Stephen L. Young
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slyprofessor.bsky.social
Stephen L. Young
@slyprofessor.bsky.social
3.6K followers 570 following 750 posts
#BLM | Professor in Mountains of NC | Nerd about Religious Studies - Mediterranean Antiquity | I study how ancient and modern Christians imagine history | Cycling | he/him | Writes @RDispatches | OpinionsMine
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slyprofessor.bsky.social
You want a drop-bar, and not flat-bar bike, Endurance or Gravel bike. That will let you have wider tires (30mm or wider), which will make things more comfortable, while still being fast enough for your long rides. Look for the Mid or Enthusiast level components (see pic). We can talk tires later...
November 15, 2025 at 8:42 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Here we go. The story is completely off the top of the NYT this morning.
November 14, 2025 at 3:03 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
All good points. But my gawd, Dreher and the conservative ecosystem have turned decades of Foxnews bullcrap into (fake) reality.
November 12, 2025 at 2:34 AM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Boone in Western, NC. Pictures don’t do it justice, but we lined the highway through town for a ways. Lots of great humans who want to make society better for other humans. 💚
October 18, 2025 at 6:39 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
September 24, 2025 at 12:28 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Microsoft execs may be spending too much time on the toilet to meddle with the magic in Taco Bell’s kitchen.
Pic of dude eating Taco Bell, wondering to himself “I wonder if the people paying $300 for a cleanse know about the $5 Taco Bell Box?”
July 20, 2025 at 2:27 AM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
I was today years old when I learned that us liberal men don’t watch or talk about sports. Ok, back to looking at one of my favorite pieces of Liberal Dem DEI art…
Caleb Love draining the three point shot for Carolina against Duke in the Final Four that won both the game and rivalry for UNC, and also retired Coach K.
June 30, 2025 at 2:42 AM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Second Page of the TOC...
@lsnasrallah.bsky.social @zafulotus.bsky.social @apocalypsenow5.bsky.social @ryancollman.bsky.social
May 5, 2025 at 1:11 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
First Page of the TOC...
@alexichantz.bsky.social @mattthiessen.bsky.social
May 5, 2025 at 1:11 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Was writing about Sirach and misogyny. File this passage (25:23-26) under "Patriarchy is Uncreative Loser Energy." Though from an ancient Jewish text now in Catholic Bibles, it reads like a manosphere bro manifesto about how women exist for the comfort & pleasure of men. 🤮 #BiblicalStudies #Classics
Passage from the ancient Jewish writing of Sirach, Chapter 25. The passage in question is loser patriarchy trash. Here's what it says, "Drooping hands and weak knees come from the wife who does not make her husband happy. From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die. Allow no outlet to water and no boldness of speech to an evil wife. If she does not go as you direct, separate her from yourself."
February 17, 2025 at 12:10 AM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
The universe has you covered…
Picture of a printer with the caption, “Don’t let your printer know you’re in a hurry. They smell fear.”
January 22, 2025 at 6:13 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Can we hear from the "I think about the Roman Empire" and "Gotta to teach Classics!" bros? Surely they can 'splain how Greco-Roman writers were obsessed with saying good leaders want advisors who speak truthfully instead of being sycophantic flatterers? Maybe our President can...oh shit, nevermind..
January 22, 2025 at 5:20 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Random but related aside re: moderates, just found myself writing this in a popular level book about the Bible, sexism, sexual violence, and white evangelicals…
Screenshot of a passage in a chapter draft for my book about the Bible, sexism, and evangelical Christian attempts to keep the Bible morally exceptional. The screenshot highlights a passage where I write that unlike our corporate media that likes to find middle grounds, I don’t want to find a middle ground when it comes to sexual violence and misogyny.
November 23, 2024 at 11:44 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Post a non-religious photo you think of as holy.
Caleb Love draining a three point shot that sealed Carolina’s win over Duke in the men’s Final Four. Chills!
November 21, 2024 at 12:41 AM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Can’t make it either. Bummer. But hey, us folks who stay home will get more sleep this weekend … and that’s not nothing at this point in the semester!
November 19, 2024 at 2:56 AM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
To be clear, in its context Rev 1:13 does not anticipate LGBTQ inclusion or promote gender equity. That's not how gender ideologies worked in ancient Mediterranean texts. Their versions of gender hierarchies or sometimes fluidity were deeply sexist: masculine was superior, feminine inferior. 8/12
A collection of passages from ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian texts that imagine a spectrum from masculine to feminine traits that people can have wherein masculine is superior and feminine is inferior. For example, - In all kinds in which there are the female and the male, nature has established much the same difference in the character of the females as compared with that of the males. But it is most evident in the case of humans … For the character of the females is softer, and quicker to be tamed, and more receptive of handling … For man’s nature is the most complete … Hence a wife is more compassionate than a husband and more given to tears, but also more jealous and complaining and more apt to scold and strike. The female is also more dispirited and despondent than the male, more shameless and lying, is readier to deceive” (Greek Philosopher: Aristotle, History of Animals 608a–b)
November 16, 2024 at 3:19 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
🧵 Biblical studies bsky is arriving! Let's talk Jesus, the Bible, and trans people

