David W. Congdon
@dwcongdon
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Senior Editor, @Kansas_Press @dwceditor | Instructor, McCormick Seminary | New book: WHO IS A TRUE CHRISTIAN? (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Lee's Summit, MO
Joined March 2009
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Apparently some Christians are not aware that the Last Supper painting is not, in fact, a sacred piece of the Christian canon.
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I'm contacting an author whose manuscript was due in 1987. A full 30 years ago. The rest of you can feel better now for being a little late.
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Missouri now has a page where people can report trans individuals and the people who help them to the state. I hate this place.
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I’m as happy as the next person to see Falwell’s fall from grace, but the fact that THAT photo took him down only reveals the serious unresolved problems in US evangelicalism.
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Big publishing news: MIT Press is going 100% open access for its academic titles beginning in 2022. Libraries are being invited to start subscribing to their service now, which gives access to their back catalog.
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Stayed up until 2am last night talking to my brother, who is an exvangelical atheist sound engineer in Portland, about the west coast megachurches and their obsession with achieving TSwift-level live music perfection. It made me want to go full on journalist and write about it.
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I’m convinced that if you want your kid to grow up conservative, a Christian college is arguably the worst place to send them. And a Bible/theology major is the worst of all. You should send them almost anywhere else and make sure they major in business, math, or polisci.
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Having worked in academic publishing for almost 12 years, and having put a number of manuscripts through plagiarism software, I can tell you that a LOT of scholars (primarily older white men) will not be happy with the results.
If we’re going to start scrutinizing every detail of college presidents’ past writings for technical attribution issues, then let’s do it. Let’s go look at everyone’s past writings, not just Claudine Gay at Harvard. Let’s put them all under a microscope and see how they hold up.
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Many thought "Make America Great Again" was trying to recreate the 1950s. Apparently that was about a century off.
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Does this mean the NYT has been sitting on this one-paragraph announcement of Kissinger’s death (or at least a version of it) since at least 2010? Do I have this right?
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@calvinjburke
St Louis and KC are delightful cities with so much to offer. But we have one of the most disgusting and evil state governments.
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People out there doing better theology with graffiti than with books
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If Aunt Jemima can change a brand name that's been around since 1893, then the Washington R-dskins can change a name coined in 1932 and the Kansas City Chiefs can change one coined in 1959. It's really not that hard.
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This perfectly exemplifies why the escalation of business schools at the expense of the humanities is so devastating for
#highered
and human society.
I asked, “What book do you re-read the most?”
I received 441 replies
Here are 20 books that should be read again and again:
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1. THREAD. I've been an editor in political science at the University Press of Kansas (
@Kansas_Press
) for over a year now, and ever since I started I've been struck by something: the highly conservative character of the political science field.
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As I’ve argued in the past, arguably the defining feature of US evangelicalism is the inability to think systemically about anything (race, gender, sexuality, economics, etc.). Evangelicalism is actually theologically designed to deny systemic/structural thinking.
So now the thing with some conservative Christians is that virtually anyone who talks about race has come under the spell of “critical race theory.” It is assumed that looking at racial groups is *the* problem and we can only analyze at the individual level. 🤷🏾♂️
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Not enough people give credit to
@rachelheldevans
for being one of the first post-evangelicals of her generation to make the case for universalism to a public audience. A year before
#LoveWins
, Evolving in Monkey Town exposed the problems with traditional theology.
#BecauseOfRHE
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Preorders are now available for my forthcoming book from
@BakerAcademic
on the different types of Christian universalism.
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At this point Thomas and Alito’s jurisprudence comes down to “owning the libs.” They have no judicial norms or principles besides making their critics angry.
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Part of me really wants to write a history of First Things. Someone for sure needs to do it.
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Spent the last moments of 2020 finishing up
@kkdumez
's JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE. Everyone already knows how great it is, but I'll go ahead and chime in anyway: Easily one of the best books on US religious history I've ever read.
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The big conference for sound tech that happens in California has a whole night dedicated to church music where they show off the top of the line equipment. There’s so much about this world that people don’t know about unless you’re in the industry.
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The stories he was telling me were wild. Churches desperate to compete for attention blowing upwards of 200K a year on sound equipment, hiring professional musicians in the Portland area to perform gigs on Sunday morning, complete with their own green rooms and the like.
