Flat Screen Preachers

I’ve been thinking a lot about Mega Churches recently, the churches where there is a single leader who is the principal figure of not only the main congregation, but of all the satellite congregations, with their sermons being broadcast each week to those remote sites.

A few days ago, I came across a video from the Evangelical show “Wretched”, discussing that very question:

10/15/2014 Update: Mark Discroll has apparently resigned from Mars Hill Church, the mega church found in Seattle.

10/01/2014 Update: Mars Hill is now officially dissolving

Abortion Debate

A while back I advertised a debate between Trent Horn and Cecili Chadwick on the subject of abortion. During the exchange, Miss Chadwick said:

“I think it’s really interesting that every time I have been asked to debate this issue I have been debating a man…”

Trent’s response to this was rather spot-on, but I wanted to advertise an upcoming debate where Processor Chadwick will be debating with a woman! On 27th October, Miss Chadwick will be in a formal debate with my friend Timmerie. All the details are in the Facebook event below:

Screen Shot 2014-10-10 at 11.55.10 AM

Quick Apology: Is Mary “Mother of God”? (Redux)

I’ve already written a “Quick Apology” to this topic before, but as I was responding to a recent commenter on this subject, I thought of an even shorter response…

Objection

Here’s the standard objection:

“Mary is not the ‘Mother of God'”

Response

In response to this, you may ask a very simple question: did the child Jesus call Mary “Mama”? Yes or No?

maryBabyJesus

UPDATE: As the more pedantic among the readers have pointed out, Jesus would have spoken Aramaic and therefore called her “Ima”.

Bringing out the best in men

Now, to be honest, I’m not much of a Vanity Fair magazine reader. I guess I’m not really part of their core demographic. After all, it’s not like their articles regularly reference Star Wars, martial arts, Catholic theology or computer programming languages. As such, typical Vanity Fair content is not really my thing.

However, the November issue of Vanity Fair features something that attracted my interest, an interview with Jennifer Lawrence, the star of the popular “Hunger Games” movies.

Katniss_peeta_train

As you may know, about a month ago Miss Lawrence’s iCloud account was hacked and nude photos found there were released onto the internet. In the Vanity Fair interview she spoke about this invasion of privacy and the trauma she experienced as a result. In the part where she spoke about the photos, she made a comment which I found no less revealing than the pictures themselves. Here’s what she said:

“I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you.”

I’m afraid to say that the sentiment expressed here is one which may well be felt by other women, which makes me very sad.

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