Christopher Douglas
LightNews LightNews
banner
crddouglas.bsky.social
Christopher Douglas
@crddouglas.bsky.social
1.5K followers 580 following 290 posts
American literature, Bible scholarship, Christian Right, apocalypse now and then. Univ of Victoria. My latest: "What If God is a ‘Pagan Amalgam’: Marilynne Robinson and Historical Bible Scholarship"
https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/37/2/67/7208648
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
crddouglas.bsky.social
Christopher Douglas @crddouglas.bsky.social · Mar 28
In a new article, I argue that Blood Meridian's judge is a human-embodied but intellectually diminished divine being who labors as an evolutionary scientist to piece together the methods of creation in which he previously partook but has now forgotten. Open Access #SSHRCC

doi.org/10.5325/corm...
A Synthesis of the Christian, Gnostic, and Evolutionary Readings of Blood Meridian
ABSTRACT. Scholars pursuing a gnostic reading of Blood Meridian have never explained why and with what consequences an archon might assume human form. Indeed, the train of interpretation, from Hans Jo...
doi.org
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
planet4589.bsky.social
For those who keep asking me about 3I/ATLAS, here's a great writeup by my friend
@astrowright.bsky.social
sites.psu.edu/astrowright/...
Loeb’s 3I/ATLAS “Anomalies” Explained
Avi Loeb continues to claim that 3I/ATLAS has many anomalous behaviors that lead to the conclusion that it “might” be an alien spacecraft.  He carefully hedges the probability that it is a spacecraft ...
sites.psu.edu
November 11, 2025 at 12:03 AM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
theradr.bsky.social
AUTHORS!!

Remember that case where a bunch of authors sued AI for stealing their work? And WON?

Well, the settlement money has been announced. Each WORK that got thefted will be compensated $3k (split 50/50 bw publisher + author). So authors will be compensated $1500 per WORK stolen.

