Author: joshsabey

People Hate and Love Trump for the Same Reason

| joshsabey

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Next year, on Halloween, we will be celebrating the 500th anniversary of the reformation. And there’s a chance we will be celebrating it with a new leader equally iconoclastic: Donald Trump.

St. Martin’s Cathedral is tall and gothic. The whole structure is made from dark red brick, massive windows, and pointed spires. Once it was the largest cathedral in the Netherlands. But much of it has collapsed. Today, only the most impressive structures remain including the large stone edifice known as the Dom Tower. Inside the building, above the altar, there’s this ornate relief sculpture of eight figures, the details still fresh as when it was first made. The figures converse around a throne and seem to be reading out of a large book. Above, as if looking down from heaven, another figure oversees the scene. It seems to be a depiction of God’s promise in Matthew: where two or more are gathered in my name, there I will be also. Continue reading →

Honestly, Why Do Conservatives Hate Hillary Clinton?

| joshsabey

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Most conservatives hate Hillary Clinton. And a lot of liberal articles have come forward recently asking people why. To them, the only reasons could be because you’re misinformed, ignorant, or a misogynist. Of course I don’t think this is the case, but I too have wondered why people hate Hillary. I am generally conservative, but I actually haven’t formed much of an opinion on her. My only real objection to her was the same objection I had with George and Jeb Bush. I don’t like aristocracy. I don’t like the idea of two people in the same family becoming president. It just means there’s a lot of who-knows-who going on.

But besides that, my thoughts on Hillary have actually been fairly innocuous. Much of this is because of a simple childhood memory. My uncle was a big-wig Economist in Houston and being young and impressionable I trusted whatever he said. As a group of us talked, he described how impressed he had been with Hillary’s work ethic. I was too young to know what they were talking about, but I left that conversation with one idea: Hillary Clinton was a hard worker. That went a long way for me.

From then until now something has changed. For whatever reason, whenever Hillary is mentioned there’s this sour taste in my mouth—nothing of substance, just a feeling about her. A feeling that isn’t even my own. And so I performed an honest evaluation: Why do conservatives, and why did I, dislike her.   Continue reading →

Jane the Virgin and A Case for Guilt

| joshsabey

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The third season of Jane the Virgin starts on Monday. I just complete the first two seasons (though I may have skipped a few, okay maybe like ten, episodes). And I have to admit, I enjoyed myself, though I have some serious reservations.

According to critical consensus at Rotten Tomatoes, the show manages to be charming despite its  “dubious premise.” Here’s the premise: a girl has agreed to practice abstinence until marriage but then a whole bunch of drama happens after she is accidentally artificially inseminated. So what’s so dubious about this premise? It risks becoming sanctimonious. People don’t want to watch a show that even hints at religious dogmatism. Continue reading →

The Accidental Christianity of Hollywood

| joshsabey

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I’m watching Star Trek Beyond and Krall just threatened to kill Sulu in order to coerce the crew into giving him the Abronath (a bioweapon capable of huge destruction). But rather than letting a crew member die, an Ensign named Syl turns over the weapon from its hiding place in the back of her head. It’s a very familiar scene. You find similar scenes in Star Wars, most of the superhero films, and even children movies like Disney’s Hercules. Remember when Hercules gives up his power to save Meg and thus allows Hades to terrorize the city and even assault Mount Olympus?

My complaint is not that this trope has become repetitive (here’s a long list of similar scenes), but that we simply accept it as a legitimate ethical decision. Do we agree that it is appropriate to surrender thousands, millions, possibly billions of lives (the stakes keep getting higher) in order to save Sulu? Why does this ever make sense? Spaceballs even parodies this trope when The King sacrifices himself and the entire population of his home planet just so the princess doesn’t get her old nose back. When it’s a nose, we understand the absurdity, but that absurdity is harder to recognize when someone’s life is at stake. Continue reading →

Single Narratives About Terrorist Attacks And Police Shootings

| joshsabey

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This last week two things coincided: I attended a panel discussion on islamophobia and my facebook friends reacted to the news of Keith Scott being shot by a police officer. These might seem unrelated, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that these experiences were really about the exact same thing: the human capacity to form narratives and hold on to them. Let’s start with the panel.

Three professors took turns speaking. Their point was that the narrative people have developed about Arabs and Islam is not accurate. People fear Arabs because they’re Muslim. But this is often not the case. There are a lot of Christians, Sikhs, and even agnostic Arabs. And people fear Muslims because of all the terrorist attacks. However, you are much more likely to be killed by lightning than by an Islamic extremist. According to one of the lecturers, Islamic extremism has only killed 109 Americans since September 11th 2001. That might sound like a lot, and every life is precious, but if you run the numbers, there is an infinitesimally small chance that you’ll be one of them. More people die falling out of bed. A lot more: it kills 737 Americans annually. Continue reading →

Advice from asaasa1983 that we should all ignore

| joshsabey

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We recently received a message from “asaasa1983” in response to an article we had written. The article was about helping children nourish healthy sexuality while avoiding destructive and deceptive outlets like pornography. To me it is a relatively secure platform.

Both statistically and within my own anecdotal experience, pornography can have a negative influence on relationships. It’s bad for the viewer and often bad for the people on the other side of the screen—the ones taking the pictures. However, I am not entirely ignorant of arguments against conservative sexual mores. We can come across as uptight, prudish, genophobs. And before I go forward I want to acknowledge that conservative sexual paradigms have at times been restrictive, narrow, and damaging. So there’s certainly some constructive liberal critiques worth listening to.  

Still I was surprised by asaasa1983’s response—so surprised in fact that I reproduce it here in its entirety: Continue reading →