"For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.'" Read more
My guess is that, as ever in Left Behind, the real unreliable narrators here are Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. They want to show us that their hero is fallible, and that his new faith requires him to face the consequences of the bad choices he made earlier. They also -- unintentionally, accidentally and unawares -- give us a portrait of Rayford as vain, selfish, misogynist and controlling. And often the least flattering aspects of Rayford's character are revealed when the author's seem to be trying to show us something they think is admirable about their character. It's like reading Nabokov, but with the added twist of the authors sharing in the narrator's solipsism and self-delusion. Read more
Yes, it's a picture of Donald Trump with Boris and Natasha, because we shouldn't forget Trump's scandalous links to Russian oligarchs and Ukrainian despots, even if those aren't among the top 10 or top 20 worst things about Donald Trump. Plus some other stuff, including: Clinton Foundation, under a microscope, looks clean; EpiPen and Insulin makers gouging consumers (and insurers); Mat Staver, law professor; and religious liberty in white America. Read more
"Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good." Read more
So you're sitting there across from the kid who's just done something dumb. Your role here is scriptural -- not in the sense that it's according to the scriptures, but in the sense that you're needing to say something that will be "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness." You're concerned, in other words, not just with what this kid did, but with what this kid is becoming -- with the different kinds of person this kid could potentially become. Read more
From Honolulu Civil Beat: “I want it understood by the general public and the media that the recent inflammatory comments made by candidate for Congress (CD2) Angela Kaaihue do not represent the views, values, or the sentiments of our Party and its members,” Fritz Rohlfing said in a statement issued late Friday. “Her vulgar, racially-bigoted, and religiously-intolerant descriptions of Democratic Party candidates are offensive, shameful, and unacceptable in public discourse.” Read more
This is a thing that a lot of evangelical Christians do and that we really need to stop doing. It's an attempt to tell your story in a way that discounts and dismisses every other story. That's always a bad look and it comes from a bad place. It's the impulse that is unable to celebrate anything without simultaneously disparaging everything else that is not that thing. And it's an attempt to bolster what you're saying about what you do know by claiming to also be an expert about everything else. Read more
"But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just." Read more
Chloe's "intellectual" objections are never explained or described. The authors cannot imagine what the substance of such objections might be. Nor do they care. If those objections are intellectual, then they are anti-faith, and that is all that they or their readers need to know. Read more
Both Ryan Lochte's clumsy cover story and the media's initial credulous acceptance of it reveal our willingness to assume the worst about South America as opposed to our more civilized society here in the "real" America. That's ironic when we remember what happened when the Olympic Games were hosted here in America, in Atlanta, in 1996. A bomb planted by a right-wing, anti-abortion terrorist killed one spectator and injured 111 others. Read more
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