Following up on Rick Santelli’s concern that any effort to aide aid families facing foreclosure will wind up “rewarding bad behavior,” here are some recent pics from the Associated Press. This is Mary Ann Herrera, photographed in front of her San Antonio home Monday by AP photographer Eric Gay. She asked her brother to paint this plea for help on the side of her house, which she’s about to lose to foreclosure. <sarcasm> As you can see, she’s been living... Read more
For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, "You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right." So they went. He went... Read more
Tribulation Force, pp. vii – x For those accidentally starting this series with Book No. 2, Tribulation Force opens with a prologue titled "What Has Gone Before." It offers a three-page summary and revision of Book 1. I suppose I can recommend this for those in a hurry to catch up on what you'd missed in the first book. (I've tried to provide my own summary as well, but it's, um, a bit longer than three pages.) The best way... Read more
I should probably mention why this topic is an important one for me. Young-earth creationism is a particular pet peeve of mine for two main reasons. The first is that it is not just false, but demonstrably false, and is thus often the place where the collapse begins for soon-to-be-former Christians raised to believe in the fundamentalist house of cards. This house-of-cards faith is a particularly brittle and fragile belief system that insists, emphatically, that all of it must be... Read more
Lifted from the comments in the previous thread, straight provides a much clearer and more concise statement of what I was trying to say about the young-earth creationists not being "conservative": Fundamentalism is a reaction to "modern" criticisms of the Bible and Christianity. It started out defending what have traditionally been regarded as the core beliefs of Christianity (e.g. that Jesus was the divine Son of God, that he was really raised from the dead, etc.), but in the process... Read more
According to a disheartening recent poll, 200 years after the birth of Charles Darwin, most Americans don't believe in evolution. The poll was poorly and strangely worded. "Do you, personally, believe in the theory of evolution, do you not believe in evolution, or don't you have an opinion either way?" One fourth of respondents said they "do not believe in evolution," while another 36 percent said they had no opinion and only 39 percent said they "believe in evolution." So... Read more
Thanks to all of you who offered advice or assistance with the unpleasant task of résumé preparation. I've noticed there are a whole bunch of books on the subject with titles like "66 Résumé Don'ts" or "101 Career-Killing Résumé Mistakes" or "33 Common Résumé Errors That Are Like Fingernails on a Frickin' Blackboard for Personnel Professionals." But I haven't actually read any of those books, so it's possible that my first draft includes many such common errors. Or even that... Read more
Shortly after starting to work our way through the first book in the Left Behind series, we noted that Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins seemed to be "Recycling Sydney Watson." Watson was an early 20th-century novelist who produced a trilogy of End Times books — Scarlet and Purple, The Mark of the Beast and In the Twinkling of an Eye — from 1913 to 1916. Writing in Books & Culture, Crawford Gribben noted L&J's many instances of flagrant borrowing... Read more
Be sure to find me, I want you to find me … "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You," Billie Holiday"Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You," Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong"Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)," Carla Thomas"Geek in the Pink," Jason Mraz"Geek Stink Breath," Green Day"Generals and Majors," XTC"The Gentle Kind," Aztec Camera"Gentleman Who Fell," Milla"Georgia Lee," Tom Waits"Georgia Slop," Los Lobos Hmm. I seem to be lacking some Ray Charles. Need to fix that. Read more
On the subject of President Obama's economic recovery plan, I side with the Keynesians who argue that America needs a big, bold, aggressive infusion of government spending. The bigger the better. This approach is "controversial" to the extent that there's a hard-core anti-Keynesian faction of economists who argue that Keynes was wrong and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt's rescue of the nation from the Great Depression was some kind of accident. The fact that his Keynesian stimulus coincided with 9-percent... Read more
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