A good friend forwards me a link to this press release. It is but one of many Focus on the Famiy type missives littering the net, my inbox, my mailbox, and my television screen. The press release posits a diametrical opposition between Evangelicals and gays, but also takes as given that which is to be [...]
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Most of you already know about the Oxyrhynchus cache; for those outside the classical world’s orbit, the documents, collected at the margins of a once-Greek ghetto at the Nile’s bed, from a humungous ancient trash dump, contain very, very old versions of Greek classics, the Bible, etc., thought to be unreadable. Turns out if you [...]
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I nearly underwent the Catholic Rite of Christian Initiation in the mid-nineties, after spending a few months ravenously devouring all the information on Catholicism I could find, both good and bad. I had become convinced that Catholicism, after a few fits and starts may have got it right after all. The social issues that concerned [...]
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My first experience with Tim LaHaye was as a horny preteen. On one sweltering Ohio afternoon, while visiting my Aunt Deb, and while also moving my bowels, I happened upon a paperback in their bathroom bookstack called The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love. Its cover featured a lazy couple necking, after a [...]
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The alternative society created in part by Hollywood myopia, and the cynicism-or, depending on your point of view, foresight of The Passion‘s marketers, has come to fruition. Senate majority leader Bill Frist has decided to exercise what the press and Congressional Republicans call the ‘nuclear option’ to make it easier for Senate Republicans to bring [...]
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St. Malachy comes back from the dead for each conclave. Reason being, in the 12th century CE he made a prospective list of Popes that culminate two Popes from now–at the end of the world. The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us: The most famous and best known prophecies about the popes are those attributed to St. [...]
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[Editor's Note: Sepoy has escaped; however, he is completely nude and wandering the mean streets of Dayton, Ohio. I say this not to frighten, but to warn. He is crazed on absinthe (one of my favorite interrogation methods) and, as he crawled from my front porch, he was muttering somethings dark about "Said's thesis," The [...]
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[Editor's note: I admit it. I have Sepoy. He is safe, for now. Leave $20m Euros on my porch, or I will read Camille Paglia to him and force feed him instant grits.] Assured poor folk will be able to get meds cheap, Indian parliamentary “leftists” unchained themselves from the proverbial redwood and, at last, [...]
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[Editor's note: Sepoy is at an undisclosed location. He's working overtime on strategies to Keep Our Children Safe. He will return next week.] Yesterday I took a case for a fellow whom a major lender claims “owes” them several thousand dollars in “lost interest” on a repossessed vehicle the lender has since resold, again at [...]
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[Sepoy notes: Gentle Readers, my good friend farangi shares his thoughts about HST. If HST lives on in anyone's soul - I point squarely to farangi and his upcoming saga of rocking in Jerusalem.] Rumor holds that Hunter Thompson has been temporarily dead several times already; each round of scuttlebutt credited those lapses into the [...]
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[sepoy notes: Gentle readers, here it is. The coup de gráce. I will have my thoughts on the series next week. Specifically, I want to see what a secular populist response to this would look like. After all, if the world doesn't end as predicted, we should have Plan B. In his conclusion, farangi also [...]
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[sepoy notes: Fundamentalism, a term now associated with Islam - though largely supplanted by Islamofascists among the freepers, originated in the 19th century America to describe those who maintained the inerrancy of the Bible. In 1895, the five points of fundamentalism were agreed upon in Niagra: Literal inerrancy of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus [...]
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[sepoy notes: On the inerrancy of text, see Holy Writ in the latest Economist (thanks, moacir). The piece focuses on Christian and Muslim traditions and has some excellent quotes and nice overview of the tension between textual literalists and textual critics. On the end times in Muslim eschatology, I briefly touched on this here and, [...]
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[sepoy notes: Gentle readers. I asked my good friend and, sometimes, collaborator farangi to write something explaining wtf is up with religion in America. Obviously, the elections were a motivation but there is something else going on. For example, just yesterday, Tom Delay - the embattled House Bully and born-again Christian - used scripture to [...]
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Presidential opinions about abortion, the place of religious expression in the public sphere, free expression, the right to bear arms, the rights of the accused, etc.,††are usually†interesting but essentially meaningless: the most important issues of our day are constitutional issues, not policy issues. Presidents can do little or nothing about them, because the controversies around [...]
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