Jason Kirk's Blog

Despite the pop-cultural/conservative-theological assumption that all Christians have always believed the same “everyone either goes to Satan World forever or goes to pearly gates forever” thing, there are centuries’ worth of records of early (and Medieval and modern and …) Christian theologians professing all sorts of beliefs abou...

Hello, thank you for looking at this newsletter’s spreadsheets each week of this college football season, perhaps even bearing with my ramblings about way different stuff along the way. I’m now just about done posting about sports on here until next autumn, so/but thanks for sticking around.

First, look at all this:

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For the second time in five years, I’m now leaving myself a bunch of notes about my first solo book project and then leaving it to write a different book (ICYMI, I’m soon ...

We know this because it was invented during that year by Calvinists: Princeton (Presbyterian) vs. Rutgers (Dutch Reformed). The sport’s first-ever victorious player-coach would even become a leading figure within the latter denomination.

Two years later, faculty disapproval of the sport’s violence would prevent a whole year of intercollegiate football from happening. So the 1871 season’s only known football pitted Princeto...

I’ve spent most of this college football season annoyed by the conference races in 2024’s newly bloated leagues. With so few conference contenders even appearing on each other’s schedules, and with almost every league now lacking divisions, paying attention to the standings has felt useless.

Look at this shit:

With one weekend to go, most of the Big 12’s 16 teams still have chances to reach the conference title game. Because the four teams currently tied at the top haven’t played each other at all...

First! This weekend! Tell a North Florida / South Georgia friend: This Sunday at 5 p.m. in Jacksonville, Florida, I’ll be at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church for a free (RSVP here) event about my book and stuff. I will not care which religious status you leave with afterward. Q&A, signing, panel, etc., and then we’re going to the bar selected by HAB’s pastor to enjoy a world without the Jaguars.

(In case you’re new: I’ve been doing a weekly college football schedule guide since like 2015 or someth...

Hello, a quick explanation for this week’s new subscribers, many of whom are here due to Bluesky blossoming into 2015-era Twitter1 :

Hey, thanks for joining! I usually post here about college football and/or religion, along with things that are neither, though there is nothing that is truly neither, because everything is both. Anyway, thanks for joining!

Each week of the CFB season, I post an ugly spreadsheet that sorts the weekend’s FBS (and select FCS) games by subjective watchability. I started...

In hindsight, there wasn’t much of a way around this, given the situations we’d already put ourselves in from 2016-2021. That’s stupid, I agree.

All around the world, incumbents have been punished for the economic conditions resulting from COVID. Comparing America’s current economy to its peers suggests Joe Biden could’ve avoided that, but when he had already inspired mountains’ worth of FUCK THIS GUY merch (mostly for ...

This is maybe the coin-flippingest coin-flip American presidential election ever — no matter how unbelievable that still sounds, nine years into this.

While you can look at any social app and find all the doom and/or cope you like, nobody knows how this is gonna go. I have a guess, and I feel fairly confident about it, but that’s not worth much to anybody.

In the meantime, here’s a version of what I plan to tell my kid, who wisely has never read any of my posts, meaning there’s no risk of spoiler...

Do you live outside a swing state?

If so, here’s what’s going on inside them. We’ve been hearing and reading these words every few seconds for the last two or three months:

From August through early October, national Republicans spent “more than $65 million” on a handful of ads centered around transphobia, according to an NYT analysis at the time, though because most of these attacks have so thoroughly conflated trans people with non-binar...