Wonderful Matters

I've recently uploaded my latest webzine piece , and there is never a dearth of folly prominent in the news to use as a pretext for what I've written about. To wit: Some evangelical pastors are so riled about bad World things that they've started putting together a megarally to be held just before the November elections. Some guy named Jim Garlow from a big church in San Diego is enlisting the services of a guy named Lou Engle who did one of these back in 2000 (you mean bad World things Christians can do nothing about no matter how many of them screech is not new?! ) The idea of this thing they're calling "The Call" is to first reflect deeply on God's things-- okay so far; second pray and fast-- still good to go; third go vote righteously on November 4th. Um, excuse me: go select World operatives whose job it is to crack heads of willfully wretched people? What business is that of those who name the name of Jesus, unless that Jesus is the Roman one? App

This was in Time magazine recently, typical stuff about how Jesus just simply can't be the only way to heaven. The twist here is that evangelicals are now supposedly coming to terms with this truth. Some devout evangelicals will rail against this with every fiber of their being, but if they understood God's economy as clearly laid out in the Bible they'd actually get it. What is about that economy, exactly, that evangelicals aren't quite getting here? It is very simple, actually. There is a World, and there is a Kingdom. Here is what that looks like: World: a bunch of religions, each with its own idiosyncratic ideas about life and death, truth and falsehood, salvation and damnation, peace and war, love and fear. Indeed most of those ideas are actually pretty rational, reasonably veritable. That is, most of these fine religious domains will say "Be a good person and things will be fine." That's true! And how sweet it is to have so many different ways to try

There are certainly more than three notes, like, maybe more like 57 billion notes, about what the deal is with value extraction, the subject of my last two webzine pieces . But for now, here're three I had zipping around in my brain today. 1. I'd kinda gotten across the idea that the lifestyle precept of "Losers Weepers" was kind of a bad thing. It is when people criminally take from others. But after reading a financial commentary that alluded to the fine service short-selling gazillion-dollar-a-year-earning fund managers do, I wanted to clarify. God does permit short-sellers to do their thing. He said as much in that passage in Matthew about the sowers of the talents. Don't sow with what you've got? It'll be yanked from you and given to the others who did. Sounds a lot like short-selling fund managers to me. The service they provide is cracking heads of those who live in the World and proudly assess value above or outside what it truly is so they themsel

Cassius is famous for saying, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." It seems most times this quote is shared, the last key part of it is omitted. Cassius closes by saying That we are underlings . He acknowledges that they've allowed Caesar to do that thing he does so well, crack heads of evildoers. What most just don't get is that if they are an evildoer, then Caesar is going to crack heads. Don't like it, tough darts. On the front page of today's Los Angeles Times was an article about a Catholic priest with a book out about how Rome needs to get cracking and really do something about the sex abuse scandal. Turns out top Catholic guy in LA, Roger Mahoney, is joining a few other top Catholic big-shots to discourage the guy from going on his book tour. "Ooo," many will gleam, "The Catholic Church is reeling! The jig is up! This guy is on to them!" The fact is, this is a great publicity move by these guys. It persua

I was thinking about that time, just shy of ten years ago actually, when I wrote one of my impassioned rants about how the professional sports I once loved had been decimated by what I've termed competitive duplicity. I likened myself to Orpheus, the Greek guy who desires to rescue his beloved from hell, hoping that enough would see the truth about things and desire to see competitive integrity fully instituted. Alas, it would never be, something that I sadly knew then. That piece, by the way, is here , and in it I made some predictions about what I thought would happen over the next ten years. Surprisingly (or not suprisingly, I imagine), some of them did indeed come true. I remember making wild predictions about who would actually appear in the World Series' to come, and except for being off on the Dodgers, those were reasonably on. (The Dodgers predictions didn't come true, I noted, because of the exact thing I wrote that Peter O'Malley warned then owner Rupert Murd