"We got edgy, some of us, increasingly restive. Every week, three times in one hour, the word would come soaring out from the Bible on the lectern...and with frustrating frequency, clobber some of us...with the jarring intrusion of this-is-not-meant-for-me.
We'd hear the Pauline grandeur of "brothers in Christ" and hear our inner voices whisper, "I'll never be a brother."...The inner whispering, the outrage, the mental editing -- it got to be too much. It was getting in the way of our worship.
...There were people who needed inclusive language, there were people who wanted to work on it; and from Advent 1981 on, the successive design teams agreed to do just that.
...We have indeed been changed. The dire warnings from the tents of orthodoxy are right: It's a slippery slope we set our feet upon....We thought we were setting out to deal with language about God's people, and we found ourselves confronted with language about God's own self. We set out to clarify, and we ended up changing some as well. We began by struggling with pronouns, and we ended up struggling with the patriarchy in which all of scripture seems to be set."
Laura Mol, "Wrestling With the Living Word"
Sojourners May 1990
Now you might think Big Business would be hard to define in this day of leveraged finances and interlocking technologies. Not so. Big Business is every kind of business except the kind from which the person who's complaining draws his pay.
Thus the Rock-Around-the-Rain-Forest crowd imagines record companies are a cottage industry. The Sheen family considers movie conglomerates to be a part of the arts and crafts movement. And Ralph Nader thinks the wholesale lobbying of Congress by huge tax-exempt, public-interest advocacy groups is akin to working the family farm."
P.J. O'Rourke
The Rolling Stone June 1990
"There is no better way to inspire a child's interest in science than by analyzing and cleaning up a polluted stream."
On Sunday, June 10, Paul Bray, Jr., a Seventh-day Adventist minister dowsed part of his church building with gasoline and then proceeded to set it on fire.
Apparently motivated by a desire to collect on an insurance policy to help remodel his church, Bray eluded police at first but later fessed up, claiming that he didn't intend to burn the entire building.
My heart was deeply touched to learn of the Virgin's concern over the centuries for Christ's people, of her well-documented visitations to Earth, and of the noble and true friends called saints who were praying for me and who would teach me by holy example to love God wholeheartedly.
The man from Gosbank was astounded to hear Mr. Angell [a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank] strongly recommend an immediate return of the Soviet Union to the gold standard....As Angell stated, "the first thing your government should do is define your monetary unit of account, the ruble, in terms of a fixed weight of gold and make it convertible at that weight to Soviet citizens, as well as to the rest of the world.""...It is my belief," Angell continued, "that without an honest money, Soviet citizens cannot be expected to respond to the reforms," whereas a "gold backed ruble would be seen as an honest money at home and would immediately trade as a convertible currency internationally."
...What, then, is Mr. Angell really saying? What is he really telling the Soviet central banker? He is saying that the United States and other Western governments have been able to get away with imposing what he concedes to be dishonest money.