Body and Soul<\/a>), but so is Evans' weird claim that Acts relates \"Jesus' Parable of the Talents.\" Don, buddy, you want parables, read the Gospels. This is the Acts of the Apostles.<\/i> Jesus only shows up for the first nine verses which \u2014 and this is Franken's point \u2014 it would be hard not to realize if you really<\/i> spent a year studying the book with your good friend George.<\/p>\n(Full disclosure \u2014 the first eight chapters of Acts were the focus of a Bible Quiz Tournament I competed in during eighth grade at Timothy Christian School. We got our butts kicked by the team from Lancaster Mennonite. I only managed to buzz in first for one answer: \"Theophilus.\")<\/p>\n
Here's Franken:<\/p>\n
It was a complete fluke that I had any clue at all about Talents. Last year my son, Joe, had been assigned some New Testament readings in his mostly Jewish private high school and had to write a short paper on, yep, Talents. He couldn't understand it and came to me. I couldn't make any sense of it either, so I called Gary Bauer. That's right. \u2026 As I said, Gary and I are friends. Honestly. It's a long story. But we like each other. And what better guy to explain a parable in Matthew? (Not Acts.) Gary wasn't home, so his wife Carol, who's also a friend (though I think she has some doubts about me), explained Talents.<\/i><\/p>\n
So they really do<\/i> seem to be friends. \"It's a long story,\" Franken says. Some day I hope he shares it with the rest of us.<\/p>\n
As odd as this is, I find it strangely hopeful.<\/p>\n
(NOTE: The link above for Fineman's article takes you to what seems to be the English section of a Danish site about \u2026 something Danish.<\/i> MSNBC.com's link for the Newsweek<\/i> story is dead, and this came up on Google. You gotta love the Web.)<\/p>\n\n
<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Early on in Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, while Al is dissecting the sloppy and inaccurate Bernard Goldberg, there’s a strange little aside. Goldberg cites as an example of media bias, an off-air comment from a CBS producer who called Gary Bauer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[85,11,86,28],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-warfare","tag-acts","tag-bible","tag-gary-bauer","tag-religious-right"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}