substitute for the substitute for the thing i used to buy

More audio.

"Over 4,400 pastors signed John MacArthur’s “Anti-Social Justice Proclamation” a few weeks ago. Over 7,000 have now added their names to that statement, making it crystal clear that they do not follow Jesus in any way, shape or form.

One of the most troubling statements they all agreed to was this:

'We emphatically deny that lectures on social issues (or activism aimed at reshaping the wider culture) are as vital to the life and health of the church as the preaching of the gospel and the exposition of Scripture.' " --keith giles at pantheos via metafilter. --Or not.

Hayabusa 2. A little robot about the size of a copy machine. You could hold one of its rovers in your hand.

Reread Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case (1961), after some 40 years; i still liked it. This black comedy, set in a leprosarium, i find hard to believe could ever have been accepted as sincere among the religious--he reserves his fiercest satire for the priests, all deluded in different ways, but really spares no one. A taint of misogyny surprised me (unsurprisingly) this time around; & i found the symbolism i considered heavy-handed, then, much more PoMo now: for the unfaithed, loveless ex-architect, pursued by unthinking hero worship even to the ends of the earth, more of an allegory for the novelist himself, who cannot quite bring himself to quit writing, nor ever persuade his followers of his oh-so entertaining, utter moral bankruptcy--though he keeps telling them he's a liar.