Ingrid Lilly

Getting ready to teach my “Gods of the Biblical World” this fall.

What else is hope for than for burning it all up as fuel before the fire gets to it?

Call using fivecalls

What else is hope for than for burning it all up as fuel before the fire gets to it?

Call using fivecalls

What else is hope for than for burning it all up as fuel before the fire gets to it?

Call using fivecalls

What else is hope for than for burning it all up as fuel before the fire gets to it?

Call using fivecalls

CSBS President, Professor Erin Runions (Pomona College), delivers the 2025 Presidential Address entitled "The Carceral Afterlives of Isaiah 66:24 and the Question of the Human."

“They” are going all in on AI. It’s the arms race, the culture war, the political game, the new market, the scientific revolution, the hearts and minds, the next great awakening, the mission field… and the one (and maybe only) thing holding the authoritarian coalition together.

Elon Musk's DOGE has spent the last several months dismantling the departments & agencies that regulate HIS businesses.

Our report found that Musk has a direct business interest in over 70% of the agencies & departments DOGE targeted.

The conflicts of interest are endless.

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

Here ya go!

www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Omg. This seems designed to achieve two goals: (1) scare prospective college students away from taking out loans (hurting college budgets), (2) forces colleges to gut all critical and creative studies of the human condition to intensely focus instead on job training and career-prep.

10] Equity through sustainability? This is my own horizon of curiosity right now. I’m petering out (big tired working mama over here). What’s the over/under on more closely connecting equity to sustainability? Is there any place for equity to take root?

9/ To achieve equitable futures in the face of climate futures, we must deal with the cultural damages of anti-knowledge, mis-information saturation, and corporate/economic war against anything but unbridled growth.

8/ Future equity, “build the world for our children to thrive,” has always been a suasive rhetoric that works on Americans. But I forgot how damaged our shared dialog about futures is. Just look at climate change —

7/ So equity achieved through historical reckoning and identity-based interventions faces these kinds of challenges. … so I brain-stormed grounding equity in futures and/or radical sustainability … as I’ve posted, my optimism deflated.

6/ Reckoning with our harm-laden histories is hard work — and socializing that work among the completely unwilling is even harder.

5/ We (and especially among us, the hopefully soon-to-be former MAGA folk) Americans want other people to be reckoned with (mass incarceration, police-worship) — but we don’t want anyone to reckon with us.

4/ I’m learning as I think and welcome co-learning especially about this next thought —> I’m thinking Americans are better at imagining futures than at reckoning with pasts.

3/ But for good or ill, the absolutely essential value and work of equity can also be rooted in the moral universe of collective futures and/or radical sustainability practices.

2/ Identity-based equity has come under intense unfair fire-storm. Americans refuse to live within the moral universe of their histories. Equity and history need each other to make sense.

1/ Ideating about Diversity equity and inclusion.

I can think of a substantial number of social formations where the principles of diversity and inclusion are coupled. I predict this conceptual pair can hold.

h/t @spqesq.bsky.social

Seriously, thank you. This list is excellent. I’m going to show it to my students.

Which book’s thesis seemed far fetched initially? (The one you’re sold on now.) I ask in solidarity—I’m all in. Do you mind sharing?

A meme calling for Dems to make Pete B the official Democratic Press Secretary on Capitol Hill—so he and support staff can do daily briefings.

Spread the word! Infuse facts and analysis — take back the means of perception!

If you are thinking about nonhuman animals in biblical texts then there is still time to submit an abstract to the Humanimal 2.0 Virtual Conference: The Bible & "Animal" Others.

The Call for Papers closes on the 15th January.

#Humanimal2025
www.humanimalconference.org/call-for-pap...

Some people expect Palestinians, including me, to be sane and act or behave normally. Do you think we don’t want to be normal? Who on earth could endure the genocide of their family, relatives, friends, and city—and remain unaffected? Who? How dare you ask or expect this.

I think journalists, policymakers and good govt types are struggling to understand DOGE because their mental model is that it is a government reform commission, operating like previous ones. Maybe. But it might be better to start thinking about it as a hostile takeover of the govt by oligarchs.

PRAYER OF THOMAS JEFFERSON ALMIGHTY GOD, Who has given us this good land for our heritage, we humbly beseech Thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of Thy favor and glad to do Thy will. Bless our land with honorable industry and prosperity. SAVE Us from violence, discord and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and every evil way. Defend our liberties and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. ENDOW with the Spirit of wisdom those to whom in Thy Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that through obedience to Thy law, we may show forth Thy praise among the nations of the earth. IN THE TIME of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in Thee to fail; all of which we ask through JESUS CHRIST. OUR LORD. - Amen.

FWIW, here's a 1970 version of that apocryphal Thomas Jefferson prayer that Mike Johnson read in the House of Representatives today. It appeared in The Cross and the Flag, the magazine of Gerald LK Smith, a white supremacist & Christian Nationalist who was America's most notorious antisemite.

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? We would rather talk about literally everything else.

open.substack.com/pub/celestem...

Pasts Imperfect (12.12.24) The Annual Classics Gift Guide, Reviewing The Return, Mesopotamian Bodily Emotion, Ancient Chinese Rice Beer, Ancient South Asian metaphysics & much more.

Tom Bolin — I liked your review of the Return a lot!

Even though I probably won’t see it, this question from Penelope is apropos—“How can men find war but they cannot find their way home?” open.substack.com/pub/pastsimp...