I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again. ~attributed to Etienne de Grellet~
If you're a fellow FiveThirtyEight junkie (or hater), you have probably been looking at a lot of electoral maps lately. I thought that, rather than worrying about it (or maybe in addition to worrying about it), it would be fun to have a little contest. Let's see if any of/how many of us can beat... Continue Reading →
Of the many wonderful lyrics John Prine has written, one of my favorites comes from “Grandpa was a Carpenter,” from Sweet Revenge. In the autobiographical recollection of his grandfather, Prine remembers that the great man “voted for Eisenhower/ ’Cause Lincoln won the war.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blW9AWIP8ZU John Prine performs "Grandpa was a Carpenter," 1983 As a lover... Continue Reading →
Petula Dvorak gets right down to it in “The Epic Failure of the American Electorate” in the Washington Post. You can find out if you are an informed voter with this PBS quiz. Bill Clinton gets specific in “I am a White Southerner. I know what Make America Great Again Means.” In a speech in... Continue Reading →
On mid-October, three militia members attempted to blow up a housing complex in Garden City, Kansas. Their hope was to destroy the complex, which houses many Muslim Somali immigrants, on November 9, the day after the election, the same day former Representative and general deadbeat Joe Walsh said loser Republicans should “grab a musket” to... Continue Reading →
For Every Mom writer and future Zondervan author Shauna Shanks* has recently published a piece on her blog that really does a fine job of capturing the thinking of many evangelical women who are sticking by Donald Trump. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. (Though I do mean it as a compliment when... Continue Reading →
It’s Halloween, which means that the past 11 and ¾ months have been spent squashing my children’s dreams about their costumes. Nothing violent, nothing gory, nothing sexy, nothing racist, nothing that promotes warmongering or imperialism, nothing homemade unless you do it yourself and it must be done at least three days prior to avoid a... Continue Reading →
It’s not quite a “Reading Round Up” in the usual sense, but I wanted to share with the books that will be reviewed in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Hate Studies. As guest editor, I was fortunate to work with some outstanding reviewers for the issue. I hope you like what they share:... Continue Reading →
I just wrapped up editing a special issue of the Journal of Hate Studies, an interdisciplinary endeavor of the Institute for Hate Studies at Gonzaga University. I proposed “heritage and hate” as the theme for a self-serving reason: I wanted to better understand the pro- and neo-Confederate movements, the continuing calls for secession, and the... Continue Reading →
I'm so pleased that NEA's Thought & Action has published my article "The 4th R: Encountering Conservative Christianity in the Classroom." The article considers what assumptions many of our conservative Christian students--particularly evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants--bring with them about higher education and shape their experience of learning in college. It draws specifically from some of my teaching in sociology... Continue Reading →
Since the release of Donald Trump’s sexually violent comments about women surfaced two weeks ago, the conservative Christians who have been among his most reliable supporters have been struggling with what to do. Many of them long ago bought into a Hillary Clinton who is “the devil”—some literally believing that she is satanic. They’ve constructed... Continue Reading →
Rebecca Barrett-Fox 