More here:
Homepage | Bartz v Anthropic Settlement Site
www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com
November 10, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
racheledini.bsky.social
The whole piece is excellent but these paragraphs here are absolute bangers. And boy but it’s refreshing to see the New Yorker critique centrist views (here’s the archived version if you haven’t got a subscription: archive.ph/UNdFj).
Women, it should be noted, have dominated the teaching profession since the nineteenth century not because it's a misandrist job-protection racket but because early public-education advocates found that they could expand the school system more quickly by hiring women teachers, whom they could pay less than men. One might ask if difficult, essential work might be well paid, at this moment in history, regardless of a person's sex. But then much of the centrist manosphere's rhetoric is predicated on refusing to see half of what's in front of you. Newsom's executive order concerning men and boys acknowledges the strong correlation between social-media usage and mental-health disorders such as depression and anxiety, but it doesn't note that these effects manifest in girls at significantly higher rates. In "Notes on Being a Man," Galloway writes, "The deliberate transfer of wealth from the young to the old in the United States over the past century has led to unaffordable and indefensible costs for education and housing, and skyrocketing student debt, all of which directly affect young men." He could have said "young people," unless college bursars and landlords run a discount program for the ladies which I haven't heard about. Emanuel, in his Washington Post op-ed, endorses a double standard with even greater frankness. The cost of housing, he writes, "is, of course, a problem for all Americans—men and women alike. But, unpopular as it might be to say in some quarters of my party, the crisis affects one gender with particular potency." In other words, men and women pay the same bill, but we are obligated to understand that the social and spiritual price it extracts from men is higher. (If women want an emergency to call their own, it can be that they are not having enough babies.) What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The "female-coded" person, to borrow Krugman's terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can't acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person's duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital "P."This person's opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly. "You need Dad," Galloway, who has two sons, said on a recent podcast. The nuclear family he imagines seems to be one in which the mom is the default parent ("They look to her for nurturing. When they really have a problem, I find they go to Mom"), while the necessary dad is the authority figure to whom Mom can appeal as the occasion demands. "There are certain moments when my partner needs me to weigh in," Galloway explained. "I don't know if it's the depth of my voice, my physical size." Boys, he went on, "begin tuning out their mom over time." One might wonder how boys lose these frequencies in the first place. One might long for a deep voice to explain it. Reeves frets that fatherless homes will beget more lost boys, more twentysomething men living in their childhood bedrooms, and more fractured families. If we do not update our "obsolete model of the breadwinner father," he warns, "we will continue to see more and more men being left out of family life." As for what authority has decreed that these absent fathers should be "left out" of their own families, Reeves never says—the culprit's identity is shrouded in passive voice. Nor does Reeves explain how women's attainment of economic independence would cause their husbands to be "stripped" of anything, much less the many non-economic aspects of being a spouse or parent. The notion that fathers wander away from their families owing to some gnawing sense of existential dislocation—some humiliating certainty of their own uselessness or usurpation—s especially pungent when one takes into account the enormous gender gap in housework and child-rearing in heterosexual marriages. According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, mothers who work full time do almost twice as much household labor as fathers. Research by the Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin has suggested that married men's disinclination toward housework and other "draggy business of family life" may be holding back birth rates, which should pique the interest of Republican pronatalists such as J. D. Vance. The deeper one sinks into our nation's alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents' house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it…
November 10, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
jennycohn.bsky.social
2/ Link: momentmag.com/the-new-chri...
The New Christian Right, Antisemitism & U.S. Democracy
For years, Christian supremacist ideology was coursing through American conservatism. Now it—and its antisemitism—is out in the open, in the halls of power and scaring Jews.
momentmag.com
November 9, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
jennycohn.bsky.social
“For years, Christian supremacist ideology was coursing through American conservatism. Now it—& its antisemitism—is out in the open, in the halls of power & scaring Jews.” 11/4/25 (*Incredible* article discussing Tucker, Nick Fuentes, Heritage, Doug Wilson & his protégés, Yoram Hazony, & NatCon.) 1/
November 9, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
volts.wtf
Sigh. I apologize on our behalf.
Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile | Gaby Hinsliff
Who is driving the populist insurgency? It’s not grumpy pensioners or vulnerable teenagers – it’s my generation, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff
www.theguardian.com
November 9, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
atrubek.bsky.social
I havent read such a banger of an essay in a very long time. This is so well-written!
Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…
lithub.com
November 8, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
janjancl.bsky.social
My book Immigration and Apocalypse will be at #AAR #SBL San Diego and bookstores / online everywhere Nov. 26 (pre-order avail now). Immediately, direly relevant, and I wish it were not so.
Picture of the book (showing cover, with a line of souls waiting to see angels in the judgment of the dead, from an 11th c. illumination above, with parallel imagery in photo below of migrants waiting in line to speak to border patrol agents.)
November 20, 2024 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
vox-magica.bsky.social
today’s the day!!
Promo graphic for my book _Smoke & Mirrors: Discourses of Magic in Early Petrine Traditions_. The graphic features a discount code for 30% off if you purchase directly from Oxford University Press. That code is AUFLY30 (case sensitive).
November 4, 2025 at 9:56 AM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
lswisnom.bsky.social
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
November 3, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
danahoule.bsky.social
Around Chicago ICE/Border Patrol are mostly just driving around looking for landscaping crews. It’s not targeted by threat or criminal background. It’s just Kavanaugh sweeps of brown men in work clothes operating landscaping equipment to hit quotas. They’re not investigating, they’re hunting
danahoule.bsky.social Dana Houle @danahoule.bsky.social · 7d
Still haven’t seen a video of neighbors cheering an abduction, still haven’t seen reports of a neighbor pointing out a hiding migrant to ICE/Border Patrol

The only people praising the ICE/Border Patrol terror patrols & kidnappings are people who live nowhere near where they’re happening.
November 3, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
joshtpm.bsky.social
Trump Wants to Abolish the Filibuster? Please Proceed, Degenerate … talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump...
Trump Wants to Abolish the Filibuster? Please Proceed, Degenerate …
As you’ve probably already heard, Donald Trump went on Truth Social late...
talkingpointsmemo.com
October 31, 2025 at 9:07 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
sarahposner.bsky.social
I do feel like there's a bit of deja vu going on here (for me, at least). I mean, my entire book is about how white evangelicals mobilized for Trump *despite* his overt embrace of Nazis, white supremacists, etc., covering it over because he was anointed and would deliver their Christian nation. 1/x
October 31, 2025 at 5:27 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
brianbeutler.bsky.social
New from me: Emmanuel Macron delivered remarks in Germany recently that I think could serve as a template for an outside-the-box, ambitious political figure. But timing and breaking with prevailing orthodoxy would be critical. www.offmessage.net/p/defiant-re...
The Defiant Resistance Speech An American Should Have Given
There's power waiting to be claimed by an ambitious political figure who makes this his or her cause.
www.offmessage.net
October 31, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
archive.org
Librarians, help us celebrate 1 trillion web pages preserved by the #InternetArchive! 🌐
Use our resource guide, complete with templates, visuals & event ideas, to connect your community to the web’s history.

