March 24, 2018

As of March 24, 2018 (not counting suicides)

Yes. March for our lives.



http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

March 22, 2018

McConnell files cloture on omnibus, setting up first vote at 1 a.m. Saturday

The Dotard is scheduled to leave for Mar-a-Lago Friday. The government shuts down at midnight.

Will he stay and sign the bill, will he sign it and cut out in the middle of the night, or will the gutless coward stay at the White House Saturday and greet 500,000 marchers?


Source: The Hill, by Jordain Carney


Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is teeing up the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill approved earlier Thursday by the House to stave off a possible government shutdown that would begin at midnight Friday.

*****

Republicans have made it clear they want to vote Thursday, allowing lawmakers to leave for a two-week recess as scheduled.

But in order to do that, McConnell needs the consent of every senator — including GOP Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.).

*****

Read it all at: http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/379834-mcconnell-files-cloture-on-omnibus-setting-up-first-vote-at-1-am-Saturday


What could Rand be thinking?

March 22, 2018

"Show Biz Kids" came on my car radio last night - serious flashback!

Rick Derringer on guitar!

March 22, 2018

So Christianity is no longer the norm? Going underground will do it good

Young people rejecting religion is not bad news for Christianity: the faith needs to embrace its weirdness and mystery

Source: The Guardian, by Paul Ormerod


It’s quite a statement. “Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good,” said Prof Stephen Bullivant this week, in response to figures showing widespread rejection of Christianity among Europe’s young people. He adds a slender caveat: “Or at least for the next 100 years.”

*****

At the risk of sounding in denial, this may not be entirely bad news for Christianity. Arguably one of the most toxic developments in the history of the faith was its shift from being a radical political and spiritual movement to allowing itself to be co-opted by forces of oppression and militarism. Becoming a default or norm effectively drained it of much of its energy.

*****

And those of an older generation hopeful that spurning religion means rejecting irrationality may be taken aback by a supposed recent renaissance in, of all things, astrology, along with what Lucie Greene of marketing firm J Walter Thompson calls a “reframing of new age practices, very much geared toward a millennial and young Gen X quotient”. One theory is that many young people shun the more arid extremes of rationalism, where everything is numbered and quantified, and all life and culture is squashed and processed into data. Maybe empiricism has had its day. And as the sociologist Linda Woodhead has noted of young Britons with no religion, relatively few describe themselves as atheist.

*****

In the past few decades, some parts of the church that tend to reject the trappings of religion have tried desperately to appear “normal”. But for a generation that prizes authenticity, maybe that’s just a turn-off. Rather than being just a slightly rubbish version of the rest of the world, with slightly rubbish coffee and slightly rubbish music, maybe it needs to embrace its difference, its strangeness, its weirdness, its mystery. Christianity as a norm, gone for good? Maybe that’s good news for everyone.


Read it all at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/22/christianity-norm-underground-mystery

March 20, 2018

What evangelicals looked like before they entered the political fray

Source: WaPo, by Gregory Alan Thornbury



President Jimmy Carter and Larry Norman stand together during a White House event celebrating gospel music in September 1979. (Don Riggott/Larry Norman Estate)



*****

Perhaps the high watermark of the Jesus Movement was “Explo ’72” in Dallas at the Cotton Bowl, where over 100,000 teenagers — dubbed “Jesus Freaks” by the media — crowded into the stadium to hear the evangelist Billy Graham preach and to listen to their favorite Christian musicians perform, chief among them being Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, the black gospel singer Andraé Crouch and Norman. Time magazine ran a cover story on the phenomenon as a leading national news item, calling Norman “the top solo artist in his field.” Life did the same and expressed fascination with this non-free-love, peace-loving and drug-free version of the hippies. Soon, Graham himself would feel burned by getting too close to Richard Nixon and naively defending the president before the truth about Watergate was known. From that point onward, the nation’s most famous preacher shied away from political jockeying, and generally stuck close to his core message, which was basically, “God loves you. Jesus died for you.”

Evangelicals had a social conscience too, though, in the 1970s, and, for a brief moment, showed promise as a group of people who now had positions of leadership in America. Newsweek dubbed 1976, “The Year of the Evangelical.” Jimmy Carter, a Baptist Sunday school teacher, professed a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and was elected president. Graham broadcast his nationally televised “crusades,” held in packed-out stadiums, and was a guest on “The Dick Cavett Show.” Author Francis Schaeffer was so popular with college students that purportedly even rock stars like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page were reading his books. By 1979, Bob Dylan made headlines by claiming he had become a “born again” follower of Jesus. The newly converted Dylan began attending church at the Vineyard fellowship, a Bible study that began, appropriately enough, in Norman’s living room.

