Wonderful Matters

I read a very disturbing piece today from The Atlantic  about the International House of Prayer, a controversial church organization in Kansas City. Don't even remember what it was called, but you can surely find it online pretty easily. Was something about the seven signs of a cult. The article presumed that the ways this church identifies a cult actually applied to them because they exhibited cult-like behaviors exactly like the ones they censure, and it all involved a young woman who killed herself with the implication that she was just in too deep with all the overly devout religion stuff. Now please, I'm pretty much with the idea that intense emotionalism in church settings, no matter how expressive the devotion to Christ, often covers for lack of conviction about truthful things. Got that. I also acknowledge the concerns about IHOP, I too have read and heard things that could easily be considered "cultic". Got that too. But the reason IHOP gets in trouble ...

I had to post a follow-up to the last post about the wretched condition of a world consumed by darkness. The latest was the recognition of nearly 800 forgotten deaths of children born to some the most tragically marginalized people, sexually abused women. I had gotten the idea that the remains were physically discovered, but apparently they were merely found by someone filing through the records kept at the time. Still, apparently there have been anecdotal tales along the lines of "Mommy, look what I found in the empty field down the road" as the skull of a small child is held up for inspection by an adult expressing the requisite incredulity. I simply had to add a remark about something the author of Philomena  had said in his op-ed in the Washington Post, something that more fully reveals his own intractably Catholicist sentiments. What does this mean, Catholicist sentiments? It means that as much as he and a huge portion of the world rage and rail and rant at the Roma...

I simply cannot neglect to put a quick blog post down about that "discovery" of nearly 800 bodies of children dumped in a septic tank near a long-demolished convent that once served as a half-way house for unwed mothers. I did put that word in that first paragraph, discovery , in quotes because one of the small items in mix of all of it is that people had already known about this mass grave of sorts but just shrugged it off as this thing or that thing -- I don't even remember the excuses, the whole thing was so wretched. The deal is that babies and small children who didn't exactly receive the best care at this place and as such died, were pretty much just dumped, and since it happened so frequently those bodies just kind of piled up over a 30+ year period over 50 years ago. Today on NPR's All Things Considered,  journalist Alison O'Reilly elaborated on it all, and she echoed all the ferocious "It's appalling" sentiments. Sorry, but it made...

Yesterday when I heard the news that Steve Ballmer was going to pay $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers NBA franchise I just about fell out of my chair. Thing is, I do know exactly why an $800 million team, tops, went for $2,000 million. It has everything to do with the reigning zeitgeist constructors. What the heck does that mean? It means that people are going to pay through the nose for a team that is going way out of its way to ensure everyone that it doesn't have a racist at the helm. Come on, think about it. What is the Clippers? It is a basketball team, reasonably popular, it's made the playoffs a few times recently, it plays in the second largest media market in the country, yadda yadda. But what else? The highest valued professional sports team franchise in the world is Manchester United, the European soccer club, at something a bit over $2 billion. The NFL's Dallas Cowboys is at around $2 billion I'm pretty sure, but I think part of all that involv...

Had an interesting thing happen tonight. Was relaxing, channel surfing, and came across the film V for Vendetta . Thought I'd tune in to it, there in the middle of the film somewhere, see a bit of it. About 14 seconds after I tuned into it, that one scene came up -- the scene I found the most fascinating, the one that gave meaning to the whole thing. I'd even referenced it in a webzine home page piece a number of years ago. Here it is , by the way, there on YouTube. I'd made a point about unavoidable government identification, but as I watched it, I thought about all the applications to my current webzine home page piece . We're all in tribes, all segmented by authoritative segmenters, and we're segmented in ways we can't even see. From those tribes we seethe and rage and simmer and rail and hate and fear and hate-and-fear some more, all the while hoping that our tribal rent-seeking is successful enough to keep our raging crusades justified and our cushy li...

I've named this blog "Wonderful Matters" because the Bible makes reference to such things all the time. Even calls them by name. Wonderful Matters . I was pretty amazed when I heard a pastor on the radio extrapolate the meaning of that word, wonderful . He said the Hebrew can only mean one thing, that the thing addressed as wonderful is indeed only explainable by God. I don't really know how many people are paying attention to my work to get what I think is a modestly substantive take on the Kingdom. I'd like to think there are a few. That's cool. Wherever God puts me on the avenue to share Him with others, I'm good with that. Sure I'd like to speak into the loudest megaphone to a desperate and dying throng of people, people who'd just turn the ear, see if they could get it, and turn . To Him. He's blessed me tremendously with a good friend who's been able to work out my website , at least for now. I'd been concerned -- as I pos...

I am mostly adding this post to my blog because I presently cannot work with my website , and I simply want to add the most meaningful notification that I possibly can about this present situation. I confess I feel quite resigned in this world overrun with the most fetid folly. Yes, I know, this is really not much of a new thing. The most murderous folly has virulently infected things for eons upon eons. I guess when it is particularly gruesome around you, the sorrow is quite acute. Anyway, the main thrust of this notification is that necessary program updating and concerns about viral computer invasions has put my web work on hold, for as temporarily as I pray it would be. It'd be nice if I could simply use the computer I've had for years, the programs I've had for years, with the security protections I've had for years, but information technology folk feel everything must be updated to the point where anything old gets jettisoned. And if you don't have connect...