Weekly Roundup: COVID-19 Protests, Confederate Flags, and Stimulus $ Going to Churches
Brad begins with another story of hijinks and nostalgia from Oxford. Then Brad and and Dan discuss a long list of religion, politics, and COVID-19 stories, including Gov. DeSantis classifying wrestling as essential business, Franklin Graham's homophobia, Confederate Flag and gun-laden protests at the Michigan capitol, churches receiving stimulus $ from the SBA, and pastors continuing to encourage their people to meet in person.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and here with my co-host, Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Brad, it's good to see you.
Glad to see you're still sane, living in the house and, you know, social distancing and such.
Yep.
I wanted to start today, Dan.
We have, we're going to do our laundry list.
It seems as if the pandemic Has sort of obliterated our sense of time.
Time is now a flat circle and it's also obliterated our segments because there's so many stories to talk about every week that like we can't really go through our normals, you know, three or four segments.
So we're gonna do our laundry list today.
Like you have four or five things.
I have four or five things.
I wanted to start though by saying I did not tell you about this before we started recording here.
That I wanted to tell another story from our Oxford days just to, you know, provide some comic relief and give you more nostalgia.
So folks, if you're like, hey, I don't need Brad and Dan's reminiscence of their youth in England, you can fast forward the next three minutes or so.
But I will say, Dan, here's what happened.
So a couple weeks ago, we talked about our friend and mentor, Paul Fittis.
Paul Fittis is Somebody you know very well.
He's a legend in Oxford.
He's written probably 20 books.
He's written a novel.
He's written theology.
He's written philosophy.
He has two doctorates.
I'm sorry, two degrees.
one in literature and one in theology.
And when you meet him, Dan, you know he's just that quintessential Oxford intellectual, right?
He's like short, he kind of walks in a waddle kind of way.
He has a neck beard like Abraham Lincoln, a big sort of like huge fluffy mound of hair.
And he speaks in this sort of like distinct cadence.
I mean, does this all sound right to you? - That does sound right.
And I feel like I should add that we're saying all of this in love.
Oh no, of course!
And I don't even know where you're going with this, but I will say that the very first time I had what in Oxford we call tutorials, right?
So the way that our degree worked, I don't remember if you did the same degree I did or not, but you know, basically I had this like assigned set of readings and this like question you had to respond to.
Basically write like a 10 page, 12 page research paper.
And then you go and you sit down with your advisor who for us was Paul Fittis.
And I remember that I thought he fell asleep cause he would sit there with his eyes closed.
Right.
And like completely motionless and I'm talking and in my head, I'm like, oh man, do I, do I keep going here?
Or like, do I, do I like drop a book or something?
Should I just get up and leave quietly, lock the door behind me?
And somebody's like, please go on.
And I was like, oh, okay, good.
He's, he's still, he's still awake.
So anyway, that's, that's very much the, uh, I don't, I don't even know how to describe it unless somebody is eccentric in some way.
I don't think you can be hired at Oxford.
Um, And Paul Fittis, in tremendous ways, sort of fits that bill.
No, and this is all said with tremendous admiration and reverence toward Paul.
We're not making fun.
A lot of our good experience at Oxford was from people like him, because of people like him.
So I'll do you one better.
I was in a tutorial with him one day and I really thought he was asleep and I was scared to death of him.
This is 2006 and we're talking about Hegel, I think.
And I'm like, he's asleep.
And it's known, it's known around Oxford that he has trouble sleeping.
Like you'll see him in his office at 3am, like studying, right?
And so I'm like, well, he's asleep.
That's all right.
That's better.
I'd rather him being asleep than tearing up my paper and all my work.
And he wakes up suddenly and he's like, Oh, yes, but you're wrong on this.
I'm like, Oh, Lord, you know, and he's like awake all of a sudden.
And he just he walks over to the shelf, opens a book to like page 406.
He knows exactly where the quote is and he's like, here's why you are wrong.
And he gives me the book and I'm reading it.
And then he goes, like, he seemingly went back to sleep.
I don't, anyway.
So here's the story real quick.
Not to belabor this, folks.
It's 2007.
I'm graduating with my master's.
I'm not going to stay.
I'm going back to the States.
I'm really kind of broken up about it because I've really made a kind of a good set of friends and a second home in Oxford.
It was really just a place I really liked.
I think like you too, Dan.
And so it was really like one of the last nights, you know, the end of the school year, right?
And so there's this big party and all the undergrads and the graduate students are there.
So everyone is sort of age 19 to 24, right?
And it's Britain, so there's no 21 or older drinking concerns.
Everyone's just, you know, it's fine, right?
So we all go to this house and this house is about a mile from our college.
Well, the house is inhabited.
By these undergrads who rent the house from the college.
But who owns the house?
Paul Fittis owns the house.
He's just let people rent it, you know what I mean, as part of the college housing.
So it's like maybe 12 30 1 a.m.
and it's getting to the point where everyone's like having way too many Diet Cokes and getting a little silly, right?
And but it's like that last end of the year end of the school year feeling everyone's like jubilant and like just sort of like all the study abroad kids are going home and people like me are moving and it's just a big sometimes you're crying sometimes you're laughing you're dancing it's one of these kind of parties right?
And what happens at 1 a.m.?
In walks in Paul Fittis and his wife Marion, right?
So now Paul and Marion are just standing in the middle of this party where everyone has like red cups full of terrible beer and is playing beer pong.
And it's just one of those moments where he walks in and he kind of looks at us and we look at him, it's like 60 people, and everyone just starts cheering like, yeah!
Like, you know, he's here!
And like someone immediately gives him a red cup full of beer, right?
And it's just like, it's like a scene out of like old school, the movie, you know?
Everyone just like, yeah!
He takes a drink of beer and everyone cheers.
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