Category Archives: Signs of the Times

A Titanic Evangelical Ship of Fools: Michael Cromartie’s Doomed Voyage

Politico linked to a lengthy 2013 profile of Cromartie & his mission from the main intellectual evangelical mouthpiece, Christianity Today. It’s a very interesting period piece, clearly aimed to help Cromartie shore up fundraising for the project in the rocky post-Crash years.
Under the subhead, Michael Cromartie is guiding media elites into a more accurate view of conservative Christians, the article also highlights both the value of Cromartie’s work, and in retrospect its poignant, perhaps even tragic underlying folly

How North Carolina YM-FUM Did Itself In: A Blog Review

Our blog poss about the end of NCYM-FUM have been read widely. And a question has recurred in comments across Facebook and in other media. It is: How did this happen?? It’s a legitimate question; and it’s one we’ve been grappling with for three years. It’s also one this blogger is feeling a bit overwhelmed … Continue reading How North Carolina YM-FUM Did Itself In: A Blog Review →

Breaking: North Carolina YM-FUM Shuts Down

There’s a notorious set of photos from St. Louis, of a public housing project called Pruitt Igoe, being brought down in a controlled detonation of high explosives. The story is that the project, meant to provide sturdy housing for the poor, had become toxic and uninhabitable. It could be a fitting parable for North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM – NCYM for short)

Yearly Meeting Dispatch: Baltimore & home

Yes, all too soon, I had to pack up the car and head out of Frederick Maryland back south to North Carolina; first to join my colleagues in the cast of “Pathway to Freedom,” a Quaker-inspired outdoor drama about the Underground Railroad, followed later today and tomorrow by the final session of North Carolina Yearly Meeting FUM, which, unlike BYM, is about to go out of business after 320 years.

More on that later. I drove over to Interstate 81 to take the scenic route down through the Shenandoah Valley, then jogged east toward Charlottesville and then turned south again in US 29, through Lynchburg and Danville to the North Carolina line.

Lynchburg has been practically absorbed into the ever-expanding Liberty University complex, down to and including the Jerry Falwell Parkway, to memorialize its late founder.

Sixty miles farther, Danville, or at least some of its prominent residents, made their sentiments clear in a couple of ways . . . .

Here We Go Again: Trump vs. Transgender Soldiers

Banning TG folks from the military is the first big chunk of red meat thrown to the sex-phobic theocratic right by the Liar-in-Chief; it will only make them hungrier for more and bigger chunks.
Can Weinstein & MRFF get backup from an activist, interreligious coalition to face them down?

They could. They should. Now we’ll find out.