society & that the home & church are struggling & that thick, healthy communities are rapidly collapsing should not be surprised when people seek out therapy to help them cope w/ the loss of these things.

I mean, c'mon guys. The idea that human beings are formed w/ & by other human beings is basic theological anthropology. It informs our social & political theory & how we shape our families & churches.