I predict another boring debate, unless McCain comes out with something new and bold. Which he probably needs to do.
Mike Murphy, on Swampland, says, “Obama’s mission is simple. Kill the clock. Act Presidential. Hope nothing happens. He’s winning.” Probably true. He had some other excellent advice for McCain.
Here’s what I’m most looking forward to: the live-blogging by Karen Tumulty, Mike Grunwald, and Jim Poniewozik. It’s a load of fun.
I just learned that Taylor University is closing its Fort Wayne campus.
Now it’ll be no more. About 200 employees will be affected. That includes a variety of people I know (including at least one person at Anchor).
The Fort Wayne campus served a lot of urban, lower-income students. The Upland, Ind., campus is known for being a hot-bed of rich kids. So once again, the poor get shafted.
I’ve been greatly impressed with the students at Taylor-Fort Wayne, and with their mission-mindedness in serving Christ throughout the city. They live within a big mission field on the city’s messed-up south side, and they represent Christ well. These kids will be missed. I imagine most will end up at Indiana Purdue – Fort Wayne.
I’m sure Taylor U didn’t make this decision lightly. But I see churches leaving the neighborhood where Anchor is located, fleeing to the richer suburbs. And now Taylor does something similar. I wonder what Jesus thinks.
After we ate yesterday at Dog & Suds, Pam got the hiccups. And it reminded me.
I was probably in fourth grade at the time. Some TV show–it might have been Candid Camera–sent someone around asking people, “How do you get rid of the hiccups?”
One person said, “I think of seven bald-headed men.”
Sounds silly, but: it worked me me. I kid you not. I would start thinking about bald guys in our church, and the hiccups would go away. I didn’t even need to reach seven.
I’m serious. This worked for me. For years.
Republican family values can be interesting sometimes. We have Joe Biden, who traveled home every night from Washington. And we have John McCain, who has been largely absent from his kids’ lives. But the Republican is the “family values” person.
Cindy McCain likes to call herself an only child, and she was the sole inheritor of her father’s beer fortune. But she actually has two half-sisters, one from her father’s first marriage and one from her mother’s first marriage.
Cindy’s father died in 2000. He left his other daughter, Kathleen Portalski, $10,000. Meanwhile, Cindy got a couple hundred million dollars. She was not only disinherited, but Cindy won’t even acknowledge her existance. Even at the funeral, in her eulogy, Cindy told the crowd she was “his only child.” While Kathleen sat nearby, dumbfounded.
Would Cindy want her family of blended children to treat each other that way? I can’t imagine Pam and her half-sister treating each other that way. They don’t even like being called half-sisters, and will probably chew me out for mentioning it. They are sisters in every way.
Aren’t these legitimate concerns for a Christian to raise?
There are so many ways in which I think Cindy McCain is great. And yet…if you insist on seeing the world (and politics) only in black and white, there’s a lot you must ignore. Life and people are messy.
You must read the transcript of the Swampland live-blog of the debate, by reporters Karen Tumulty, Michael Grunwald, and James Poniewozik. It’s hysterical. They started a half hour before the debate started, and continued to the end, injecting snide little comments throughout. Here are snippets:
Some of my reactions to last night’s second presidential debate:
I mean, really. How many men would give up drinking if “faced” with a threat like this? Or maybe the men of the early 1900s were more character-driven.
Wanna be stretched?
An Alabama pastor, while attending the Innovate Conference in Granger, Ind., felt it was important to baptize one of his parishioners NOW. Not to wait until he returned to Alabama. So he conducted a baptism over the internet, with live video. Five days later, that girl died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm.
Tim Stevens, a pastor at Granger Community Church, tells about the baptism on his blog, and you can watch a video of the baptism. It gave me goosebumps.
Get used to this kind of thing happening. Imagine:
I’m sure the advent of radio preaching drew criticisms that people were substituting the radio for actual church attendance. Likewise with TV preaching. While we can agree that gathering with other believers is what God fully desires, it’s also true that radio and TV have reached a lot of people for Christ–people who, otherwise, might never have heard the Gospel.
Now we have podcasts and video streaming of church services, so people can “attend church” at their convenience. Nurses and policemen who work Sunday mornings can download a video of the service and watch it when they can. This is a good thing.
We also have multicasting–a pastor’s message is beamed to churches in several other locations. Last October, Pam and I attended a church where the message was being seen in several locations in that facility (including their own coffee cafe).
You can argue all you want about how “This isn’t what God intended.” But though I’ll always prefer the face-to-face, I have difficulty seeing technological tools as being anti-biblical.
The Apostle Paul himself was high-tech, for his day. He used letters to instruct, admonish, and encourage. He couldn’t be there in person, so he wrote letters. Letters which were multicasted from town to town, millennium to millennium. Jesus never wrote letters (that we know of). But we believe Paul’s letters were divinely inspired.
So why can’t God, likewise, be totally present in that internet baptism?
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Copyright © 2013 Steve Dennie | All rights reserved