*****

Carter and Norman called upon evangelical churches to do something about poverty and protested institutional racism — messages they carried nationally but also in white conservative churches in particular. But when Carter’s presidency faltered, Ronald Reagan found a different cadre of Christians with whom to share common cause and rock the vote. The relatively apolitical Graham was overshadowed by new voices in the “Moral Majority.” Television evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson gained ascendance. Fundamentalist preachers such as Jimmy Swaggart and James Robison then began to have the ear of the White House, and both reviled Christian rock music in public — with Swaggart famously calling Norman’s music “spiritual fornication.”

*****

Within Christian circles, Hollywood, rock and roll and anything that sounded “liberal” were now the enemy in the minds of the televangelists and their legions of followers. The culture wars proceeded apace, and they kept the faithful mobilized. Subsequent evangelicals didn’t get contracts with secular record labels, as Norman once did. And if they did manage to do so, they stayed silent about their religious views. So increasingly evangelicals doubled down on building their own record companies, publishing houses, and increasingly, their own subculture. And the only time they poked their heads above their own wall was to hand out a voter’s guide or endorse a political candidate. By the time University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter coined the term “culture wars” in 1991, the die had been cast. No longer could evangelicals be a part of the cultural mainstream, and eventually they would come to be known in the mind’s eye of the public as little more than the Republican Party, now Donald Trump’s party, for the foreseeable future.


Read it all at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/03/20/what-evangelicals-looked-like-before-they-entered-the-political-fray/

March 19, 2018

Historian Michael Beschloss reminds us:

https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC



"NO COLLUSION"







"13 hardened Democrats"







"WITCH HUNT"






Known by the company you keep

March 19, 2018

Faith-Based 'I Can Only Imagine' Soars With $17.1 Million Launch

Source: Variety, by Dave McNary

More at: http://variety.com/2018/film/news/i-can-only-imagine-box-office-faith-based-film-1202729700/


Film Review: ‘I Can Only Imagine’

March 17, 2018

The Population Bomb Has Been Defused

Many of us grew up with and heard for decades how the inevitable overpopulation of our planet would kill us all.

Then, something else happened.

The lesson here? Buck up, kids! "Something else" is never predicted, but quite often happens!

Source: Bloomberg, by Noah Smith














Read it all at: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-16/decline-in-world-fertility-rates-lowers-risks-of-mass-starvation

March 15, 2018

We're in the midst of an apocalypse. And that's a good thing.

Reminder: Christianity ain't what it used to be!

Source: WaPO, by Nadia Bolz-Weber

*****

An apocalypse is a good thing, and I’m delighted to welcome you to this one.

In Greek, the word apocalypse means to uncover, to peel away, to show what’s underneath. That’s what this country has been experiencing in the past six months. There has not been a sudden uptick in sexual misconduct and assault in our country, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are simply exposing what was already there. The reality that some men comment on, threaten, masturbate in front of, intimidate and assault female bodies is finally being brought out of the dark ubiquity of women’s personal experience and into the light of public discourse. The male domination at the center of the sexual harassment issue — how those in positions of power (usually, but not always, men) have used that power to sexually gratify themselves at the expense of those who are subordinate to them (usually, but not always, women) — is being revealed apocalyptically in prime time.

*****

The heresy is this: With all the trappings of Christianity behind us, those who seek to justify or maintain dominance over another group of people have historically used the Bible to prove that that domination was not actually an abuse of power at the expense of others, but indeed was part of “God’s plan.” And there you have the appearance of Christianity (Bible verses and God-talk) contradicting its essence (love God, and love your neighbor as yourself).

Sexual harassment and misconduct persist in the United States for a reason.

The venom of domination runs deeply in us as a country and a people. And it does so because the fangs that delivered it were given not the devil’s name, but God’s. When the subordination of women is established as God’s will, when slavery is established as God’s will, when discrimination against queer folks is established as God’s will, when the CEO of the National Rifle Association claims the right to buy a semiautomatic assault rifle is “not bestowed by man, but granted by God,” it delivers a poison that can infect the deepest parts of us. Because messages that are transmitted to us in God’s name embed far beneath the surface, all the way down to our original place, our createdness, our source code.

*****

This is why I welcome our moment of uncovering; we need to see how deep the heresy of domination runs, and then remind one another that dominant powers are not ultimate powers. We Christians need to repent of our original sins, and see where we have embraced the appearance of Christianity only to reject its essence. This is not a new idea. Black Bible scholars, feminist and liberation theologians have done this work well and for decades now. So if those who came before looked to the Bible to justify their dominance then let us look to it to justify our dignity. It’s in there. Hebrew midwives who defy Pharaoh. Ethnic outsider women who insisted on their dignity. African eunuchs who knew where water was in a desert.

We must do this. The Bible, Christian theology and liturgy are too potent to be left to those who would use them, even unwittingly, to justify and protect their own dominance. And sometimes the origin of the harm can be the most powerful source of healing.

That’s how anti-venom works.


Read it all at:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/03/14/were-in-the-midst-of-an-apocalypse-and-thats-a-good-thing/

March 13, 2018

"Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"

For November release!

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/13/17112890/fantastic-beasts-2-crimes-of-grindelwald-first-trailer