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Principles are the thing. Without that, we might as well be a state school for electronics repair.
Don’t go wobbly on me, boyo, and it doesn’t matter how much some of the other trustees fret, fulminate, or send emails, you have two years in which to weather this thing.
Don’t give way to fear. Dogs can smell fear.”
One group wanted the American flag up, while the other wanted the Christian flag down, and it seemed to them that for a time that they could row to the same coxswain.
hippie punching is never as rewarding as it initially sounds—and
She was a black-haired, brown-eyed Italian in the midst of a bunch of pale Celts who, for some reason, liked to think of themselves as Anglo-Saxons. This is like a German confusing himself with a Frenchman, but the history is admittedly complicated.
Donato’s youngest boy, Girolamo, was Maria’s father, who had met and married Camilla, both of them the age of seventeen, as soon as he had held on to his first real job for a month. Good enough, he thought. Let’s go for it.
She was cheerful and outgoing, and was very intelligent and competent, but there was a streak of melancholy in there somewhere.
Max was a straightforward kind of guy, with virtually no interior dialog at all.
We are subordinating country to God visually outside, and we do it verbally inside. That’s why we say ‘under God.’ It’s all the same thing.” Check. “How do you figure?” Man, some of these hill apes think they know how to argue. “Well, you all tend to think of the word God as a placeholder for some sort of generic divine entity. For us, it is a proper name. Secularists, even the theistic ones, say ‘God’ and silently add however you conceive him/her/it to be. Like it’s a neutral, impersonal substance that each person adds their own condiments to in private. But we are using a name. For us, it is
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“No life that’s lived for Christ is lost.”
The hour-long story on the flag was going to run the next Friday night, but once Martin showed his producer the doctored footage (without saying anything about its tenuous relationship with what philosophers call the correspondence view of truth), the decision was made to do a three-minute spot the following night.
The Internet has not changed this or made us smarter. It just moves our ignorance around the world at very high rates of speed.”
Trevor stood up to go, and Dr. Tom walked him to the door. “What is your take on the lay of the land out there?” “You mean in the student body?” “Right, that’s what I mean,” Tom said. “Permission to speak freely, sir?” Dr. Tom laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Just like in the war movies.” “Well, the student body is divided about this flag issue—about a third are humiliated by the whole thing, having been taught and unduly influenced by Dr. Jake Rollins. About a third are supportive, but still embarrassed, and about a third are rowdy and enthusiastically in your corner. I am the unelected liaison to
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Even during his days as an undergraduate, his grasp of what could possibly have been meant by the aforementioned correspondence theory of truth had been tenuous.
He put it up on Jezebel, and was quite gratified, upon awakening the next morning, to see that MSNBC and HuffPo had both thought that his news from three a.m. was truly newsworthy. They had posted it also.
Maria stared after them, marveling at the paragon of saintliness who had just greeted Rollins the Insufferable with warmth and kindness, and had apparently meant it.
They were both stellar students in a stellar theological program (if you don’t count all the unbelief and apostasy), but there were striking differences between the two men. A first-rate education had gone into Dr. Tom’s head, while it had apparently just gone straight to Dr. Jake’s.
Dr. Rollins carried more envy around inside his rib cage than you could find at a drag show in San Francisco.
You could set your iPhone out on the desk, and it would charge all by itself.
They abandoned clean play and sportsmanship in the first quarter. Just amazing.”
Simple denials seemed to him to be so old school, and so dependent on naive views of truth, and—not incidentally—filled with contempt for marginalized voices. How anybody like Rollins could have gotten hired at a fundamentalist joint like Choctaw Valley would have been a mystery to anyone who was privy to his views. But since he kept his views entirely out of sight, except at the right conferences, it wasn’t that big a mystery after all.
“Well, I don’t know what I expect other people to do,” Dr. Tom said. “But I know what I am going to do. I am going to laugh at the jitney slander. Give it the raspberry. Maybe two raspberries.”
Martin Malloy was summarily sacked by the president of the television station, and, while it has very little to do with the thread of our larger narrative, he did eventually become a teacher of journalism at Behemoth.
“What has happened,” he concluded, “is somewhat counterintuitive. Some might have expected a flood of controversy like this to damage our . . . testimony.” He remembered just in time that Dr. Tom hated the word brand, and so he veered at the last minute over to testimony. Tomayto, tomahto.
