Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
Well, an editorial columnist’s anyway:
| It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. |
Pravda?! 😯
Would they know what they’re talking about?
Next what?
Whatever it may be, I am presently thankful for all the freedom and liberty and opportunity and plenty I’ve enjoyed almost my entire life.
This morning my Google Alert for Anabaptist led me to Religious Demographics in America, from which I excerpt forthwith:
| Which groups are the net winners and losers in the dynamic process of shifting religious affiliation?
The group that has experienced the greatest net loss by far is the Catholic Church. Overall, 31.4% of U.S. adults say that they were raised Catholic. Today, however, only 23.9% of adults identify with the Catholic Church, a net loss of 7.5 percentage points. […] It is also interesting to see which childhood faiths people leave behind. […] Roughly half of those raised as Protestant (52%) retain their childhood religious affiliation…. Overall, then, 80% of those who were raised as Protestant are still Protestant, either within the same denominational family in which they were raised (52%) or within another Protestant family (28%). […] Of all of the Protestant families, Baptists, Adventists and Lutherans have the highest retention rates, at roughly 60% each. The Holiness, Anabaptist and Congregationalist families, by contrast, have much lower retention rates, below 40% each. […] Two of the religious groups with the lowest retention rates are Jehovah’s Witnesses and Buddhists. |
As an Anabaptist of the Mennonite brand, I’m troubled by our low retention rate. 😥
I wonder, though, what our congregation’s retention rate works out to be.
What about yours?
I also wonder what our congregation’s acquisition rate is. Especially from the ranks of the heathen.
What about yours?
Several months ago, Ruby had to exile one of our hens. Otherwise, she would have died at the hands beaks of the other hens. (Wow, she was low on the pecking order!)
(The hen, that is.)
Anyway, as a way of personal relaxation, yesterday afternoon I was hand-feeding her blades of grass and sprigs of weeds.
Her she is, in the process of swallowing a blade of grass she has just pecked from betwixt my fingers:
(I tried — unsuccessfully — several times to catch the grass still in my fingers as well as in her beak.)
Then I decided to do a portrait of her!
Remember the Exile!
Click the above image. Save the resulting bigger version to your computer. Make that image your wallpaper for today. Leave a comment telling the world (or at least me and the seven readers of this blog) that The Exile is now your wallpaper.
Thanks! 
That’s the title of Justin Buzzard’s piece:
| Like most other new things, Christians tend to either embrace Facebook uncritically, or retreat from it and condemn its use. Embracing technology uncritically—the “bear hug,” as I call it—means using a technology without thinking through its impact on yourself and others. The “cold shoulder”—ignoring/retreating from/condemning a technology—is often driven by misguided fears and shallow biblical interpretation. While the problems with embracing uncritically are more easily discerned, giving a technology like Facebook the cold shoulder also has its problems. |
A pretty good piece, I would say. In it he gives nine ways to not use Facebook as well as six ways to use Facebook to love God and others, and care for your own soul.
Maybe he pushed me over the Facebook cliff. 😆
But I still say that Facebook is The Budget on steroids. If that doesn’t connect for you, it’s OK. 😉
(PS: I drafted this yesterday…then forgot to post it. 🙄 )
I just saw that word in three headlines over at Drudge:
| White House Warns Critics: Should Be ‘exceedingly careful’…
China warns Fed over ‘printing money’… COLUMBUS SCARE: Police chief warns of deep cuts without tax increase… |
So I got to wondering it what other headlines it was appearing today:
OK. You get the picture.
Sleep well.
And beware! 😯
Well, President Obama passed up on nominating a black conservative man or a green liberal woman or a homosexual white man.
Instead he nominated a woman I never heard of. Right now, I know extremely little about her. I don’t even know her name.
Will the Republicans bork her? Or filibuster her? Or mock her? Or fling dirt (dry or mud) at her?
Will she have tax problems? Or nanny issues? Or paper trail nukes?
We’ll see.
One other thought: The Clintonistas bemoaned that President Clinton didn’t have a 9/11 event to do great things for their man. I wonder if the Bushies are regretting President Bush didn’t get a Supreme Court nomination so early in his first term.
Well, whoever this woman is, she will not impede the progress of history nor the execution of God’s will in it.
May she not have to endure all the demeaning unkindness so many others experienced in the confirmation process.
It’s Memorial Day, so it’s fitting to remember Abel, the first man to die.
Abel, yet speaks, though dead. (The Bible tells me so.)
So here’s an excerpt from The Great Cloud of Witnesses: Read it all