by Shawn Crawford Preachers at our Baptist church had to ask for an Amen. We weren’t just going to spontaneously let one loose. God can’t drive a parked car, my youth minister would say. Meaning you had to exert your own will as well in the pursuit of a righteous life. When it came to…

by Shawn Crawford C.S. Lewis, the Evangelical icon who would be thoroughly nauseated by Evangelicals, once wrote we should not kid ourselves into believing the Reformation had anything to do with religious freedom. Once he escaped the stake, John Calvin had no problem watching Michael Servetus burn. Although he did ask for a beheading instead.…

by Shawn Crawford Growing up, a lighter branded you as suspect to any Baptist worth his King James Version. Because really, other than smoking and setting houses on fire to incinerate the family within just for kicks, what did you need a lighter for anyway?  If you wanted to light something righteous like a candle…

by Shawn Crawford In 1904 America, of boys between the ages of ten to fifteen, 26% worked full time away from home.  In the textile mills of New England, children began working at age six for twelve to sixteen hour shifts.  When dozing off, cold water would be thrown on them.  Ingrates.  At the turn…

by Shawn Crawford Like most Kafka stories, “A Hunger Artist” inserts you into a bewildering situation, appears to offer you some solace and meaning, and then bewilders you all over again. The Hunger Artist is just that: a man that starves himself for a living. But unlike Gregor Samsa awaking to find himself an enormous…

by Shawn Crawford If T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is the sacred text of Modernist poetry (With Joyce’s Ulysses the sacred novel), then his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” provides the theology to interpret and understand the poem’s byzantine lines and obscure references. How we pored over both, seeking to fathom the mysteries locked…

by Shawn Crawford (The following is an excerpt from Crawford’s lecture at the Lausanne, Switzerland conference of The Society of Data Analysts Committed to Reducing Any Complexity to a Single Sobering Graph. Researchers will remember the group’s acrimonious split from the Social Scientists United for Reducing Any Cultural Crisis to a Single Meme. In a…

by Shawn Crawford In January of 1841, passengers arriving from Europe would be greeted by anxious New Yorkers on the docks. They all had the same question: “Is Little Nell dead?” Such was the anxiety caused by Charles Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop. But why couldn’t tortured New Yorkers simply read to the end…

by Shawn Crawford In the 70s our church caught bus fever as an effort to bring in the sheaves with greater volume (we pass the salvation savings on to you!). We began deploying a fleet of ancient school buses, painted Baptist blue, out into the neighborhoods of town to bring anyone that so wished to…

by Shawn Crawford Why do we stay? We lack the resources or the opportunities. We remain faithful to a place given to us through an accident of birth. We rage and complain but never wander very far, the reasons a cipher to ourselves. Even in America, a land of nomads and self-fashioning, most of us…

by Shawn Crawford Make it one for my baby, and one more for the road—Arlen/Mercer On the 4th of July, the kids start acting jakey once the sun approaches the tree line. It’s maybe, kinda, sorta, starting to get dark, so shouldn’t we break out the fireworks? No. But soon you’ll relent and allow some…

by Shawn Crawford Oatmeal for breakfast. Kale salad for lunch. Surely a slice of pie with dinner won’t ruin the diet after you’ve been so disciplined all day? Welcome to Moral Licensing, the term psychologists and researchers use to describe the process by which we use a “good” behavior to later justify a “bad” choice.…