Shelly Penton

@plaidsilk.bsky.social

816 Followers 620 Following

Religious Studies, ABD. Vanderbilt–>UChicago–>University of Virginia. Skeets my own.

Screenshot of FB post by US "Department of War" with a photo array of military personnel, each captioned "SEND ME." Post text: "Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I. Send me.'" ---Isaiah 6:8
Screenshot of Fox News Opinion post with pictures of Mamdani, AOC, and other leftist politicians with the first reading: "Progressives want to tax billionairs first, and *you're next* [in big bull-fighting flag red letters] on the list" Post text begins: "OPINION: You may not care about a wealth tax, but the wealth tax cares about you..."
Screenshot of a search result with AI "search assist" stating facts pulled from wikipedia, which is first organic search result. Text from "search assist": A gleysol is a hydric soil that becomes saturated with groundwater long enough to develop a characteristic color pattern, with reddish, brownish, or yellowish colors at the surface and greyish or bluish colors deeper in the soil due to reduced iron. They are commonly found in low-lying areas with shallow groundwater and are used for rice cultivation in the tropics or drained for arable farming elsewhere. Text pull from Wikipedia: Gleysol is a type of hydric soil that has a characteristic gleyic colour pattern due to anaerobic conditions. Learn about the causes, effects and examples of gleysol formation, and how they are classified and used in different climates. [Put for real, who asked for this? Willy Wonka's dumbest failson?]
Screenshot of two group chat text messages, both from the same person. First text: "did you see that Mamdani watched a World Cup game with a bunch of men being held at Rikers and referred to them as "New Yorkers," and not as inmates, prisoners, etc?" Second text: "Right wing coverage used a variety of descriptors of the act, but the one they were looking for was "Christlike" and they never quite got there."
"Boyfriend meme" layout: Boyfriend: Me Girlfriend: Alamo Drafthouse The Woman in the Red Dress: The Only IMAX Theater in 60 Miles
post by the WP editorial board with the quote "The 'buy, borrow, die' myth is part of the overarching fallacy that wealthy Americans are nothing but tax cheats. The United States already has a very progressive income tax, and the share of revenue paid by the top 1 percent has been increasing over time. Pretending that's not true won't make anyone better off"
Screenshot of a Talarico quote ifrom an msn article with the clickbait title "Dem Senate Candidate James Talarico Mysterious Girlfriend Revealed – And She's Vegan" Quote text: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan,” he has said. “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.” Link to article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/dem-senate-candidate-james-talarico-s-mysterious-girlfriend-revealed-and-she-s-vegan/ar-AA24nTRs
screenshot of the cover of the Jeffrey Stout's book _Democracy & Tradition_
Extended ranking: Simone Weil John B Cobb Jr. Karl Barth Stanly Hauerwas Dietrich Bonhoeffer Jürgen Moltmann Jaques Ellul Herbert McCabe Karl Rahner
Result of quiz (i.e., theologian you most closely align with): Simone Weil. Blurb: In Assisi in the spring of 1937, in the small Romanesque chapel where Francis had prayed at San Damiano, a twenty-eight-year-old Simone Weil—Parisian philosophy agrégée, factory worker, briefly a Spanish Civil War combatant in the anarchist Durruti column—was driven for the first time in her life to her knees. A year later at the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, reciting George Herbert's “Love (III)” through a migraine, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” She refused baptism in solidarity with the unbaptized. Born February 3, 1909 to agnostic Jewish parents in Paris and trained under Alain at the Lycée Henri-IV, sister of the great mathematician André Weil, she had taken the agrégation at twenty-two and then spent her twenties trying to do philosophy with her hands—a year on the Renault assembly line in 1934, the brief Spanish front, manual labor as spiritual practice. She crossed to London in 1942 to work for the Free French and died at Ashford, Kent, in August 1943 of tuberculosis aggravated by refusing to eat more than the rations of occupied France. You think attention is prayer, affliction is the place God touches, and the unbaptized belong at the table too.
Fox news post with two photos of rosie o'donnell looking absolutely the same as "before" and "after" with the caption: "Rosie O'Donnell Admits She Got A Secret Facelift After Years of Calling It A 'Betrayal of Feminism'"
_Never Touch A Porcupine_ boardbook with clear tape around the spine, partially covering a toddler-chewed top corner
Quiz results page with "your closest neighborhood" as "The Episcopal Church (TEC)" with a graphic I don't quite understand and am too lazy to read in more detail, so please don't make me explain it. Text underneath result: Your taste lives in the tradition that has become, more than any other in America, the home of inclusive orthodoxy: ancient liturgy, sacramental theology, openly LGBTQ+ clergy and laity, a strong literary culture, smaller but stable. Episcopalians skew educated, urban, and politically progressive, but the deep aesthetic is older than any of that: incense, choral evensong, the Book of Common Prayer, gardens, gin. Your neighbors are people who think hymns from the 1700s and same‐sex weddings belong in the same building.
