The wall-to-wall Palin coverage only adds to her celebrity veneer. It's not helping. I am diametrically opposed to just about everything about her politics, and even I am starting to feel a little defensive of her.

Half of this article is a legitimate expression of concern for how certain religious practices and the beliefs that tend to go along with them negatively affect public policy (especially foreign policy). But it's not a straight line from glossolalia to nuclear disaster, so you need something of more substance to turn an article about Palin's religious upbringing into something resembling relevant commentary in this election. The other half of this article is trying to do that, but we don't have enough information so it comes across as trying to spin cobwebs into castles. The quote about the Iraq war and God's will is a good example of this. From the little context we have, it sounds to me like it could be something I've prayed many times (Lord, show us the part of this terrible destruction that You can fill with new life). Maybe she was talking there about God's will in the sense of some international pre-apocalyptic conflagration, maybe not. Maybe she takes AoG theology very seriously, maybe she's just an incredibly savvy, ambitious woman who knows a harness-able demographic when she sees one. We don't really know. But if we take those words and project our fears into them and turn her into a caricature, it reflects more poorly on us than on her.

We have to be careful about our tendency to parade certain religious beliefs and practices out like some kind of freak show in order to whip ourselves into a political frenzy (it's kinda' the liberal equivalent of tent-revival-level rhetoric, which I do not mean in a positive way). Most people will hear "speaks in tongues" and think "nutty, scary, bad, eeek!" but I've been to AoG services a number of times -- some of them are truly frightening in the way this article implies. Others are just plain sweet. Glossolalia can come across like a particularly angry psychosis, but it can just as often be like the cooing of a mother over her child. Once I attended a service and began to weep in the middle (my father had just died), and this group of people surrounded me and started "speaking in tongues" in the most comforting, gentle way I could imagine. It really depends on the people, the preacher, and the way they understand their practices in relationship to the larger world.

Look, once a week I drink wine and eat bread that has been mysteriously transformed through consecration into the body and blood of my Lord and Savior. That's pretty nutty too, on the face of it. It has deeper resonances for me embedded within my tradition, but it's hard to understand that if you don't learn a lot more about who I am as an individual and how my specific congregation explains and contextualizes that practice. And since we don't know enough about Palin to do the same for her spiritual practices, we really aren't doing much more than reacting viscerally to how different her background seems to us. This is the type of histrionic guesswork that happens when a candidate is being so completely cloistered from the media. The appropriate response is to demand more access to her, not to rush to our spinning wheels with a bag full of cobwebs.

Sounds like code for uppity to me. Black man isn't being deferential enough to the white lady. But then, they're accusing everyone of not respecting her enough.

I could tell during most of the article that the author took pains to avoid spoilers (as she explains, everyone showing at fashion week this year is one of the currently-remaining contestants, though not all of those are actual finalists). However, if you read carefully, toward the end she slips up and gives away the name of two of the finalists when she says that the big question after the show was "x contestant" or "y contestant." That's a pretty good indication that those are two of the three finalists. Bummer.

Really? Really?

Oh.My.

God does not hate them. If God hates anything, God hates their hurtful policies and actions. God also probably isn't very fond of hateful words. Probably hates those, too. I can't think of anything more dehumanizing than to suggest that God hates someone. I realize that line is probably just a bit sloppy - probably the Jesuit meant that what they stand for theologically and politically is what God hates in a Christian. But then again, does that mean God hates progressive policies (or progressive Christians, or politicians, or voters) when they wind up hurting people too? Or is that just what happens when a Republican gets it wrong?

My first instinct is to agree with the idea that God hates the politics of the opposition, because that idea of God makes me feel better about myself. It lines up nicely with my view of the world. But who the hell am I, or a Jesuit, or Ms. Palin, or Ms. Lamott to presume to know the mind of God? It's the progressive Christians who are supposed to be able to admit that we're acting on guesswork when it comes to understanding what God wants, right? My second instinct is to suggest that while I expect God very much cares about what happens to people as a result of this election, God is infinitely and immensely bigger than these feelings of fear and anger and - let's be honest here - dehumanizing hatred.

As a progressive Christian, I feel horribly betrayed when my conservative brothers and sisters deny my faith and reject my fellowship on the grounds of theological and political differences. I'm not about to do the same to them.

Sounds like Ms. Palin is not the only person around who is full of rage.