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Just last month I wrote about the “gospel of easy money,” and in that post were a few links to stories of pastors living unusually lavish lifestyles. If you read that post, and easily discerned my contempt for such behavior, you’d expect that similar stories immediately grab my attention. Stories like this one from WFAA News 8 in Dallas/Fort Worth:
A neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville is accused of killing three colleagues on Friday. She opened fire at a faculty meeting and also injured other faculty. The full story is still coming out and, as the New York Times put it in a headline, “Twists Multiply in Alabama Shooting Case.” She fatally shot her brother 20-plus years ago and some question how the case was handled by the police. And she and her husband were questioned, though not charged, in a bombing incident at Harvard.
It probably either feels like “eternity” or “just yesterday” when we first read reports of Haiti’s devastating earthquake that has left over 200,000 people dead.
Throughout the 10 years I’ve lived in Washington, D.C. I’ve made great sport of the freakouts that accompany snow in the region. Unlike these puny mid-Atlantic mortals, I grew up in a part of Oregon where four or more feet of snow in my front yard wasn’t uncommon. My wife, being from Colorado, frequently joined me in scoffing.
You may recall, especially if you are haunted by the hellish details of murders, a post that I wrote a year ago about the death of a 16-month-old boy named Javon Thompson while in the hands of his mother, Ria Ramkissoon, and other members of a small alternative religious group called One Mind Ministries.
I’ve previously come across kung fu ministries. When I worked in the Inland Empire, I even attended a church event where former wrestlers and football players broke burning stacks of bricks instead of breaking bread. But did you hear the one about MMA — not watching it but actually doing it — was the latest trend to take over evangelical America?
As I prepare this morning to go through the indignity that is modern air travel, I can’t help but nod my head in agreement with this article about how new body scanners violate some religious sensibilities. These are the scanners that show your naughty bits to the friendly TSA agents who are trying to detect bombs.
