Wherein both the authors and their heroes grow so bored with the London conspiracy subplot that they all decide to just kind of drop it, without ever explaining or apparently even wondering what it is that this conspiracy was conspiring to do. Also too, we learn more about nefarious polyglot Nicolae Carpathia, but it's still not clear whether he looks more like Bill McKay or The Electric Horseman. Read more
"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love." Read more
Walter Hagen said great athletes “Make the hard ones look easy and the easy ones look hard.” You will never live long enough to read all the criticism written about Hillary Clinton’s capacity for sometimes making the easy ones look hard, but take a moment this week to acknowledge that she has just accomplished something historic, unprecedented, and incredibly hard — and she made it look so easy that we take it for granted. Read more
Want to make some easy money? A bit of creatively implausible exegesis and some conveniently elastic numerology can give us a new-and-improved End Times countdown that starts next year. There's a fortune waiting to be made for anyone who doesn't mind that this would entail becoming a soul-less, blasphemous, predatory monster. Read more
Tim LaHaye has died at the age of 90. The death of any long-lived End-Times "prophet" is always an inherently awkward thing. Each, in turn, is disproved by their own longevity, just as each, in turn, is exposed by their own well-planned retirement and well-structured estate. Read more
"Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?" Read more
The alternative to evangelism as hospitality is to take the approach that Rayford takes above, insisting to Chloe that she requires forgiveness because she is a "selfish, greedy, jealous, petty, spiteful" sinner. Rather than getting bogged down here in a discussion of why I find this tack immoral, let me just say for now that it's not particularly wise. "Trust me, you're a filthy sinner," is not the most winsome or promising form of evangelism (and you'd be hard pressed, apart from satires like Jonah, to find biblical models for such an approach). Read more
The police who shot him for no apparent reason did not provide even rudimentary first aid as Charles Kinsey lay there, handcuffed, unarmed, and bleeding. This is monstrously irresponsible. It is, frankly, evil. And it is par for the course for trigger-happy American police. Read more
A new Left Behind movie and a new Jerry Jenkins book tour have the World's Worst Books back in the news, with new profiles and puff pieces revisiting all the inaccurate claims of previous versions. Plus: "Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All;" Secretary of Labor Tom Perez gets all Laborem Exercens; and the Lemonheads cover a famous song written by Melania Trump. Read more
The Republican National Convention opened yesterday in Cleveland with a horrifying "benediction" from prosperity-gospel huckster Mark Burns. Burns has me thinking again of Zedekiah son of Chenaanah, the ridiculous court prophet-for-hire from the Bible. But as always when dealing with this story, I wind up getting frustrated and sidetracked by it's missing ending. Read more
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