If that Tahoe avalanche had taken six fathers leaving behind seven now-fatherless children, would your response here be any different? Interested to know, that’s all, as I try to understand this better.
Yes, dear brother. Our response to every last thing should be sex-specific, and here it is a much greater tragedy that the dead are women who are always mothers, and always the last thing we cry out before we die (say on the battlefield or in an accident): “Mom,” “Mother,” or “Momma!” Some or all of these children left behind are little, which makes their grief and loss (and those of their father) even more acute.
Sex matters. From beginning to end. Always. Now it’s up to us to figure out how to replace the fence we ourselves have destroyed, and to do so by asking why and how? In every Bible text. In every news account. In every worship service. And then to teach othes what we learn from our inquiry, working to rebuild the fences for others as we do for ourselves. This is what is is almost unheard of in our churches and their preaching and teaching.
But back to the greater importance of mothers to little children, here’s something to read that is superb. Of course, you know it will be old, from before the fences guarding male and female were torn down. Love,
James-FemalePiety.pdf (171.3 KB)
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The thing to keep your eye on is the “doing what she loved most, with the people she loved most” comment. To everyone in human history, yes even including pagans, that comment is insane.
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Thank you; this does makes things clearer.
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US House Rep Tony Gonzalez finally stops lying and admits he committed adultery with his staff aide, Regina Santos-Aviles. He was ten years older, her boss, married, and father of six; she was ten years younger, his aide, married, and mother of eight-year-old.
After the adultery, this young mother set herself on fire and died.
After lying and lying to cover up his adultery, RepGonzalez finally admitted his… what?..
“I made a mistake, and I had a lapse in judgment, and there was a lack of faith, and I take full responsibility for those actions. Since then, I’ve reconciled with my wife, Angel. I’ve asked God to forgive me, which He has, and my faith is as strong as ever.”
“Lapse in judgment” indicates that, normally, his judgment is fine. And He knows God has forgiven him. Was he disciplined by his pastor and elders? Did they tell him God had forgiven him?
Not to beat a dead horse, but the horror (choosing my words carefully) continues. In yesterday’s interview, Gonzalez dismissed any responsibility for Regina Santos-Aviles’s suicide: “I had absolutely nothing to do with her tragic passing. And in fact, I was shocked just as much as everyone else.”
This man has no fear of God. But worse is that those who have the obligation to discipline him refuse to do so. In a heartbeat PresTrump or House Speaker Mike Johnson could have his resignation in their hand. The House ethics explicitly forbid this abuse of power—not to mention adultery.
This is our Christian representative, our Christian House Speaker, and our Christian nation.
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Out of our minds podcast: Immigration: who is my neighbor?
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Reading Charles Marsh’s bio of Bonhoeffer is to read tons of documentation of gullibility and lock-step conformity of Christians to Nazi propaganda. The filth took over the Protestant churches, completely—particularly in an explosion of hatred and oppression of the Jews. As I read, I’m constantly noting the glaring similarity in our situation, today, to the Christians and their pastors of the past over in Germany who joyfully joined Hitler as he declared faith in Jesus was perfected in Christian church and people’s fervid nationalism.
Just today, I read this (quote below) and recognized it as a good description of the credulousness rampant within the conservative Protestant church today which is also shouting its fervid nationalism.
So now, I repeat the Apostle Paul’s command in Scripture: “Avoid such men.”
“people want a simple explanation for their troubles in a complicated world. Autism? It’s vaccines. Disease? Some foods are “poison.” Trouble with your kid? Must be brainwashed by … novels? Video games? Rap music? (This one depends on the decade.) The One True Reason trains a mind not only to reject complexity but to accept bigotry—which is why it’s so ideal for reactionary politics. No housing? Immigrants. No job? Immigrants. Inflation? Immigrants. Immigrants? It’s the Jews.”
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Civilization is in a sense a matter of feeling shame in the appropriate places.
-Charles Taylor, “A Secular Age”
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Spent a summer pumping disel at truck stop. We cleaned every windshield and I learned to turn squeegee so whole length of squeegee is drawn over bad bug spots.
10" of abrasion rather than 1"
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Christian men keep telling me not to think abt angry belligerent Christians in American politics today when I read history of angry belligerent Christians in German politics yesterday. “It’s NOT the same!”
