‘Hard to plan the day’

• Love this remark from EB White: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

That’s via Nathan Hunt on Abraham Joshua Heschel on the Sabbath, which offers plenty to chew on.

• Disgraced 20th-century relic Jim Bakker has settled a lawsuit by agreeing to refund $156,000 to his followers for selling them “Silver Solution” as a miracle cure for COVID-19.

That RNS report also informs us that the church Bakker leads is called Morningside Church Productions Inc.

It seems the Rule of Cheese also applies to churches. If you buy “cheese,” you’re getting “cheese.” If you buy “cheese food” you’re getting some cheese and some not-cheese. If you buy a “cheese food snack product,” you’re probably not getting any cheese at all. I suspect “Church Productions Inc.” is the ecclesial version of “cheese food snack product.”

• A personal testimony. One that ends with an altar call.

• Fred Schritt earned the admiration of Freds everywhere.

Would I be linking to this Atlas Obscura item if I weren’t also named Fred? Probably not. But if I were passing through Grand Island, Nebraska, I’d still swing by this place even if it were called “Bob’s Flying Circus.”

• “Whether they came of age in the 1960s or the 1980s or early 2000s, many conservative evangelicals are quick to worry that ‘social justice’ might displace evangelism and discipleship as primary concerns within their organizations.”

“Displace” is doing a lot of work there.

Abominable, salvation-preventing, evangelism-twisting, gospel-denying work.

Your ‘evangelism’ and ‘making disciples’
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.

Isaiah 1:14-17. Chapter and verse.

“Displace.” Feh. Your sins are as scarlet and you’re determined to keep it that way.

(Note: My disgust here is not with John Turner for offering an accurate description of Cru, et. al., but with those he describes.)

• “New early human discovered in 130,000-year-old fossils at Israeli cement site.” (via Steve Buchheit)

My first thought reading this story was that my white evangelical friends who love Biblical Archaeological Review were going to have to work hard to ignore this new discovery from Israel. But then I started to worry that they might — dismissing the 130,000-year age of the find to enlist it in support of some racist notion about “Canaanites.”

• “This is an adult woman, not a little girl, and not an animal to be exploited.” #FreeBritney