Douglas LeBlanc

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Creeping Fundamentalism VI: Fundamentalist/Premillennialist/Reconstructionist/Whatever in Chief

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Three cheers for a Boston Globe essay that may calm some fears of George W. Bush as the End Times President. The essay is by Alan Jacobs, an English professor at Wheaton College, which may be enough to disqualify him in certain provincialist circles. (Recall how only last month the Globe’s competition, the Boston Herald, instructed its readers that Wheaton “counts holy roller Billy Graham among its alumni.”)


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Salon on DeMille, Jennings on Jesus & Paul

Hmmm: Salon covers Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments on April Fool’s Day. Will this be an expose of shadowy McCarthyite figures who controlled the masses through kitsch? A celebration of DeMille (shown in a portrait by Yousuf Karsh) as a transgressive auteur? An irony-laden piece hailing the film as a masterpiece?


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Socrates for the rest of us

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This week’s Time makes it official: the Socrates Café movement has trickled down to Middle America. You have to respect Christopher Phillips, founder of the Society for Philosophical Inquiry. He met and fell in love with his wife, Cecilia, when she was the only person to show up for one of his earlier cafés. Now they travel the country and live out of suitcases to spread the concept of everyday people gathering to discuss big questions.


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Beaming down the Messiah

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In the April issue of Wired, Joshua Davis delivers an amazing report on Yitzhaq Hayutman, an English-born architect with a high-tech solution to Middle East conflicts: using lasers to project a restored Temple above the Dome of the Rock and, thus, to “induce the arrival of the Messiah and the coming of peace on Earth.”


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Would Richard Hooker support gay marriage?

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Lately it’s becoming popular among Episcopalians who support blessing gay unions to cite this remark attributed to the 16th-century theologian Richard Hooker: “Pray that none will be offended if I make the Christian religion an inn where all are received joyously, rather than a cottage where some few friends of the family are to be received.”


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Bad craziness at Wheaton College

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On Sunday the Boston Herald published a sobering report about Feroze Golwalla and his small Parsee Ministry Team, also called Baruch Ha Shem International. Golwalla, 36 and a native of Pakistan, describes Baruch Ha Shem as an effort to take the message of Christ to Parsee Zoroastrians (who live in India and Pakistan). But some students who became associated with Golwalla while they studied at Wheaton College in Illinois describe him as a cult leader who used frequent violence to control them.


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