Marsh, “Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer”: “Since the end of World War I, the Conservative Party in Germany had become less a political entity than a club for angry malcontents.”
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Manhattan Institute roundtable interview w/20 GOP Zoomers. Read “Andrew’s” answers:
“I’m a Christian”
“I really like Nick Fuentes. I feel like he puts a strong emphasis on social conservatism, and Christianity, and America First…”
“I’m very pro-strong executive, strong leader, strong man. I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist. He was like, we have to take Germany back for Germans. And I feel like we should do that in America. We should take America back for our native population. So, I’m not an expert on Hitler by any means, but as far as nationalism is concerned, I’m all that.” Everyone Wants to Know What Gen Z Republicans Think. We Asked Them.
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New York Times, March 7, 2026: “If President Trump ends the war without getting control of the cannisters, Iran will almost certainly speed toward going nuclear."
Simple truth.
Just came across Ellul’s Propganda: the Formation of Men’s Attitudes. From the intro:
Jacques Ellul’s view of propaganda and his approach to the study of propaganda are new. The principal difference between his thought edifice and most other literature on propaganda is that Ellul regards propaganda as a sociological phenomenon rather than as something made by certain people for certain purposes. Propaganda exists and thrives; it is the Siamese twin of our technological society. Only in the technological society can there be anything of the type and order of magnitude of modern propaganda, which is with us forever; and only with the all-pervading effects that flow from propaganda can the technological society hold itself together and further expand.
Most people are easy prey for propaganda, Ellul says, because of their firm but entirely erroneous conviction that it is composed only of lies and “tall stories” and that, conversely, what is true cannot be propaganda. But modern propaganda has long disdained the ridiculous lies of past and outmoded forms of propaganda. It operates instead with many different kinds of truth— half truth, limited truth, truth out of context. Even Goebbels always insisted that Wehrmacht communiqués be as accurate as possible.
A second basic misconception that makes people vulnerable to propaganda is the notion that it serves only to change opinions. That is one of its aims, but a limited, subordinate one. Much more importantly, it aims to intensify existing trends, to sharpen and focus them, and, above all, to lead men to action (or, when it is directed at immovable opponents, to non-action through terror or discouragement, to prevent them from interfering). Therefore Ellul distinguishes various forms of propaganda and calls his book Propagandes—that plural is one of the keys to his concept. The most trenchant distinction made by Ellul is between agitation propaganda and integration propaganda. The former leads men from mere resentment to rebellion; the latter aims at making them adjust themselves to desired patterns. The two types rely on entirely different means. Both exist all over the world. Integration propaganda is needed especially for the technological society to flourish, and its technological means—mass media among them—in turn make such integration propaganda possible.
…
propaganda is a unique phenomenon that results from the totality of forces pressing in upon an individual in his society, and therefore cannot be duplicated in a test tube.
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Ellul is good, here. Thanks.
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ALJAZEERA: “the critics [of war against Iran] are making a different error: **They are treating the costs of action as if the costs of inaction were zero. They were not.** They were measured in the slow accretion of a threat that, left unchecked, would have produced exactly the crisis everyone claims to fear: a nuclear-armed Iran capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, surrounded by proxy forces that could hold the entire region hostage indefinitely.” The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why | US-Israel war on Iran | Al Jazeera
Church officers, the will-to-power, and nationalism:
"Every social group tends to develop imperial ambitions which are aggravated, but not caused solely, by the lusts of its leaders and privileged groups. Every group, as every individual, has expansive desires which are rooted in the instinct of survival and soon extend beyond it. The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power. Only rarely does nature provide armors of defense which cannot be transmuted into instruments of aggression.
“The frustrations of the average man, who can never realise the power and the glory which his imagination sets as the ideal, makes him the more willing tool and victim of the imperial ambitions of his group. His frustrated individual ambitions gain a measure of satisfaction in the power and the aggrandizement of his nation.”
-Reinhold Niebuhr, “Moral Man and Immoral Society”
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Always envied my brother, David, for writing his sermons out with pen and ink. This ChronicleHigherEd headline clarified why.
“I Made My Students Write by Hand. It Gave Them Their Brains Back.” Then the first line: “We need to slow down the process of thinking.”
True, although I typed this on a keyboard.
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