Previous slide
Next slide

Theology of Calvinball: Johnny the Walrus vs The Mysteries

Among the obsessions of Christian Nationalist circles today, the infamous question of Pontius Pilate arguably looms largest: What is truth? I was curious to know, too, so I posed the question to two very different picture books.

Both works are aimed not at children but at adults. The first, titled Johnny the Walrus and written by transphobic conservative talking head Matt Walsh, just crested its second anniversary. The second, The Mysteries, was created in a collaboration between Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht and released last October. Notably, The Mysteries is Bill Watterson’s first book since his strip Calvin and Hobbes ended in 1995. It has an unrelated, much darker storyline and a strikingly different art style. Moving between Johnny the Walrus and The Mysteri

More

Beyond Healing: Changing the Narrative of Disability in Religious Spaces

The Broadway musical Leap of Faith tells the story of Jonas Nightingale, a con man who holds fraudulent, revival-style church services around the country and capitalizes off of people's religious fervor and subsequent financial generosity. It's all a stage show – nothing more, nothing less. Actors are paid to cast down their canes and start dancing, to rise from their wheelchairs and feign tearful relief, all with the aim of making a few bucks. But then Jake McGowan, a young, recently disabled person, believes so fiercely in the possibility that God (vis-a-vis Jonas) might

More

The East Jerusalem Hills

It’s been a long day of touring East Jerusalem and getting a crash course on the ongoing silent transfer of Palestinians out of their lands. Our first day began with a tour led by an Israeli guide from The Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD), showing us the “matrix of control” that Israel has installed. Our bus drove from hilltop to hilltop and valley to valley in East Jerusalem, and we stopped in several places where we were shown how a slow strangulation is underway by Israeli settlements which swallow up more and more Palestinian land. Now 20 years old, Israel’s segregation wall snakes through these hills and valleys like an endless anaconda.

More

What can you do at a time such as this?

It is at times like these that we, the IPMN, are grateful for the PC(USA)’s longstanding history of prophetic witness to the Israel/Palestine crisis. Since  the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland by the new state of Israel, the Presbyterian Church has been advocating for a just peace. The church has stood for the right to return for Palestinian refugees; an end to the occupation of the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip; and investment policies that ensure we do not profit from human rights abuses or the deadly use of weaponry. 

More