I suppose part of what gets to me about Alabama’s harsh new papers-please law and its crackdown on Sooners is that this is the same state that spent much of the past decade boasting of its fealty to the (Protestant formulation of the) Ten Commandments. The chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, Roy Moore, based his whole public career on refusing to remove a sectarian Ten Commandments monument from the state courthouse. He installed the thing there in... Read more
Alabama’s governor and legislators really, really hate Sooners. Alabama Republican Gov. Robert Bentley signed on June 9 the nation’s harshest anti-immigration law, surpassing Arizona, while the state’s Christian denominations sat on the sidelines. “We have a real problem with illegal immigration in this country,” said Bentley, after he signed the bill that passed by a significant margin in both state houses. A member of First Baptist Church of Tuscaloosa, Bentley said, “I campaigned for the toughest immigration laws and I’m... Read more
I knew all the time I should shut up and listen … “Only Once,” Maria McKee “Only One,” Terry Taylor “Only Ones Who Know,” Arctic Monkeys “Only the Good Die Young,” Billy Joel “Only the Lonely,” Alison Cipris “Only the Strong,” Midnight Oil “The Only Time,” Nine Inch Nails “Only Trust Your Heart,” Astrud Gilberto “Only Us,” Peter Gabriel “Only You,” Joshua Radin “Only You,” Vitaminsforyou “Only You,” Yazoo A complete stranger could probably look at this tiny alphabetical slice... Read more
Tribulation Force, pp. 393-396 “Jesus Christ is the Messiah!” the rabbi concluded. This declaration surprises almost everyone in the story and absolutely no one reading it. It’s another clumsy anticlimax, a conclusion so thuddingly obvious for so many pages before it arrives that the authors’ efforts to make it suspenseful just make everyone in the story seem frustratingly dim. The division of labor between the co-authors here follows the main pattern: Tim LaHaye provides the bizarre check list of ingredients... Read more
The previous post was a bit of a bitter joke. I’m not seriously advocating any of those ideas as the best ways of addressing America’s jobs crisis (although we should be teaching music and art and it is probably long past time to try something other than the isolation strategy that has failed to work with Cuba for five decades now). But I am dead serious when I say that it’s time — right now — to be doing everything... Read more
Brad DeLong notes that this week’s employment figures are cause for panic. What he suggests, actually, isn’t merely panic, but “PANIC!!” But given our current employment crisis, I think a third exclamation point may be required. We’ve got 13.9 million Americans who can’t find work. That’s cause for alarm — cause for all out panic and the kind of try-everything-possible-right-now response that panic inspires. Panic is sometimes not a bad thing. It’s often underrated. Because sometimes panic works. Think of... Read more
Tribulation Force, pp. 391-393 There’s little quite as mortifyingly horrible as the church speaker who attempts to “reach the young people of today” by incorporating what he imagines to be their lingo into his message. The result, almost always, is something wincingly awful and embarrassing for all concerned. The speaker usually sounds like a tourist trying to pretend to be a native speaker while relying on a guidebook of common phrases from 1953. His every over-earnest attempt to convey the... Read more
News item: “Southern Baptist pastor, Fox News host get facts wrong” Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, appeared on the program “Fox and Friends” just two days after Easter to try to link [President Barack] Obama to Islam. When host Steve Doocy asked Jeffress what he thought about Obama not issuing a proclamation recognizing Easter, Jeffress began questioning Obama’s faith. “Steve, let’s look at what’s really going on here,” Jeffress replied. “On the one hand, we have... Read more
So Franklin Graham says that churches, rather than governments, are responsible for meeting the needs of the poor. Either one or the other, zero-sum, in competition, etc. This is not the view of most Christians or of most Christian churches. Nor is it an easy view to reconcile with the Christian Bible, which is full of admonitions to both the community of believers and to those in government that they are responsible for caring for the poor, the powerless, widows,... Read more
Bruce Watson of AOL asks “What Would the Rapture Do to Real Estate Prices?” In New York City, for example, a 49% drop would reduce the city’s population to 1910 levels. In the short run, this would cause property values to plummet in the city, but the effects would quickly spread beyond mortgages and rents. … This is assuming a post-Rapture world in which the political and economic systems would remain relatively stable — admittedly, a somewhat unrealistic expectation. …... Read more
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