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Showing posts from March, 2010

A "Plumbline" I wrote that will run on KDCR Friday, 3/19

What Glenn Beck Does Not Know Should one even bother to reply to Glenn Beck? Clearly, he does not use reason when he tries to convince folks to think like he does. Often, he attempts to frighten people by using words that carry all sorts of emotional baggage. Sometimes he talks as if he knows a lot about something, but in reality he’s not very well informed. I would hope that people would see through this sort of manipulation, but I hear that Beck has a huge following—even in a town like Sioux Center. So I am going to respond to something he recently said. Beck said that Christians should check their church’s web pages for the words “social justice” or “economic justice” and if they find them, they should resign from the church. Why? Because those words are really code words for communism and Nazism. Now for those Christian Reformed folk listening, if you bother checking the website of The Christian Reformed Church in North America, you will discover—if you did not already kno

Blindside and Precious

Blindside and Precious Two movies having to do with African Americans caught in situations of extreme poverty were up for best picture at the Academy Awards this year: Precious and Blindside. Neither won, though in my opinion Precious should have. (But I saw only 5 of the 10 nominated films.) Both Precious and Blindside are fine movies but completely different in style. Blindside is a typical Hollywood movie, by which I mean, a movie that takes a true story and cleans it up into a slick, clean comfortable feel-good tale that allows rich, white, Christians and Southerners to feel good about themselves. Precious, in contrast, is a journey into the life of a young African-American girl who has been sexually abused by her father and experiences daily the most putrid kind of verbal abuse from her mother. The language, of the mother especially, is so violent and profane that it scalds your heart. Blindside seems to say that if once in a while wealthy whites would pick an Afr