I guess I don't pay much attention to the news. Camping is predicting that the rapture will occur tomorrow. I wasn't aware before today, but I know the whole world must be buzzing about it if the UK Telegraph and Jared Wilson (on his facebook page) are both talking about it. I can't believe that the media is paying attention to Harold Camping. I still remember "88 Reasons Why Jesus will Return in 1988" and it's follow-up, "89 Reasons Why Jesus will Return in 1989."

Here's the UK Telegraph, which apparently doesn't know about the "'88" book.

For the last 50 years, the deep and sonorous voice of Harold Camping has reached millions of listeners of Christian gospel radio in the United States.
The 89-year-old is the president of Family Radio, a California-based religious network which broadcasts to more than 150 stations across America.

Born in Colorado, Mr Camping studied at Berkeley in the 1940s and became a member of the Christian Reformed Church, a Protestant denomination that has its roots in the Dutch Reformed churches and is theologically Calvinist.

In 1958, Mr Camping and some other members of the church jointly purchased an FM radio station in San Francisco and began broadcasting conservative Christian gospel. In the following decade, as the West coast of America embraced counter-culture and the hippy movement, Mr Camping's radio network expanded, adding another 13 stations.

In 1970, Mr Camping published the Biblical Calendar of History, in which he dated the creation of the world to 11,013BC and the flood which Noah survived to 4990BC. His timeframe was based on the idea that the word "begat" in the Old Testament does not necessarily imply an immediate father-son relationship, but could refer to a patriarch and a distant descendent.

He also argues that a calendar exists in the text of the Bible which details the imminent end of the church age, implying that churches are no longer used by God for salvation, and the Rapture, when Christians will gather to meet Christ, and finally the end of the world. The current date for the Rapture is May 21, 2011, and Mr Camping believes, according to Thessalonians 4:15-17, that this is when "the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord".

Five months later, on October 21, God will completely destroy the earth, according to Mr Camping's prediction. He had previously predicted the Rapture would occur in September 1994.

[This is Part Two of a two-part series on last week's midterm elections. Part One, appearing yesterday, focused on the significance of the election and the message we should take away from last Tuesday. Today, the focus is on the impact the election will have going forward. Thank you to Bill and The Thinklings for the opportunity to share my thoughts.]

The events of last Tuesday are still being processed. Even now, there are six US Representative races that have yet to be called. But let us not let the fact that this election isn't even over keep us from beginning to talk about the next two years. (Where's the fun in that?) Many are already looking ahead to 2012, throwing names out like Hillary, Dean and Feingold as possible primary opponents to Obama. If any of those materialize, the GOP has to be considered the favorite to win the general election, regardless of their candidate. The Republican standbys include Palin, Romney and Huckabee while some new names have entered the fray like Chris Christie [who has given every indication that he won't run] and Marco Rubio [who would be the GOP equivalent of Obama in 2006].

But the final results of the 2012 election season will depend greatly on what happens in 2011. You will begin to see Republican Presidential would-bes, could-bes and wannabes begin to try and provide a meta-narrative to DC politics in a few months (it doesn't hurt that a few of them have time on Fox News). It will be a battle of message between these potential candidates and the White House. We’ll see whose narrative sticks, but if the Republicans can come together on a central message, they have a strong shot at winning the battle, especially when one considers the utter lack of message by the Democrats over the past months.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

[This is Part One of a two-part series on last week's midterm elections. Part One focuses on the significance of the election and the message we should take away from last Tuesday. Thank you Bill and The Thinklings for the opportunity to share my thoughts.]

Last Tuesday, a massive political overturn in the House of Representatives saw the Democrats handing a strong majority over to the Republicans. The Senate also moved towards GOP control, although the Republicans fell short of what they needed to own a majority. Governorships across the country slanted Republican as did State legislatures. In short, the GOP won big, but not as big as some had hoped. Still, you won’t find many Republicans complaining. All the while, underneath the surface of the electorate, the Tea Party movement went from relative obscurity to changing the face of government across our nation in just over a year.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

“Fifty member church in Florida gets international attention when it burns somebody else’s holy book. Five thousand member churches hold free clinics to everyone, food pantries, home fix-ups for free…. and never get a mention even in local news. It’s not so much that bad news travels fast, but good news rarely gets a ride.”

