The acid guile is sucking at your shoes

• “Romance tips from an end-times pastor: Demons torture married couples who practice ‘woman on top.'” Katie Halper mostly just points and laughs — which is appropriate, and she’s good at it — but there’s a serious theological matter lurking here. I think this is missionary-induced rant on the missionary position. The pastor is Nigerian. His theology is not. This is the product of colonizing missiology — first world fantasies replanted as an exotic invasive species.

Spam is really popular on Guam, but that doesn’t make it indigenous to Guam. Lots of theologies have similarly been processed, canned and shipped from here in America to the church in the developing world, where some of them have become popular as well. That popularity elsewhere doesn’t make those theologies any less American, or any less canned and processed.

• I am, as always, shocked — shocked! — to learn that good Christian people are telling lies about Planned Parenthood.

• “Maybe the people who like to ski are praying a little harder than the rest of us.” That’s from a Religion News Service piece on snowed-under churches in New England. The accompanying photo is worth more than a thousand words.

Meanwhile, the Ithaca Visitor’s Bureau briefly surrendered — the upstate New York city’s “Visit Ithaca” website, designed to promote tourism, greeted visitors with a picture of sunny beaches and the message, “Winter, you win. Key West, anyone?”

• Speaking of … anybody ever use a Sno Wovel? They look pretty ingenius, do you think they work as well as the folks who make them say?

• The Reboot offers a helpful glossary/guide: “Seminary, Divinity School, Bible College: What’s the Difference?”

Unsurprisingly, these things range from high-cost/high-quality to low-cost/low-quality. Getting a seminary education is terrific, but most people can’t afford to take on student loan debt for studies that don’t boost their earning potential. Christians looking for a more affordable and more accessible source of theological education may turn to “Bible institutes,” which tend to be less expensive and more convenient — but which also tend to include more fundie folklore than actual theology or biblical study. I’d love to see seminaries and divinity schools offer something like those “institutes” — affordable theological education for lay people, but with actual theology rather than the kind of stuff they tend to peddle at “Bible institutes.”

• “You can’t run an army without profanity,” Gen. George Patton said, “and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn’t fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.”

• “‘Human shield’ wraps around Oslo synagogue”