Screenshot of Fox News oped post with the title "DAVID MARCUS: rise of Marxism is a hydra Democrats created but can't control" Post text: MARXIST HYDRA: Democrats created a far-left monster they can no longer control, Marcus argues Picture include in post is a May Day (?) protest crowd with a banner that reads: "The Fascist Trump Regime Must Go! NOW"
Screenshot of post from New York Magazine with a picture of a young Winona Ryder in a minimalist, strappy gray gown glancing coyly to the side as she holds a cigarette in her hand with the caption: "I mean, why shouldn't we all smoke cigarettes again?" NY Magazine post text reads: “Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking. All the time,” writes author Xochitl Gonzalez. “With each passing day of this absolutely deranged year, my desire to contemplate how to make sense of it all while puffing on a cigarette grows.” Part of this smoking thing is a yearning for the past, admits Gonzalez. Not in an effort to recapture her youth, but to recapture an approach to time and life. “I can’t personally slow down technology or fix media or the demands of capitalism or any of the other existential things that have crept into our lives,” she writes. “But maybe what I can do is stop what I’m doing, ask somebody to come outside, and take five minutes to slow down with me while I engage in the very dangerous act of holding a flaming stick to my face. This could be my rebellion.” Read Gonzalez’s full essay: https://nymag.visitlink.me/ICiRLY
Screenshot of Scientific American post of an article titled "'Staggering' number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk [no Oxford comma boo] and more" by Helen Pearson and Nature Magazine. Scientific American post text: More than two-thirds of the public believe at least one false or unproven health claim — such as the idea that taking paracetamol during pregnancy causes autism — a new survey finds. The results hint that a large, and potentially growing, number of people are questioning scientific evidence. The survey, of more than 16,000 people across 16 countries, asked whether they believed claims that are not supported by research, including that the ‘risk of childhood vaccinations outweighs benefits’, ‘fluoride in water is harmful’ and ‘raw milk is healthier than pasteurized.’ http://spklr.io/6045EKdpN
Peaky Binders "No fighting" meme edited to say "No standing water in the yard"
Screencap from an NYT movie review of Michael. It reads: "The movie itself becomes a tale of triumph and glory for someone everyone admired, rather than an estate’s attempt to scrub clean the life story of a star who has been multiply accused, in harrowing terms, of child sexual abuse. That same estate is the reason that an HBO documentary that gives space for two men who have accused Jackson to tell their story has been deleted from its streaming platform; you can’t watch it, because it might as well not exist. The three-ring media circus that surrounds every celebrity gives us versions of them we can choose to believe in. “Michael” aims to deliver a version of Michael Jackson that, strangely enough, conforms to what the movie’s version of Joe Jackson wanted all along: a perfect child, a top-notch performer and certainly nothing more than that. In this business, you can make up just about anything."
Screenshot from an NYT article titled "Michael Jackson's Music Was Too Big to Be Canceled". The paragraph reads: "When asked about the continued popularity of Jackson’s music, the estate said in a statement that “each project, including the two shows with Cirque du Soleil to ‘MJ the Musical’ to the biopic, offers another generation an opportunity to experience the joy of the discovery of Michael’s music and reinforces the connection with Michael’s legacy for longtime fans.”"
Screencap of an Hollywood Reporter interview question to documentary director Dan Reed, along with his response: "What about this notion that after your movie came out, if one thought logically, the movie should have taken Jackson down. But in fact his popularity rose after your movie, and streaming numbers on Jackson’s music rose and they only continue to grow. Since then, we’ve had the MJ Broadway musical, which is a huge hit and tours. So what does that say?" "It says that people don’t care that he was a child molester. Literally, people just don’t care."