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The reason I majored in English lit is that I’ve always been drawn to morally complex stories that illustrate a basic truth: being on the “right” side doesn’t make everything you do right.
This is why I care about the decline of the humanities so much.
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So apparently Biola University is terminating faculty who don’t subscribe unreservedly to premillennial dispensationalism. In case you forgot, some people are still stuck in 1910.
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Apparently a group of sound mixers for big churches and Xian musicians put together a group called MxU that has become a training ground for how to mix professional grade live music for churches. Sound engineers for people like Metallica give lessons to church staff.
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RIP John Shelby Spong. You deserved better from the ranks of the theologians and clergy.
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The “persecuted Christian complex” is so out of control that they’ll file lawsuits about the hypothetical possibility of having to do something mildly uncomfortable.
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I should have expected this. Where to begin? Let's start with that title.
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David Brooks giving us the best reason to vote for Bernie.
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Excited to finally share the news I've been holding on to lately. So this is happening soon. Looking forward to having my book out with
@CambridgeUP
.
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I came of age listening to MxPx, Plankeye, and Pedro the Lion. My youngest brother listened to Coldplay and Hoobastank.
Now I’m the CRT-spouting leftist and he’s the loyal Trump follower and purveyor of conspiracy theories.
+1 for Christian music
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@danremps
A lot of Christians would benefit from considering Barth’s view that just because a group of people calling themselves Christian gather to talk about “god” once a week doesn’t mean God has anything to do with it.
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I've been informed that my
@Fortresspress
book "The Mission of Demythologizing" has won the 2018 Rudolf Bultmann Prize for Hermeneutics from the University of Marburg. I'm deeply honored by this acknowledgment.
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“All studies we analysed that did not find surgical masks to be effective were under-powered to such an extent that even if masks were 100% effective, the studies in question would still have been unlikely to find a statistically significant effect.”
Pretty much all of the studies that say that masks don't work are underpowered.
Pretty much all of the studies that are adequately powered say that masks work.
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I work for a publisher but I stand with IA
↔️ Interlibrary loan
🎞️ Microfilm
🗣️ Accessible books
Important, right?
❌ Did you know each of these longstanding library practices was challenged by publishers?
Learn more from yesterday's discussion with
@library_futures
@KyleKCourtney
&
@jziskina
⤵️
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Pretty soon universities will be football and basketball camps with an attached business school.
The Department of World Languages at
#WVU
is recommended for dissolution, eliminating ALL programs, grad and undergrad, and reducing faculty to ZERO.
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It's publication day for my new book on Christian universalism!
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I’ve completed a PhD, published five books, taught undergrad and grad students, helped academic authors across multiple disciplines publish their works—and nothing has been more difficult than getting my 8yo daughter to clean her room.
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Impossible to overstate Moltmann’s influence. He was generous beyond imagination. Up until a year ago he was supervising my friend Brach Jennings’s dissertation. That is the kind of person he was. Truly the best of us. An incalculable loss.
News on the wire just now that Juergen Moltmann has passed away at the age of 98. A hugely influential voice in Reformed theology in our time.
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The em-dash is the best punctuation and every keyboard should come equipped with it as a basic keystroke.
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I’m starting to rethink my criticism of Left Behind theology. Maybe we were too hasty in denying the coming Antichrist.
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I'm a theologian and professional editor. I couldn't choose better words.
I'm a rabbi.
I believe words have power.
I try to choose mine carefully.
Fuck you, Trump.
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Just sent off the manuscript for The Varieties of Christian Universalism to my editor at Baker Academic. This project has been in a state of limbo for many years, thanks to the upheavals in my life 5 years ago. I'm glad it's finished and look forward to seeing it out soon.
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my spiritual practice is writing letters to nyt games about their impoverished dictionary
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The advance copy of my new book, WHO IS A TRUE CHRISTIAN?, arrived today. I could not be more pleased to see this out in the world.
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My grandfather went to Wheaton College in the late 1930s and was an old-earth (day-age) creationist, while my father went to Wheaton College in the mid-1970s and became a young-earth creationist. This was the source of a lot of family drama when I was a kid.