As someone who is married to someone who worked for a Christian music company in Nashville for a while, plus as someone who has listened to almost exclusively Christian music for 25 years (thinkling regulars know my exception), and as someone whose second Christian album ever was an Amy Grant album (my first was David Meece) and as someone whose first Christian concert ever was an Amy Grant concert, and as someone who knew people who knew Amy during her difficult marriage with Gary Chapman, and as someone who finds the intersection of faith and dogma, truth and love, reality and ideals interesting, and as someone who has observed the curious goings on in the CCM industry for a long time, I found this article fascinating.

A First-Person Account From A Guy Who was Forced to Force Amy Grant To Apologize For Her Divorce

A snippet...

He threw an old copy of CCM on his desk in front of me. It was the issue with Amy on the cover, and the interview inside focused on her divorce from Gary Chapman.

“Have you read this interview?” Gerald asked.

“Yeah, I read it.”

“Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?” He thumbed through the pages of the interview, waiting for me to agree. When I didn’t say anything, he looked up. “Well?”

“How is that interview pathetic? I loved that story.”

“She doesn’t apologize, Matthew. For getting a divorce.” Gerald shifted in his chair. “Not one time. It’s as if she’s not sorry for disobeying God’s command to stay married. She needs to apologize.”

He closed the magazine.

“Who does she need to apologize to, Gerald?”

“Her fans. Us at CCM. And everybody she failed.”

Our chat went on like this for fifteen minutes. Eventually, Gerald got to his point.

“On Wednesday, when you do the interview, get her to apologize. Ask her to apologize if you need to.”

“Are you kidding me? You’re asking me walk into Amy’s house and get her to apologize for something that happened more than three years ago? She’s remarried, Gerald.”

Gerald threw his hands in the air. “I want her to apologize.”

“Gerald, this isn’t Watergate. We cover Christian music. Can’t we do a fun story and let the stupid divorce topic remain in the past?”

“God has rules.” He spun his chair toward the laptop sitting on a table next to his desk. “Either get Amy to apologize or we won’t run the story. Period. Get out of here.”

I walked out.

Two days later, as I pulled into Vince and Amy’s U-shaped driveway, my stomach ached at what Gerald wanted me to do. I shifted the car into park and began to panic. I’m getting ready to interrogate Amy Grant. I love Amy Grant. I want her to love me.

I couldn't decide what to title this post, so I put both of my title ideas up there...

but my point is that prayer does work, and not always quite like we think.

I thought this was a cool testimony.

A little late, but somewhat refreshing:

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Halperin, who maintains Time's political site "The Page," cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.

"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."

The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin

Because Obama's campaign was generally so well run, he argued, the press tended to applaud even his negative tactics.

"We'll scold you for being negative," Heilemann said, "but if it seems to be working, the tone of your coverage becomes more positive."

Sarah Palin conducts an interview while a turkey is (from what I'm told - it was kind of hard to tell) killed in the background. And the world explodes.

You don't have to think she's the next Reagan to see the ridiculousness in the reactions of the mainstream media and liberals¹ to this capable Alaskan politician.

Do you?

Hat-tip to that fabulous Brit Canadian, Mark Steyn, who has this to say:

I didn't think I could like Sarah Palin more than I do, but the nancy boys at MSNBC bleating all over the screen about the Great Turkey Carnage is hilarious. This is a great caption:

TURKEYS DIE AS GOVERNOR PALIN TAKES QUESTIONS FROM MEDIA

Or was it: MEDIA DIE AS GOVERNOR PALIN TAKES QUESTIONS FROM TURKEYS.

After she's sworn in in 2013, I hope President Palin arranges for a ritual turkey slaughter to be going on behind her at every press conference, if only during David Shuster's questions.