New Yorker article screencap reading: "Over a century of technological change, the ideology of ed-tech has remained constant: that the latest innovation—whether teaching machines, Khan Academy video tutorials, or chatbots—is perpetually on the verge of launching a new era in personalized learning, one that will prove liberatory both to overworked teachers and underengaged students. This durable belief was evident in my conversation with Bent, of Anthropic’s education-research team, who spoke of A.I. tools “giving teachers more one-on-one time with students.” He went on, “When a teacher has thirty students, it becomes very hard to track where all the students are at, to create custom activities for all of those students.” But, with Claude, “we see a teacher who has thirty or thirty-five students in their class doing what a teacher would do if they had five students in their class, but just doing it better.” From the article "What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?" Link: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/progress-report/what-will-it-take-to-get-ai-out-of-schools
Screenshot of text thread. First text: "Χριστὸς ἀνέστη [Christ is risen] say it back" Second text: "Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη [He is risen indeed]" Third text: "Hallelujah fellow nerds"
Washington Post fb post with picture of JD Vance in the White House Oval Office – looking as epic as he can like the third place winner in Guitar Hero repping a bottom-shelf eyeliner brand – with the lede "Their tiny church is on the cover of JD Vance's book. They don't know him," and the caption, "The modest church on the cover of Vice President JD Vance’s new memoir unpacking his Catholic faith has a tiny but loyal congregation. What it doesn’t have, members said: any connection to Vance or Catholicism."
Picture from NYT of the pope in regalia with the caption "Hegseth Says U.S. Troops Are Fighting for Jesus. The Pope Disagrees."
Screenshot of Fox News post of quote from Melanie Trump overlying a picture of the family, including Melanie and Barron Trump: "The strength of America is closely tied to the role women play in shaping their children's character, education and morals."
Screenshot of scene from Hidden Figures in which Katherine informs her NASA supervisors that she got classified data by holding redacted documents up to the light. She sits with her back to the camera while her supervisors, all white men, and the department secretary, a white woman, stand looking at her.
NYT photo of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey with overwritten caption: "The Minneapolis Mayor Who Cursed Out ICE Is No Stranger to Crisis" (photo credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for NYT)
Screen shot of Fox News post with the caption: "STOP THE MADNESS: "What we are seeing across the country as organized gangs of wine moms use Antifa tactics to harass and impede ICE agents is not civil disobedience. It isn't even protest. It's just crime," writes David Marcus. Attendant photo shows woman wearing a pink hat protesting at a line of armed, masked officers with guns. Overwrite text reads: "Opinion: Deluded Wine Moms Are Committing Deadly Crimes, Not Simply 'Protesting'"
Picture of my one-year-old son seated on a cozy carpet surrounded by magnetic tile toys. Around the carpet are comfy seats, and behind those, a couple of shelves of colorful kids books. The set of pictures on the wall to the right are prints from the pages of the book Boy, Fox, Mole, Horse.
Picture of our front window with Christmas trees, ornaments, and winter village painted on it. Below it on a bench are a pile of newly wrapped presents.
Two cats, one ragdoll (left) and one orange marbled tabby (right), sit squeezed together on a windowsill.
Picture of the (not quite finished) Christmas tree and winter village mural painted with tempura paint on our living room windows. Tree in color is in center panel and winter village in white is on the side panels with houses/church at the bottom and ornaments on top.
Feature photo of a hot young Martha Stewart (August 1976) overwritten with an excerpt quoted from a recent NYT phone interview with Stewart: "I was the original [expletive] tradwife. And I was just as pretty as those girls, and more organized."
screenshot of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani with his peerless beard game
NYT headline: "Did Women ruin the Workplace?" byline: "And can conservative feminism fix it? 3h ago . By Ross Douthat and Victoria Chamberlin"
Forbes Headline (text on cover photo of three college-age guys in nerd-casual): "The World's Youngest Self-Made Billionaires Are A Trio of 22-Year-Old AI Founders"
Screenshot of NYT headline: "Librarian Fired in Books Dispute to Receive $700,000 Settlement" Caption: "A library director in Wyoming who was fired two years ago because she refused to remove books with sexual content and LGBTQ themes from a library’s children and young adult sections was awarded $700,000 in a settlement on Wednesday."
