“Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.”
David Bentley Hart
The Prophet Joel proclaimed that the Spirit of God would be poured out on all flesh. Peter in one of his sermons in the book of Acts, said that it was fulfilled in the first century. Some are just unaware of it. If it is true of all, then all have the capability of partaking and participating in the divine nature.
Source: The Freedom Blog: Quantum/Ethereal Prayer: Praying at the quantum or ethereal level
Democrat Christians care about peacemaking, the poor, immigrants, and the oppressed in our society. To them, this is what it means to be a Christian. So, they vote for Democrat candidates who at least “seem” to care about poverty, war, immigration, civil rights, and the average joe on the street. Republican Christians tend to care about the unborn, the traditional family, and the right to bear arms. Therefore, they vote for Republican candidates who at least “say” they care about overturning abortion laws, defending traditional definitions of marriage [anti-gay marriage, etc.], and protecting the Second Amendment. Both sides firmly believe that to vote any other way is “un-Christian”, but only because they have both developed and accepted a very narrow definition of issues that are “Christian” issues and conveniently ignore those other issues.
Source: How Can You Be Christian And Vote Democrat/Republican? | Keith Giles
Looking bad
If you look at the United States of America right now, things are not good. On almost every level, things are not good. We, the people of Jesus Christ, helped sow the wind by using the awesome power of the most powerful faction of the most powerful political party in the world to bring Donald Trump into the office of the president in the United States – a man who is manifestly cruel, ignorant, a liar, incompetent and who manifestly hates many of his fellow citizens – we brought him into the most powerful office in the land and exactly what you would expect has happened.
Source: Metaxas vs French: The Christian arguments for and against voting Trump | Ruth Jackson
“Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.”
Source: Jorge Luis Borges on Reality, Writing, Literature, and More – BIG OTHER
…the argument from potential is significant because it is the only thing that explains the stewardship that adult human beings have in regard to human neonates. Newborn infants lack the psychological maturity to possess goals, aims, beliefs, or purposes. This does not, however, exclude them from the moral community. The reason why it does not is because we realize that infants have the potential to develop these conscious goods, and it is this potential that, as Jim Stone argues, grounds the infant’s interest in growing up and realizing that potential [3]. Every single semester that I teach the issue of abortion in class, I put up a picture of two cells that look striking similar, almost identical. I then reveal to my students that one is a skin cell, and the other is a fertilized egg at the zygotic stage of development. “Do they have the same moral status”?, I ask them. When I scratch my arm and kill skin cells, is my action as morally problematic as abortion? My students always answer that the two cell types are morally different; that the zygote is of a different status than my skin cells. In defense of this distinction, they always give the same reason: the zygote, if implanted into a uterus, has the potential to become a baby who will then become a person, whereas my skin cells do not. Since the vast majority of my students, in my seven years of teaching, share this intuition, I think that it is an intuition that is worthy of being explored rather than cavalierly dismissed.
And The Fires We Talked About by James Ross Kelly is an anthology of 35 stories of varying lengths. The tales are set mainly in and around the town of Medford, Oregon and the California hills, though some stray much further afield to North Africa and the Red Sea. Many contain pithy local dialect or idioms which bring a flavor of the forests and mountains in the area and the men who work at logging and tree planting in the unforgiving landscape. The stories tell of their lives, the back-breaking work, the dangers, and the recreational visits to clubs and bars. There are strippers and fistfights, and beer flows freely in the bars as the men relax and for a time forget the perils of their chosen field of labor. Some stories tell of military men during the Vietnam conflict and there is one particularly moving tale of a forest fire in the California hills. The author displays an extraordinary depth of knowledge about the nature of the forests and the logging operations, while he also bemoans the disappearance of community and a particular bucolic way of life as farms and holdings are snapped up by rapacious, faceless corporations. But there are more diverse tales too – tales that will stretch your imagination, such as Standing in the Rain, where he writes about an author who is experiencing a degree of success writing formulaic detective novels, but is assailed by one of his characters who is unhappy about the way the plot has developed. James Ross Kelly also displays an intricate knowledge of the topless bars and strip joints of the seventies and eighties – knowledge which features in several of the tales and perhaps particularly so in No One Here Gets Out Alive. Well-written and covering a variety of themes and subjects, there is something in this collection for most tastes but maybe should be avoided by your maiden aunt.I enjoyed And The Fires We Talked About; it contains many glimpses into worlds and ways of life that are rapidly disappearing. Written in a forthright, unflinching style, Mr Kelly’s characters live and breathe and rise solidly from the pages. There is a certain amount of sex and violence but I found none of it offensive and felt that it was in keeping with the themes being explored. If I had to pick a favourite story from the collection, I would choose The Fire Itself, a beautifully observed tale of a California forest fire along with a touching look at the natural ecology of the region and one family who lives in it. And The Fires We Talked About is an impressive anthology from the pen of a talented author – I do not hesitate to recommend it.
Source: Book review of And the Fires We Talked About – Readers’ Favorite: Book Reviews and Award Contest
St. John One: One 