The letters did not expressly mention, but implied strongly, that the issues at stake involved the survival of mom, apple pie, and the red-checked tablecloth on the kitchen table. The letters were agonizingly full of patriotic treacle, but were no less effective for all that.
“We are called to be all things to all men . . . poor testimony . . . laughingstock at SBL . . . the first will be last . . . build bridges, not walls . . .” Dr. Rollins was walking a fine line, and he knew it. He was using some of the standard phrases he had picked up from some of his friends at the more . . . open conferences that he went to, but only the phrases that he did not believe the board members would recognize. They would react to liberal jargon, but not, he hoped, to the liberal bent decked out in the very latest jargon. He thought he saw empathy in the eyes of more than a few of
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If not for good old Robert’s Rules, Tom would have been long gone, five to four.
Apparently the governor has been putting the screws on, and he knows where to put them, believe me. The only thing that saved us was that he didn’t have time to get to everybody. Stan was on a hunting trip until yesterday, some place with no cell coverage, and Hank was in the Sudan on that mission trip. And the other three are okay, God having been pleased to give them spines.
And when they flip, they will think they are obeying Romans 13 or something. It will turn into a matter of high principle.”
And as I have been thinking about this, I decided it might be better to be a broken man than a man who never risked breaking anything.
Trevor Smith was the scion of a family that had plenty of bucks, but which had somehow managed to keep that fact from rotting out the floorboards of its collective soul. They had money—quite a bit of it, actually—but for them, money was just bullets. Trevor’s great-grandfather was the one who had made the first great installment on the mammon pile, and it had only been growing since that time. This, despite the fact that they used most of their ongoing surpluses to fund mission work—supporting several hundreds of missionaries, in Asia mostly. The more they did this kind of thing with their
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How he could possibly have been in the same room with this vision and not known about it was an indication that he was being spiritually dull and lethargic, and was quite possibly backslidden.
Trevor was now firmly settled in Eve’s corner, in the ardent hope that one day soon, she would be in his.
Kramer had noticed that peculiar smell emanating from the New Testament department for years . . . and he didn’t even live in town.
The apostle Paul lived one of the most thrilling lives ever lived, and yet the good professor seemed to have the ability to present the second missionary journey as something at the same level as watching paint dry.
Trevor said yes sir, like a good Southern boy. A number of heads in the first three rows swiveled around, as though they could scarcely credit it. Someone in this classroom had the temerity . . . is that the word? . . . we think so . . . the temerity to challenge the professor? It did not occur to them to wonder why the professor had the temerity to challenge the president. Their loyalties were all locally sourced.
“Yes, sir, I would be happy to. We are a Christian college, and we confess that Jesus is Lord. He is not simply Lord of a spiritual zone somewhere, but He is Lord of the nations.”
Trevor pressed the point. “My understanding is that if Christ is the Lord of the nations, and that if this nation is one of those nations, then He is the Lord of this one also. If He is the Lord of this one, then His flag should be given precedence by those who actually confess to believe He has that precedence. The only clear way off this point, as I see it, would be to deny that the Christian flag is His flag. That would be a reasonable line of argument, it would seem to me.”
A number of ponytails in the front rows bobbed because they saw that this was intended to make sense.
“We learned from Dr. Henry last week that that passage should more accurately be rendered as His kingdom is not from this world, meaning that it is not grounded in earthly principles. Not that it doesn’t or can’t have any earthly impact on the world.”
There had apparently been plenty of oil left over after he fixed his hair, and so he had figured out a way to work that into his smile.
I do believe in a certain form of American exceptionalism. James Madison and the others wrote a Constitution that clearly didn’t trust Americans at all. That really was exceptional. But now that we have started to believe in our own uniqueness . . . well, that’s not exceptional at all. Everybody has done that, from the Babylonians on down.”
But subordinating the flag to God? How is that a dishonorable place to be? Even the Pledge says under God.”
The Founders were remarkable in their foresighted ability to construct a form of government that distrusted all future generations of American politicians so thoroughly. They knew we were just one more nation. That was exceptional.”
Dr. Tom closed his eyes briefly, a slow blink, and thanked God for sending Trevor Smith into his life.
The “atrocious lighting,” as Dr. Tom summed it up, made it look like one of Dante’s circles done up in sepia tones.
He was the original church curmudgeon. Tom could do a passable imitation whenever he wanted.
If that conversation had been the North Atlantic just several generations back, there would have been U-boats everywhere.