The Southern Baptist Convention announced this morning that roughly 40-employees are being laid-off at the International Missions Board. This follows the recall of on the order of 700-missionaries and early retirement of approximately 50 IMB staff.
The International Missions Board has lost tens of millions of dollars over the past several years.
This is interesting: After the Archbishop of Uganda walked out of a meeting seeking common ground among the member provinces of the Anglican Communion, the Episcopalian Church was suspended from full participation in the Communion for 3-years.
It isn’t clear from early reports whether that was the price of the Archbishop’s return, or if he left without returning because he thought that action was too lenient.
Well … ho-hum. Am I the only one who recalls Ozymandias when these stories grab the headlines?
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
If Mr. Trump wins the nomination, the G.O.P. will become the party of anti-reason.
I will go further: Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it.
The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.
This is precious. Mike Huckabee complains that evangelicals aren’t supporting his campaign because, Damn!, if elected he would implement policies which put their ministries out of business.
“A lot of them, quite frankly, I think they’re scared to death that if a guy like me got elected, I would actually do what I said I would do, and that is, I would focus on the personhood of every individual.
We would abolish abortion based on the Fifth and 14th Amendment. We would ignore the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision.” Huckabee said that, as a result of his presidency, evangelical organizations would no longer be able to galvanize their supporters and fundraise. “A lot of these organizations wouldn’t have the ability to do urgent fundraising because if we slay the dragon, what dragon do they continue to fight?
And so, for many of them, it could be a real detriment to their organization’s abilities to gin up their supporters and raise the contributions, and I know that sounds cynical but, Todd, it’s just, it is what it is,” Huckabee said.
Uh-huh. Like, who knew that religion is a predatory goddamn racket and the evangelical right are their witless pigeons?
This is a Southern Baptist pastor, a former governor of Arkansas, a winner of a couple primaries 2-election cycles ago, a current presidential candidate, and a former FOX News talk-show host; in this particular, I’m willing to take him at his word.
Bill Donohue — no sane adult’s idea of a clear-headed thinker — snipes at Obama’s condemnation of religious profiling during last night’s State of the Union address as hypocritical on the grounds that the HHS contraception mandate is — GASP! — religious profiling. I am not kidding you: He actually says that.
The Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate is a classic case of religious profiling. Not only does it cherry pick Catholic non-profits by forcing them to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, it redefines what constitutes a Catholic entity: Catholic social service agencies that hire and serve large numbers of non-Catholics—that is what truly Catholic institutions do—are deemed to be no longer Catholic. This explains why the Little Sisters of the Poor were declared to be non-Catholic by the administration; it also explains why the nuns sued them.
The Little Sisters of the Poor were told they have to fill-out a form saying their religious beliefs proscribe provision of contraception as part of their health plan; they refuse, claiming that completing a form burdens their religious freedom.
I am reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous dismissal of theologians, and more generally of the godly:
Whatever a theologian feels to be true must be false: this is almost a criterion of truth. His most basic instinct of self-preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in.
The Antichrist, §9