Before the 1960s, very few evangelicals—indeed, few fundamentalists—accepted this reading of Genesis.
Why did US evangelicals embrace young earth creationism in the 1960s? Why pretend it’s the orthodox view? How has this development shaped evangelical attitudes toward expertise?
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For one week (7/14-21), virtually all
@PrincetonUPress
books will be available for 50% off when you use the code PUP21. Enjoy!
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One of the points I make in my forthcoming book is that conservative Christians speak about one kingdom when they are in positions of power and two kingdoms when they’re not.
evangelicals when the government does something they like: “ROMANS 13!!!”
evangelicals when the government does something they don’t like: “WE ARE IN THE END TIMES!!!”
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Most common guesses at the author:
1. George R. R. Martin
2. Harlan Ellison
3. Douglas Adams
4. Jane Austen
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Long thread on how the theft of Osage oil and sovereignty built the wealth of Wichita’s Koch family.
It’s said that behind every great fortune is a great crime. It was this Osage oil that created one of America’s greatest fortunes: the Koch family, whose wealth is calculated at over $120bn.
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Hot takes like this confound me. If you think the decision was correct on the merits, then we absolutely should live in a world where these cases are brought to court. If it wasn’t correct on the merits, then it shouldn’t have been brought at all. Those are the options.
I’m very clearly no fan of Donald Trump, but I also don’t want to live in a world where every president leaves office only to face a pile of lawsuits and indictments. We are dangerously close to living in that world.
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After 7 years of teaching Reformed history and theology for
@UDSeminary
, I've been informed they are ending their use of adjuncts to teach their CRE/CLP courses.
As a result, this summer I will be uploading my 14 lectures to YouTube. I hope people find them useful.
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While some are rightly worried that Nashville might be the Christian Right’s Reichstag Fire, I’m even more worried that, like Grynszpan’s killing of vom Rath, this could be the prelude to the transgender Kristallnacht. We have to do whatever necessary to prevent this.
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While I’m not opposed to the call for accessible books, this is another good opportunity to talk about the book industry—particularly the religious book industry.
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My new favorite example of why you should always use the serial comma.
#grammar
Newt Gingrich, a three-star Air Force general and former publicist for Michael Jackson and Prince want to create a $2 billion sweepstakes to see who can establish and run the first lunar base
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Now that I've finished
@IBJIYONGI
's THE DISORDERED COSMOS, let me say that this book ought to be required reading for anyone in academia. For those who don't know what this book is really about, let me say more.
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1. THREAD on evangelicalism, "ancient/historic Christianity," and the antimodern discourse coalition of today's Christian Right—as well as a preview of my forthcoming
@CUPReligion
book, Who Is a True Christian?
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If things hold true, my new book, WHO IS A TRUE CHRISTIAN?, will be coming out on Leap Day, the day before my birthday—the best possible birthday gift.
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This is correct, but I want to make sure we properly capture what makes much (most?) of US white evangelicalism a cult. There’s a tendency among many to think this is a new development, or that Trump is the catalyst, the personality around which the cult centers.
There is a sizable and growing portion of white American evangelicalism that could be labeled a “Christian cult.” And much of the rest of it is committed to excusing, defending and protecting their friends who are the leaders of that cult.
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Today is the official release day for my new book! Let your academic and public libraries know they can order a copy. If you've had a chance to read it, I'd greatly appreciate your reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.
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Hands down the best endorsement for the NRSV. They should put this on the front cover.
Absurd that NRSV is standard in Anglican churches — absurd because of its gender neutral language which mistranslates the Greek and other false translations of the OT which tend in a demythologising direction. Better versions must be used in future and mainly KJV itself.
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🚨📗 BOOK GIVEAWAY!!! 📗🚨
I meant to do this sooner, but such is life. I have two copies of my new book from
@BakerAcademic
that I’ll send to the winners of a drawing. To enter:
1) Retweet or QT this before EOD on 2/5
Or
2) Comment below on why this topic matters to you.
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I've received an important update directly from John Matzko, the Bob Jones U. archivist.
BJU destroyed most of its archival *paper* files in 2021 after giving Matzko a week to save what he wanted, which included minutes and various important files. 1/
I was informed by a scholar I reached out to recently that Bob Jones University has recently destroyed its archive, leaving historians with very little to work with.
