• “Two years later, the couple will appear in Casablanca, a film about refugees seeking transit letters to Portugal; he played the dealer Emil and she the young Yvonne, who sang “La Marseillaise” as tears rolled down her face.

Chanan Tigay Smithsonian The article, “The Untold Story of the Portuguese Diplomat Who Saved Thousands of People from the Nazis,” is a long read. It’s also beautiful, beautifully told, and full of unexpected details like the one above.

• In this story, Aristides de Sousa Mendes behaves heroically. He did the right thing when few others around him did. And so he didn’t live happily ever after.

It reminds me of an earlier story from the story recently shared by John Fea:

In 1695, Thomas Maule, a member of the Society of Friends of Salem, wrote a tract denouncing his Puritan neighbors for their anti-Christian behavior during the witchcraft frenzy. In Truth held and maintained, Maule declares: “For it was better that a hundred witches live, than one person be put to death for a witch, who is not a witch.” Maule’s words were a scathing and prophetic criticism of the witch trials of Salem; they also landed him in jail for twelve months.

“If you can keep your head when everything around you is losing theirs,” they may never forgive you. It will double if you can save your heart.

• So what do you do if some anti-vaccine freaks at MAGA try to sabotage your business by writing one-star reviews online? You print these reviews on T-shirts and sell them in your restaurant.

• It would be a terrible thing if that headline were true: “Most White Evangelicals Still Believe The 2020 Election Was Stolen.

Alas, the truth is even worse than that. It’s not that “60% of white evangelicals believe in the Big Lie” but that 60% of white evangelicals are so deeply immersed in bad faith duplicity that they will pretend to believe what they think their allegiance is. white nationalism forces them to pretend to believe, regardless of what they know to be true.

They don’t “believe the 2020 election was stolen” because they don’t believe in anything. They are no longer able to believe.

• This is the first play by Jacob Alan Cook in the series we reviewed recently: “What if your ‘Christian worldview’ was based on sinful ideas? “

We can put this essay in the same file as these articles from 2008, 2013 and two months ago:

I would also add this: It is theoretically possible that someone could one day argue that their perspective simply represents a “Christian worldview” without a hint of pompous and judgmental condescension. But this theoretical possibility has not yet been proven in any real world example.

• MAGA-QAnon Republican Representative Lauren Boebert refuses to apologize for her use of hate Islamophobic slurs and malicious attacks on the legitimacy of non-right-wing white-Christian members of Congress.

“They want public humiliation,” Boebert says, “and that’s not going to happen.”

Boebert, like everyone who complains about “the cancellation of culture,” fails to see that his public humiliation is what is. already event. She is – repeatedly and perpetually – humiliating himself. The only way to end this public humiliation is to apologize and stop saying the nasty things that are causing his self-induced humiliation.

Complaints about “culture cancellation” almost always reflect this same obtuse failure to equate shameful behavior with shame. “I refuse to be canceled” is just another way of proclaiming “I am shameless”. No one disputes Boebert’s shameful behavior. Of course, she is shameless – this is just a rephrasing of the problem.

The word “disgrace” is useful here in part because when used as a verb it is almost exclusively understood as self-inflicted. It cuts through the confusion that exacerbates “culture cancellation” critics like Boebert. No one else “dishonors” you. You do this to yourself. And you are free to stop dishonoring yourself at any time. But that is entirely up to you, to yourself, regardless of what any so-called “crowd” of others has to say about anything.

• The title of this article comes from “Twist and Shout” by the Cramps, which is the penultimate song from the band’s frenzied 20-minute ensemble in the video below.

God’s Reign is like a free psychobilly concert in a public mental hospital.

Punch ; reach the bottom. Find the person you’re told doesn’t matter and show them that they matter.