Consider Tim LaHaye's portrayal of the "Antichrist," Nicolae Carpathia. You can't get to Nicolae without first going through Damien Thorn -- the villain of Richard Donner's 1976 horror classic The Omen, and of its numerous sequels and remakes and imitations. And you can't have The Omen without first having Hal Lindsey. Read more
I asked, Muhammad Yunus, the George Bailey of Bangladesh, about this: Had he been criticized for charging interest in a Muslim country? Dr. Yunus said he was surprised by how rarely this was even noticed. Grameen was often criticized, he said, for lending primarily to women. Read more
"Responsibility — ethical obligation — is boundless and universal. All are responsible for all. No one is exempt." Read more
Psalm 49: "Do not be afraid when some become rich, when the wealth of their houses increases. For when they die they will carry nothing away; their wealth will not go down after them." Read more
"Exodus definitively establishes the motif and the trajectory. Liberation starts here. But it does not end here." Read more
Workers want to be treated as "human;" restaurants screw women of color on wages even more than they screw over white women, whom they screw over even more than they screw over their male workers; the ghetto is working as it was designed to work; anti-SNAP congressman collects huge farm subsidy from same legislation; companies refusing to hire the poor; no dessert until you finish your poison; and more. Read more
"Laughably false and easily disproved claims about the Golden Age of the past? Check. Attempt to spin the church’s abandoning its responsibility as a case of government usurpation? Check. Ridiculously inflated claims about the scale, capacity and expertise of faith-based assistance? Check. Deliberate exclusion of the opinions of those actually providing that assistance, both today and 'a hundred years ago'? Check. Fundamental confusion that imagines all duties and obligations as mutually exclusive? Check." Read more
It took centuries of hard work to transform the Bible into a manual of Hell-avoidance. It would be more credible, and far easier, to claim that the central theme of the dictionary is Hell-avoidance, since the dictionary mentions Hell more often than the Bible does. The Hebrew scriptures and the Pauline epistles of the New Testament have nothing to say on the subject. If you’re looking for Hell in the Bible, about the only place you’ll find it is in a handful of the semi-Pelagian parables of Jesus, wherein Hell is never the default destiny of the “unsaved,” but always rather the deserved punishment for selfish rich people. And yet none of the people who preach a gospel of Hell-avoidance seem to believe in that idea of Hell. Read more
It's the Friday music game -- I'll show you mine, you show me yours. This week, it's more songs with names in the title. Just one name, actually, Mary (or Marie, or Maria). I've got songs by Springsteen, Cash, Sarah McLachlan, Mazzy Star, Randy Newman and many others, including, of course, Leonard Nimoy. Read more
"Pastor Ted's embrace of 'private property' as the badge. hallmark and signifier of Christianity is absurd. Christians do believe and always have believed in the right to private property, but that right has always, always been limited. And the insistence on those limits has always been just as important, or more important, than the insistence on the right itself." Read more
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