Can any
#twitterstorians
confirm this?
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Lord, for priests who do not give in to the patriotic demands of their parishioners, we give you thanks.
@UnvirtuousAbbey
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My first time seeing my new book in the wild is always a special day.
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This is genius.
“By week one, I was already tired of his anti-rich, pro-Samaritan bullshit. I wanted to take a course in Christianity, not liberalism.”
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It’s always a beautiful thing when the copies of a new book arrive. As usual,
@BakerAcademic
did a superb job.
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Alan Jacobs adds his name to the long list of scholars who ahistorically suppose that evangelicalism was hijacked by Falwell & co. We will not understand 2016 unless we recognize that evangelicals have been catechized in the religion of settler colonial whiteness for a LONG time.
The question of who is and who is not an evangelical should matter to everyone concerned with American politics and the American social order," Alan Jacobs writes. "It matters especially to those who wonder how we got here."
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An incalculable loss. James Cone was massively influential to my theological development. May his legacy live on in communities awakened to the emancipatory message of Jesus.
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Important thread on the way lack of accountability means history continues to repeat itself.
ProPublica did a good job reporting on the relationship between Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas. But there are blogs out there with titles like “Friendship between Thomas and Crow triggers controversy — again” from 2011, which reference reporting from 2002
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If they had staged the Last Supper using French soldiers in uniform, we’d hear instead about how it honored the Christian roots of European society.
Because the only pieties being blasphemed are the cultural values of heteronormative masculinity.
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I’m only a quarter through this book and already it’s one of the best books I’ve read on 20th century US religion and politics. It’s also among the best rebuttals to the Thomas Kidd/Alan Jacobs claim that evangelicalism got hijacked by politics in the late 20th century.
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Show me someone promoting a pure “biblical Christianity” and I’ll show you someone who, in their hermeneutical naïveté, is distorting scripture more egregiously than explicitly conservative or progressive interpreters.
There’s a stark difference between biblical Christianity & Christianity that’s merely a brand of conservatism or progressivism.
The former is rooted in the Bible & controlled by Gospel imperatives. The latter seeks ideological ends & uses the Bible as a secondary source.
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Sometimes I wish there were an evangelical "blue pill" that would make me blissfully ignorant of Metaxas, Dreher, Strachan, et al.
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Carl Trueman has really outdone himself. What’s ironic about his argument is that he seems to think evangelicals, by virtue of being disestablished, are some kind of countercultural protest movement, when the reality has been just the opposite: they mirror the worst of society.
LGBTQ-affirming churches are simply doing what the pro-slavery churches of the nineteenth century did: giving specious blessing to the values of the world in which they find themselves.
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My 9th grade son, who spends his time gaming and coding, just finished reading 1984 and texted me to say it’s his new favorite book.
My inner librarian wants to hand him a copy of Orwell’s essays, as well as Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses, but I have to play it cool now.
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1. 🧵THREAD ALERT🧵
There's been a lot of talk about liberal theology/religion recently, much of it overly simplistic. So I'd like to take the opportunity to examine what "liberal" means in this context.
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Bryson White’s paper on the prison industrial complex as realized white supremacist rapture eschatology is blowing my mind. This is the content I come to
#SBLAAR18
to hear.
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ok but why do we need a biblical justification for sex? if I never hear the adjective “biblical” again I would be a very happy person.
ok purity culture is crap, but using “the most literal reading” of Song of Songs as biblical justification for pre-marital sex is just really, really bad hermeneutics.
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A direct look at the demonic heart of American civil religion.
Fox host: Dropping MOAB is "what freedom looks like, that's the red, white, and blue."
Geraldo: It's one of my favorite things to watch.
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I did my first real Zoom meeting today with the Four Seasons Total Landscaping background.
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20 years ago, on June 24, 2004, my college roommate, James Pyles—the only roommate I had during my three years at Wheaton—was killed in a car accident on a highway in Israel. He was an immensely complicated person. Who I am today is in large part the result of my time with him.
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@bleaktheology
I believe you can do it. I think Misstasi works nicely. But I guess that sounds like Mississippi. Misstoursi?? 😆
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