More ⤵️
blog.archive.org/2025/10/07/
🧵

#Wayback1T #Libraries
Two images with text at the top that reads: "Wayback Machine" alongside an Internet Archive logo. Below that, each image contains the word "Then" or "Now" with a red arrow pointing down to a related Wayback Machine capture of the Internet Archive homepage from January 26, 1997, and July 31, 2023, respectively. Below each is the domain name "ARCHIVE.ORG".
October 30, 2025 at 7:02 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
kevinmkruse.bsky.social
I always get drawn back to Al Gore telling voters that he’d only raise taxes on the top 1% and then after the election a poll showed that something like 20% of voters thought they were in the top 1% and another 20% thought they would be in the next five years. Just a total tragic disconnect.
volts.wtf David Roberts @volts.wtf · 12d
Maaaaan, this. So much this. Every time there's any kind of actual in-depth survey we find that the American people are *abysmally* ignorant about even the most basic political facts, but the pundit class just immediately forgets & proceeds with political analysis based on subtle policy differences.
chrislhayes.bsky.social Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 12d
Feels like so many of our convos are revolving about how voters respond to what politicians are doing, or what parties’ positions on issues are, without much actual empirical sense of what they actually know about those topics.
October 29, 2025 at 11:13 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
donmoyn.bsky.social
When I give public talks now, I explain we are living through a series of de facto constitutional amendments, where the executive asks for radically more power, the judiciary largely agrees, and the GOP-led Congress is committing a form of institutional suicide.
Very much this:
There is no formal mechanism in the American system of government to dissolve the legislature. And for good reason: Congress is an independent institution with its own sphere of authority. To give any actor the power to dissolve it would fatally undermine its place in the nation’s constitutional arrangement. But by keeping the House on indefinite hiatus — as well as sidelining its oversight authority and more or less ceding its power to make law to the president — Republicans have successfully circumvented the text of the Constitution to make our national legislature a nullity. They have, for all intents and purposes, dissolved Congress.
October 29, 2025 at 1:51 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
helenkennedy.bsky.social
When he's finally gone, there is going to be this flood of books and tell all interviews from Republicans about how hard it was to be a Republican in Washington during this time and I am going to be galatically furious about it.
October 29, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
larryglickman.bsky.social
A few thoughts about this deeply-flawed Jeremy W. Peters article.(Gift link.) www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/u...
How a Small Elite College in Maine Influenced Mamdani’s World View
www.nytimes.com
October 29, 2025 at 12:02 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
jeffsharlet.bsky.social
Yes, Lord of the Rings is about how you must trust the “hard men.” Just as Narnia is about an evil lion. And the New Testament tells a tale of a wimp who wouldn’t fight back. Next week on “fascists read classics,” we’ll meet tech visionary George Orwell…
October 29, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
mattseybold.bsky.social
Remember when Paul Krugman’s columns were soooo wonky.

“It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.” - Paul Krugman
The Hunger Games Begin
40 million Americans are about to lose food stamps
open.substack.com
October 29, 2025 at 2:06 AM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
sarahposner.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Religiosity like Gelsinger’s – a born-again Christian who has referred to Silicon Valley as his “mission field” – is shaping Silicon Valley’s culture in its image. Where there was once purported atheism, there is now “a very loud, very visible, and very specifically Christian-inflected technological culture” in Silicon Valley, said Damien Williams, a scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who studies how technologies are shaped by religious beliefs. It’s exemplified by figures like Peter Thiel – who warns of the coming of the antichrist if humanity fails to work toward certain technological frameworks – and Andreessen Horowitz’s Katherine Boyle, a close friend of JD Vance, the vice-president. Gelsinger has long been outspoken about his Christian values, helping found Transforming the Bay With Christ in 2013, an organization aiming to ignite a Christian spiritual movement in the region.
October 28, 2025 at 5:13 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
vox-magica.bsky.social
it’s officially book promo time! so, hey, i wrote this book; it comes out in a week! would you mind signal boosting and asking your library to buy it? if you’d like a copy, the code AUFLY30 will get you 30%off.
global.oup.com
October 28, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
andrew-whitehead.bsky.social
NEW RESEARCH

Americans who embrace Christian nationalism more likely to agree situation f/ people with disabilities is good as it is, disabled people demand too much from rest of society, & there have been enough societal efforts in favor of people w/ disabilities.

academic.oup.com/socpro/advan...
Screen grab of the webpage for the journal article titled, Christian nationalism and ableism in the United States by Andrew Whitehead.
October 27, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
chancebonar.bsky.social
🗣️ PLEASE SHARE 🗣️

I'm writing an intro & sourcebook on late ancient Gazan literature for Dar al-Kalima University Press. The press and I plan to produce an Arabic translation to make Gazan literature more accessible to Palestinians. Help me compensate the Gazan translator!

spot.fund/dn8t744sc
Click here to support Chance Bonar's story *AncientGazanLitTranslation
*spotfund is the easiest place to create beautiful and free online fundraisers. It takes just minutes to start raising money today.
spot.fund
October 21, 2025 at 5:25 PM