Columns Archives

Having thus cheated death twice, you might think that Thecla would abandon Christianity in favor of staying alive, but of course you’d be wrong.

We all expect to have important, dramatic lives. We all think we’ll turn out to be heroes. We’re just like Rainbow Man.

So, if Easter did coincide with an Anglo-Saxon feast to a goddess no one’s ever heard of—well, I mean, coincidences happen.

It’s called the “Miracle of Lanciano,” mostly because “Holy crap, we have bleeding human remains on the altar” isn’t particularly catchy.

The great thinkers of the Mediterranean have already identified the seven virtues and how you can acquire them! It doesn’t get much easier than that.

In the end, it wasn’t being at odds with his board of elders that brought Jonathan Edwards down—it was dirty magazines. Because, isn’t it always dirty magazines?

For several centuries, if you wanted to make sure the viewer knew you were sculpting Moses, you gave him horns. Weird, right?

St. Lawrence was literally barbecued to death. And then the Catholic Church made him patron saint of chefs, presumably to rub it in.

The point is, it’s Christmas (or actually Advent, but since no one seems to understand the difference between Christmas and Advent, whatevs, call it Christmas if you want, sure)!

Jesus’ solution to your own sinful tendencies isn’t presented as inconveniencing, insulting, or harming the people around you—it’s presented as handicapping yourself.

I like to think that, centuries from now, “Christian rock music” will be thought of as yet another inexplicable oddity of Church history, alongside Origen’s self-mutilation, the Crusades, and whatever it is with Lutherans and Jell-O.

Miller predicted Christ’s return based on all that stuff in Daniel about “time, times and half a time” that everyone pretends to understand but doesn’t.

Coffee culture is weird, you guys.

Christianity was unusually unified at the time the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built, but things have been falling apart (literally and figuratively) ever since then.

Protip: when you’re too pious for monks, it might be time to dial it back a bit.

A lot of dumb things have happened in Church history and in the Bible—and it’s through the dumb stuff that God is at work.