Ah, the Prosperity Gospel. Let me get one thing out of the way before diving into the contents of the article Preston posted: I’m 100% against the Prosperity Gospel. My personal belief is that faithful adherence to Christianity calls us to question, if not absolutely reject, Capitalism. Accordingly, I am no friend of the Prosperity [...]
Posts from ‘November, 2009’
Dollar, Dollar Bills, Y’all
Reasons for the financial collapse: subprime mortgages, over-speculation, bad financial instruments, and of course, Jesus. Wait. What? The feature article in The Atlantic this month is Hanna Rosin’s “Did Christianity Cause the Crisis”. It makes a case that the prosperity gospel was another factor in our economic meltdown. In particular, she suggests its message encouraged people to agree [...]
Re: Fort Hood
We all have a polarity within us; magnets, so to speak, that pull on our moral compass. It’s in cases like Hasan’s, where the needle in the compass snaps, that we begin sifting through the deluge of questions of why his compass no longer pointed north and led him toward such destruction. It’s been just [...]
Fort Hood
I was away at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting when news came through to Montreal that a United States soldier had opened fire on his fellows at Fort Hood in Texas. The initial media coverage was predictably scattered. Reports were coming in too fast to parse: the shooter was dead, the shooter wasn’t [...]
Re: Urine Trouble
I spent a bit of time combing through a lot of the commentary on the Fox News article referencing this particular episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. The discussion there seems to be dominated by the notion of Christians as a persecuted minority group. I’ll come back to that issue in a minute. First, as you [...]
Urine Trouble
So Larry David, on his show Curb Your Enthusiasm, got a drop of tinkle on a picture of Jesus. The camera zooms in. It appears the image of Jesus has a single tear rolling down his cheek. “Praise God! It’s a miracle,” two women decide as they fall to their knees in prayer. The next [...]