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This will bring back memories of Steve Martin writing out 9,987,653 checks for "one dollar and nine cents" in the movie The Jerk. In the settlement of a 16-year-old class-action lawsuit against former televangelist Jim Bakker's Praise the Lord ministry, 165,00 people will each get $6.54 (presumably by check). They had each originally given $1,000 to Bakker's ministry for vacation stays at a PTL resort that was never built. The settlement fund is $3.7 million, of which $2.5 million will go to the attorneys who brought the suit. The lawyers had asked for all of the money, but a judge denied that request in 2002. Read the story in www.religionnewsblog.com.

I was involved in something similar many years ago in Louisiana when, out of the blue, a form letter arrived asking if I wanted to participate in a class action suit against an insurance company I formerly had a policy with. It was a simple matter of signing the form and mailing it back. Then I forgot all about it—until one day I received a check in the mail for 87 cents.

The BBC News reported today that US Army medical experts can't explain why about 100 US troops serving in Iraq have contracted pneumonia. A team of medical investigators is arriving in Iraq to study the situation. [See "Iraq pneumonia spate baffles US," BBC News, 7 August 2003]

Why is this so hard to understand? They need to re-read the March 1991 Los Alamos Memorandum on US military use of depleted uranium in weaponry. See also the CBC report on this deadly "silver bullet."

Eschatologist Jack Van Impe said last night on his television program that national security advisor Condoleeza Rice had telephoned him to get his input on the Bush White House's "roadmap to peace" and so he put together something and sent it to them. Since "Armaggedon is coming soon!" was the theme, I think, it's hard to know how helpful his contributions turned out to be. Read the full text of the Roadmap to Solution of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

The US Episcopal Church's advancement of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson to bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire is a sign of this church body?s new apostasy and its descent into the very pattern of evil that Christ's sacrifice was designed to free us. And this is not really about homosexuality. It never was about whether Robinson should or should not be a celibate gay in order to don the bishop's vestments; it is not about the shameful pederasty among Roman Catholic priests; it is not about Catholic or Anglican. It is about a pattern of sin that threatens to drag the body of Christ back into an idolatry that leads to many other evils, taking with it generations of guileless people as they follow a path away from God's holiness and toward a pervasive human depravity.

This debate, which is just getting started all over again, will no doubt center its focus on homosexuality—openly gay or celibate, natural vs. unnatural, behavior that is chosen vs. biologically given, what Paul said, what Paul meant, what really went on in Sodom, what did Jude write, dabbling in New Testament Greek.... This will only turn our attention away from the real issue: whether modern Christians can put aside their interest in what our new culture is promoting and instead follow God's moral standards for us as his children. The issue is about the lure of a mortal cult which has engendered a system of beliefs recreating the history and purpose of human sexual differentiation. Through a reinterpretation of the human body, male and female become instead sexless and therefore not unlike Potato Head toys, capable of identities (including sexual identities) that can be changed by any simple culture-driven choice. Instead of an honest, authentic acceptance of what God has designed us for and the holiness to which he demands we labor towards, Christians are asked to put their trust in a manufactured surrogate—needed because social pressure demands it, attractive because it appears in perverted guise as a logical outcome of Christ's love for all human beings, and useful because political and social ends are achieved by its belief.

Pope John Paul II himself suggested this in his Address to the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, 21 January 1999: "It is only in the union of two sexually different persons that the individual can achieve perfection in a synthesis of unity and mutual psychophysical completion." Because love is not an end in itself, it cannot be reduced to corporal union of two humans; only within the cooperative context of God's will for us can sexual love be fully realized.

We ought still to heed Paul's prescription: "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing, and perfect will." [Rom 12:1-2]

I spent most of the weekend reading more Bukowski (short stories, his novels). Reading Charles Bukowski is a little like climbing in and out of garbage: after a while you have to take a hot shower. But what sustains my interest in the man and the writer is his intractable authenticity. That's similar to what Bukowski himself said about John Fante, a long-standing influence, in a foreword to a reprint of Fante's Ask the Dust. I mention Bukowski on Fante because sincerity of voice was what the young Bukowski sought and what he expressed throughout his poetry, his prose, and in his personal life—despite a debauched life as drunkard, barfly, brawler, vagabond, and roué. In both poetry and prose Bukowski is a master at conveying the dark side of this fallen world, and he lived to 73.