• As winter storm Jonas heads our way, the Big Box is closing for the night. I’m glad corporate headquarters, where this decision was made, is in Atlanta rather than, say, Buffalo, where a blizzard warning might be viewed differently.
I may wind up making up the lost hours Saturday or Sunday (weather permitting), but I may just use the long weekend to dive back into Nicolae: Rise of the Antichrist because — wow! — we’ve already surpassed the first goal on my Patreon page. I am truly staggered with gratitude. And I’m looking forward to restarting Left Behind Mondays. (In a weird way, I kind of miss Buck and Rayford.)
• A community health clinic is reopening in Washington State. The facility provides affordable medical care to about 3,000 patients every year, so I’m sure this is something we can all celebrate, right?
Oh, wait … it’s a Planned Parenthood clinic, shuttered since a fire-bomb attack in September. So 3,000 low-income women and families in Washington State will be celebrating the reopening of this clinic. And the sort of people who are happy about good news for others will be happy, too. But “Christians” will be upset. OK, then.
• “This Is What the Fossil Fuel Industry Spilled Into Our Rivers, Towns, and Fields in Just a Year.”
It is not a short list.
• The Benedict Option.
• If I’m following this correctly: Ted Cruz is winning the endorsement game among dominionist Charisma-magazine Pentecostals; Donald Trump has a lock on the “Prosperity Gospel” crowd; and Marco Rubio is leading among the gatekeepers of the white evangelical president-and-founder crowd.
Regardless of how this shakes out in the White Evangelical Primary, the most interesting thing here is the relative influence and size of these constituencies. The gatekeeper types usually dismiss the Charisma crowd and the Prosperity Gospel preachers as fringe elements that shouldn’t count as legitimate parts or representatives of evangelicalism. But at the same time, as they rush to the microphones to describe themselves as the leaders of this tradition, they claim to speak on behalf of tens of millions of Christians — numbers they can’t begin to reach unless all those Pentecostals and Prosperity-chasers are included. And while those distinguished leaders pride themselves on being named to the senior advisory council of yet another white evangelical para-church institution, the truth is that most white evangelicals have never heard of them, while guys like David Barton and Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland are rock-star famous.
Cruz seems to be making an end-run around those evangelical gatekeepers, and that may be shrewd politics.
• Item: “Evidence Stacks up for a Planet Beyond Pluto.” First reaction: Cool. Second reaction: (Remembers H.P. Lovecraft story predicting the existence of this planet) Uh-oh.
• I remember as a kid waiting for Hurricane Gloria to arrive, with New York radio stations playing a steady stream of Van Morrison, and mullet-era U2, and Laura Branigan. (That storm also produced a terrific song from the Kinks.) A storm named Jonas doesn’t give us quite as many musical options, but here’s Weezer as we await the nitty gritty:
(I suppose we could have gone in this direction too.)
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