Wonderful Matters

Just have to plop up here a quick post on an article right there in the big mainstream McPaper, USA Today . A university professor has a column in which he asks, "Are we living in the Hunger Games?" I wrote at length about the film The Hunger Games as a profound metaphor for very real contemporary human sacrifice. Yes, human sacrifice happens all the time by everyone not living by the self-sacrificial principles of Jesus Christ. It isn't always in the physical violence people do to one another but in the spiritual and emotional violence they do. The reason so many refuse to accept this truth is that it is so hard to discern in the lives of everyone who does it, which it seems is just about everyone. Here the author elucidates how evident this is. He will certainly get points from those shouting about how inequitable all things economic are in this country. He will get more points from those who want to screech about how much power too few people have to exploit other...

This past week events occurred in my life that paralleled one another quite profoundly. The first was that a president was reelected who is so wickedly reprobate that I grieved over the continued course of this nation. Many said, "Oh quit yer whinin' -- that's been said so many times before and look, we're still okay." No we're not. We're still living in a moral sewer. The second was I spent my week exhaustively working to permanently dismiss from my classroom a student who is pathologically manipulative, narcissistic, and sociopathic. The emotional and spiritual violence spewed from this young man utterly destroyed the instructional integrity of my classroom. Both were awfully draining events to endure, but what made them so striking was not just the similarities in the breadth of evil reflected in them, but that so many people either refused to see and act appropriately on them, or much worse: allowed them or even enabled them to continue. Regard...

My niece has been over this weekend, and she's exactly the same age as my daughter. It was a great opportunity to see Wreck-It Ralph , and it was a terrific movie. It was actually kind of slow to start, and I started to see some of the same formulaic plot devices that you see in all the Pixar movies. But the key message is one I want to share with you here because it relates exactly with the subject of my latest home page piece . I want to start by sharing with you something you may already know. I am a rabid San Francisco Giants fan. So it may go without saying that when they won their second World Series title in three years last Sunday night, I was ecstatic. But I realized something a while ago that is quite profound about this ecstasy, and it is one of the most perverse facts of life that there is. For you see, the splendidly wonderful wonderfulness of that whole thing wouldn't mean a thing if there weren't The Los Angeles Dodgers . And not just the Dodgers, b...

The Nobel prize in economics was awarded this week to two economists, Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd Shapley, who specialized in matching. Their work was about finding ways to get a student matched with the best college and a single adult matched with the best spouse.When you look at the breadth of their work you can see that in many respects it is what the core of economics is all about . Economics is chiefly about decision-making . And how much of that decision-making is trying to get what it is out there matched up with who you are, what you're about, what you like and love and sing about. I'll never forget that gal who on an assignment I gave my students in which they were to write down anything and everything they wanted -- I was teaching about scarcity -- wrote "I want to know what I want." How exquisitely and profoundly and splendidly sublime is that. That we'd get matched up with what we want, but then, the challenge ... How does that happen best? Rea...

It is hard to find good healthy churches that can provide rich spiritual sustenance. I'm convinced that it is because most Christian churches are intractably tied to the World System through its law and bylaws, one of which is the 501c3 paperwork the leaders of those churches sign to get all the goodies Caesar offers them. Tonight I went to the Saturday evening event of a "Truth Conference" that trumpeted itself as an apologetics-oriented affair, and I'm always jumping on good apologetics kinds of things. The speaker tonight was Ed Hinson, and I'd never heard of him, but thought I'd step in and see what was what. His ambitious plan was to go through the entire book of Revelation for the several hundred seated in the megachurch-like auditorium. Whew, I thought, that's a really tall order. But alas, I was not in a church where the people were necessarily expecting an expansive scholarly take on a very challenging part of the Bible. Sure enough, much of ...

Last Sunday the Doonesbury comic was a vicious swipe at those who believe in God and what He says in the Bible. Some of cartoonist Garry Trudeau's stuff is fine, but far too often he lights into those who don't share his view of things, and when he does he just looks mostly foolish. His strip Sunday was a classic instance of this. I couldn't help but put together an alternate version, one that reflects the truth about the scientific evidence, and that version is here . I went ahead and put mine up on "the wall" at Facebook and thought, hmm, wonder if anyone's going to add some remarks? Would they be favorable, from those who tend to believe in God as He shares Himself in the Bible? Or would they be unfavorable, from those who don't quite believe in all that in that way? So far I've gotten two "Likes," which is really cool, but not a single comment. This is kind of why I really don't spend too much time on Facebook. I mean there are...

I saw an ad for a film called  Father of Lights . Don't know much about it, but was intrigued because the term is a name for God in the New Testament. So I went to the website about the film, and found a piece written by someone responsible for it who says this is the third film in a series that is supposed to tell us who God is really . Apparently the film shows all kinds of awesome things happening to people, and this proves that God is loving and kind and giving and gracious and because of all that... He definitely then isn't Angry. It wasn't just that the writer said this, but he said in that pukifyingly humanist way, you know, "We must get rid of that Neanderthal idea that God is wrathful, which is just so ridiculous and no enlightened person really believes that anymore." I read this and, yes, got a little angry. I get a bit ticked about these kinds of statements because they themselves are so idiotic. For one, the guy writes with such anger himsel...