Screenshot of news story with headline: "'Didn't mean to scare anyone': Dolly Parton's sister clarifies after asking for prayers for country star" News story has a picture of Dolly Parton performing on stage
Screenshot from UVA Student Council email: While the Compact contains elements that appear to have a positive impact on UVA, such as a tuition freeze and preferential access to federal funding, it also contains several concerning requests. Beneath the surface-level appeals lies a framework that would fundamentally alter the mission of higher education and threaten the independence that has allowed the University of Virginia to pursue its enduring ideal of being both Great and Good. The Compact will restrict how universities can engage with political and social issues, create barriers to international student enrollment, define gender and sex in strictly biological terms, and require an administrative commitment to using "lawful force" to address violations of "civility." These few examples from the Compact threaten the very ideals of a liberal arts education—to promote interdisciplinary studies, diversity of perspective, and the freedom to learn without limit—and risk narrowing the vibrant exchange of ideas that defines life on Grounds. Additionally, the Enforcement clause enables the Department of Justice to monitor our “adherence to the agreement,” enabling federal overreach to increase unimaginably and continue indefinitely. The University of Virginia’s structures of shared governance should not be bought out by partisan influence, and we reserve the right to govern ourselves. This Compact, as it stands, will likely serve to the detriment of student life and experience at UVA, both inside and outside of the classroom. As the Student Council Executive Board, we reaffirm our commitment to the rights, opportunities, and quality of life for every student at the University of Virginia. We are closely monitoring the situation and meeting with the administration as well as the student governments of other universities in the meantime. Your input is invaluable and will guide our response, so please continue to reach out with your thoughts and concerns. As we mentio…
Email from UVA administration from yesterday evening: To the University of Virginia Community, You have likely read that UVA is one of nine schools that received a proposal from the Department of Education and other federal officials regarding a “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education.” The document raises questions of profound importance to the University of Virginia and more broadly to all institutions of higher education in the United States. President Mahoney has formed a working group to study those questions and to advise him concerning the appropriate response. The Board of Visitors has confidence in that process and looks forward to working with President Mahoney to address this critical juncture in the relationship between the federal government and American universities. It would be difficult for the University to agree to certain provisions in the Compact. We write to assure you that our response will be guided by the same principles of academic freedom and free inquiry that Thomas Jefferson placed at the center of the University’s mission more than 200 years ago, and to which the University has remained faithful ever since. We are including a link below that will allow members of the community to share their views, and look forward to your input. https://virginia.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1IanFDY9X6Zkrqu Rachel Sheridan Rector Paul Mahoney Interim President
Image: Nazi flag
Screenshot of a fb post from Nashville Spurs: "Hi I’m a spurs fan from Shrewsbury England I’m coming to Nashville in November I’ll be there for the Man Utd match on the 8th where do you watch the games it will be a 6.30 am start will there be anywhere open that time of the morning"
NYT headline: A 102-Year-Old Yoga Teacher's Simple Approach to Aging Well Caption: For decades, Charlotte Chopin has been bending and stretching in Léré, a village in France. Here's how she keeps moving. Photo: screenshot of video interview with subject
Internet search for "quart how many ounces" returned the AI Search Assistant answer "One quarter (US) is equal to 400 ounces" with the warning in small gray print "Auto-generated based on listed sources. May contain inaccuracies."
Internet search for "quart how many ounces" returned the answer "One quarter (US) is equal to 400 ounces" with the warning in small gray print "Auto-generated based on listed sources. May contain inaccuracies."
NYT Opinions Section headline: "We Are Going to Have to Live Here With Each Other" NYT Opinions Section caption: “In ways that surprise me, given what I thought of Kirk’s project, I was and am grieving for Kirk,” say Ezra Klein. “I recognize some commonality with him. He was murdered for participating in our politics. Somewhere beyond how much divided us, there was something that bonded us, too. Some effort to change this country in ways that we think are good.” The accompanying picture is Ben Shapiro in black and white, as if to highlight that a contrast is going on, but ironically unaware of that contrast.
"(chuckles) I'm in danger" Simpson meme edited to read "(chuckles) We're in danger of cyber-heresy."
Reuters headline: "Pope Leo criticises [sic, if you happen to be American] high, Musk-style corporate pay packages" Reuters caption: "Pope Leo criticised corporate pay packages that offer executives much higher salaries than their employees in excerpts from his first media interview released on Sunday..."
PBS headline: Suspect in Charlie Kirk killing had become 'more political' and likely acted alone, authorities say PBS caption: The man accused in the Charlie Kirk assassination had earlier expressed to family his opposition to the viewpoints of the conservative activist, the authorities said in announcing an arrest in a targeted killing that raised fresh alarms about political violence in the U.S."
WE DID IT JOE meme with the edit "We did it, KEN"
Headline from Financial Times: "Rupert Murdoch seals $3.3bn succession deal to hand empire to eldest son." Caption: "Rupert Murdoch has resolved the bitter dispute over his sprawling media empire, handing his eldest son Lachlan future control of the business and buying out his three o...[See more]"
Time Magazine caption (screenshot from insta): "We crave the pulse of the bass beneath our feet, the collective chant of a catchy chorus or killer bridge, the unspoken understanding between strangers who, for just one night, are part of something bigger than themselves. The stadium concert will remain a space where we come together not just to listen, but to belong."