Our Shared Love and Hate of Selective Literalism in Bible Study
A very thoughtful analysis of our tendency to pull out of the Bible only those ideas that support our way of life, reinforcing our preferences and prejudices.  I have not read anything from Rachel Held Evans in the past, but I bookmarked her blog after reading this.

After first reminding us that the Bible condemns gluttony and materialism (and wearing cloth made from two types of cloth) as strongly as it does homosexuality, the author turns to axamining why we tend to select only certain biblical condemnations. 

'While self-righteousness avoidance certainly affects our selective literalism , we also have good reasons for not condemning one another for the more ubiquitous biblical violations (again, real or perceived) in our culture.'

She concludes it is partly a numbers game:  we like to gang up on the minority group.  Partly just plain old self-centered self-righteousness.  And partly because the abominations we choose not to make salient and condemn with 'God Hates Consumers' signs are also those behaviors we see everyday in those we know and love.  This makes it more difficult to other them.

And this, she suggests, might mark a pathway for to create by walking on it, because when our approach "conveniently renders others the problem and us the heroes, maybe it’s time to sit across a table and get to know one another a little better, to break up some categories and make some new friends. Maybe it’s time to drop our stones for a while and pass the bread." 

At the group level, we call this politics (or at least our efforts to create democratic forms of politics) and this is why it is so important to stop the ongoing obstructionist efforts in DC that are designed to both impoverish the public sphere and to persuade us that democratic self-governance is impossible.