Novelty, Nonsense, and Non-Sequiturs

Fearing God the Collectivist Way

Sojourners, the magazine so sensitive to oppression that it instructs its subscribers to correspond with it by using "gender-inclusive forms of address (i.e. 'Dear Friends')," is celebrating its twentieth anniversary of "bringing hope and healing to a broken world."

Recently, Sojourners Art Director, Ed Spivey, explained the need for changing the magazine's typeface, and, in so doing, he perhaps expresses the depth of collectivist reverence for the Savior:

"Our new typeface is called Times Roman (named, I think for the big-city paper that Jesus used to read with his morning coffee and bagel. He would send Bartholomew out everyday to get one, since they didn't have home delivery, but Bartholomew was a little absent-minded and sometimes brought back the Post instead. Or he would forget the newspaper altogether and just buy a couple of Slurpees and a chili dog. Maybe that's why you don't read that much about Bartholomew in the Bible...)."

No Wonder We Can't Privatize It

Columnist L.M. Boyd recently noted the sort of information that might make frustrated mail-order business owners wake-up screaming:

"One out of every 160 working American is on the US Postal Service Payroll."

Gorbachev Sticks to His Guns

In Leningrad, USSR, during the pre-referendum debate over whether to restore the name of "St. Petersburg" to that city, Soviet President and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mikhail Gorbachev argued in true progressive/reformist style:

"There are no moral or political reasons to change the name of the city, since Lenin was one of the great thinkers, politicians, and statesmen of the twentieth century."

An Erotic Presbyterian Environment

Amidst all the media attention given to the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), the Commissioners did manage to officially adopt "A Brief Statement of Faith" into their Book of Confessions. The new confession explicitly adopts an egalitarian understanding of genders and opposes humans, who "exploit neighbor and nature, and threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care." Jack Stotts, who chaired the committee that drafted the confession, hopes that the statement will be read as a regular part of Sunday worship: "I hope it would be used initially to the point where it almost breeds contempt." [We can only hope.] After the vote, the commissioners stood up and cheered.

Two days later, the Assembly adopted its first detailed policy on sexual misconduct by church officials. "We are facing a crisis terrible in its proportions and implications," reads the introduction to the policy statement. The New York Times reports that in "an informal church survey of 50 presbyteries, 60 reported cases of sexual misconduct were under investigation." But, hey, they're recycling aren't they?

If the West Won't Speak to Us...

Sergei Kapitza writes in Scientific American of the current "upsurge of the irrational" as Soviets race to embrace "ESP and UFO's, astrology and clairvoyance, mystic cults and mesmeric healers." On the back cover of the scholarly journal, Social Sciences and Modernity, published by the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. we read:

"`I am not an executor of fate...I come from nowhere and there is nowhere I can go. I am beyond time and space...but I am always, at all times, with you as a small particle of the great thinking matter. You managed to wake me up in myself and now I am waking you up in yourself.'
Beginning with No. 3, our journal, in its new department `Problems of Higher Reality,' will publish dialogues with the Cosmic Mind, as received by the staff members of the All Union scientific coordinating study center for UFOlogy."

Orthodox Mathematics

In an excerpt from a sermon by Anthony Coniaris published in Again, a periodical of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, we learn:

"As Christians we would agree completely with those who say that without God man is a zero, an absolute zero. But the big difference with Christians is that we believe that God is the big ONE before the zero. And, as we know, it is the ONE before the zero that gives it worth. Christ is the ONE Who makes me something. Without the ONE and only God, I am nothing....This is the key to abundant living. My confidence in Him is the foundation, the beginning, of a healthy self-confidence and self-worth."

At Least They Can Write

Harper's Index reports:

"Average number of `uhs' used by college science professors while lecturing, per minute: 1.39
Average number used by college humanities professors, per minute: 4.85"

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