Most impressive ...

... Sarah Ruden, a joyful iconoclast. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In my circles, we're supposed to deride the flag-waver who asserts that God loves our nation more than others, but I'm bored with that, and more inclined to get annoyed with the typical clerical politician of the left--just because no one around me challenges him, however strange his statements: for example, that "poverty elimination" and Christianity are functionally the same thing.

Aside from the obvious Scriptural and theological objections you could make to that, there are horrors of the twentieth century to look back on: the massive poverty elimination projects in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cambodia, China, and Tanzania. The result was always elimination of the poor, those irritating barriers between human ideology and agency, and the paradise leaders insisted that these can create on their own