Trans people are dehumanized, blamed, demonized, and lied about. I'm not a political operative with clout, but I am a biblical scholar who studies gender in antiquity

So how about the trans Jesus of Revelation? 1/12
Quotation of Revelation 1:13, "And in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed in a robe to his feet and a golden sash on his female breasts." It includes the Greek text for "on his female breasts" at the end.
November 16, 2024 at 3:19 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
The editors of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, @srollens.bsky.social & Robert Myles, have made it a space that does history in really *interesting* ways. Its articles are often resources for thinking critically not just about Jesus, but history and religion, and why they matter. 👍
Screenshot of an article entitled, "The Mouse of the Mysteries." Abstract: This article presents an imaginative exercise in which a fictional author from the year 4025 details results from excavations of archaeological sites dating to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based on analyses of small domestic finds, as well as the discovery of a monumental complex utilizing similar imagery, the author concludes that people must have worshipped an anthropomorphic mouse god – the Historical Mouse – in the Mechano-Digital Age, keeping devotional votives in their homes and traveling at least once a year to a primary space of worship centered around the experience of various ritual mysteries. This article calls upon students to perform a self-evaluation about their own assumptions and approaches to the ancient world as they witness a hypothetical historian make outrageous, yet plausible, errors in the course of trying to describe an ‘ancient’ religion.
November 12, 2024 at 7:28 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
It's almost as though the major corporate media apparatus entirely failed to report adequately on what MAGA's "mass deportation" really means and, instead, just normalized it as a housing policy...
November 12, 2024 at 4:00 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
🧵 One of my public takes as a scholar of religion is that we need to normalize an Ethics of Religious Responsibility: People are responsible for their gods or religion. No shirking responsibility for supporting transphobia, patriarchy, or ethnic cleansing by saying "But it's just my religion." 1/4
Quotation that reads: We should absolutely judge a deity by the offerings and piety it demands! Furthermore, what people are willing to sacrifice for their god should likewise be a commentary on their deepest values. Let us call this an ethics of religious responsibility: we are responsible for the deities we follow. Many people tacitly accept this point when they opine that folks who follow other gods, or at least not their God, deserve to burn in hell. So, if one’s deity demands things like human sacrifice, genocide, or partiality to rapists and autocrats, then this should give some pause. In a society founded partly on the concept of religious liberty people can, in theory, choose to worship such deities. But in a society also founded on the concept of free speech, shouldn’t people who follow these gods at least have to answer uncomfortable questions about their sociopathic deities? Why should it be bad manners to question people who worship such gods instead of bad manners to promote those gods in the first place?
November 10, 2024 at 9:35 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Writing a popular level book about Bible, gender, and sexual violence. Here's what I just found myself typing to rewrite the beginning of the chapter about ideologies of masculinity and femininity in Greco-Roman literature. @mpgphd.bsky.social's work is great! (Have mercy on my opening draft here!)
October 12, 2024 at 8:00 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Exactly. And when the Times covers the incitement of racist panic in this way, it normalizes that way of erasing the actual harm it causes to humans. Ugh.

In other news, there’s a Delorean parked across from me right now…
September 19, 2024 at 3:43 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Seriously? Fuck @cnn.com. Trump’s and other high level GOPers’ social medias have been fire-hoses of racist and sexist lies that are actively causing violence. Oh and Trump routinely posts faked images to lie about endorsements (eg, Taylor Swift). But sure, CNN, focus on Harris.
September 14, 2024 at 7:58 PM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
A podcaster who whines that Tadej doesn’t just let others win. It’s wild to hear folks try to promote Lance as some alpha-bro competitor.

Not that this photo is on the level of Fignon, but would you accept it as holy? 🤣
August 16, 2024 at 3:48 AM
slyprofessor.bsky.social
Went and looked at the thread in the bad place. Damn. The dudes wanting to legitimize white supremacy are out in fucking force trying to pretend it’s all just academic. Though of note, many of them are anon accounts. Shocking! 🤦‍♂️
June 22, 2024 at 7:48 PM