Radio evangelist Harold Camping has died at the age of 92. Best known for predicting that on May 21, 2011, Jesus would come back, Camping’s most harmful teaching was that all church bodies were heretical and that people should just listen to his radio broadcasts instead of going to church.
Longtime readers of this blog might recall some good discussions we had about Mr. Camping’s predictions and his theology, including with one of his followers. (See, for example, here, here and here.)
A federal judge has ruled that Utah laws against polygamy are unconstitutional. [Read more…]
You will note that I have mostly resisted the temptation to conflate Advent with the Christmas season, but I will start with the Christmas posts now that we are in the week before the Nativity of Our Lord. But to salute Advent, I offer you, after the jump, a fine poem on the subject by Rowan Williams, the previous Archbishop of Canterbury.
Target has hired former CIA operative Jonna Mendez as an online “Kid’s Gift Detective” to help parents shop for their children and hide the presents. She was the “chief of disguise” with the agency, working in the Office of Technical Service, which she describes as having something like the function of Q in the James Bond movies. Her husband, Antonio, was the CIA agent in Iran played by Ben Affleck in the movie Argo.
I was not aware that children are particularly secretive when it comes to what they want for Christmas, to the point that parents need cloak and dagger tradecraft to get them to reveal that information. I guess the common element in being a spy and shopping for Christmas presents is a lot of sneaking around. See some of the tactics she recommends after the jump. [Read more…]
Classical scholar Peter Brown has published in the New York Review of Books an excited review of Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Harvard University Press)
After the jump, an excerpt from the review with a link to the book. Question: Could Christianity transform sexual morality once again? [Read more…]
A Lutheran pastor, Guntars Baikovs, originally from Latvia but a St. Louis seminary Ph.D., has become the Super Heavyweight champion armwrestler–in both arms–in Australia. After the jump, read a news story about him. Notice how he works in a plug for vocation:
“In our society we celebrate achievements. That’s good, we need to nourish our gift and be proud of them. But for so many of us, it makes our lives difficult. Our value and dignity doesn’t depend on our achievements,” he said.
“In reality, what is much more important than our extraordinary achievements in our hobbies, are the ordinary things we all do on a daily basis – how we serve people around us.”
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