The ineluctable Joe Carter, over at Evangelical Outpost, has an article up entitled "The New New Anti-Semitism: Confronting Anti-Christian Bigotry". Well, anti-xtian bigotry among the Left-leaning chattering classes is hardly new news; in fact, it's so "dog-bites-man" that it makes me yawn sometimes. But Joe isn't too worried about things; he says:

Fortunately, this radical contingent is too small a minority to be a physical threat.

Howbeit, I hope that Joe remembers that it was a small but radical group of highly organized people who back in beginning of the 20th Century managed to get control of the levers of power in Russia. But I guess I shouldn't be worried too much; it could never happen here.

But even if it were to happen, it wouldn't be the conservative xtians who'd stage such a bolshevik-style coup: No, they are much too disorganized—and far too busy perpetually fighting among themselves—ever to be able to pull off such a feat. Furthermore, as they watch their jobs get offshored and the infrastructure of America get shipped overseas, xtians are simply too bogged down, like everybody else, paying their mortgages, and paying off their credit cards, and paying their taxes. The taxes in turn get used by the government to build public schools so the xtians can send their kids there to learn atheism and how to perform sodomy. By the way, in regards to this, the last Barna statistic I heard was that only 4% of children ages 13 through 18 (middle and high schools years) ever manage to form any deep and lasting commitment to XP. I guess this proves just how effective the public schools have been in fostering correct forms of "progressive thinking".

So the condition of the Church in American is overall really one of miserable defeat and, metaphorically at least, could be aptly typified by what is found by reading the Book of Judges in the Old Testament: Completely subjugated, we are too busy serving the foreign gods—gods our fathers have not known—and besides that, we are ruled over by the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perrizites, Hivites, Jebusites, and the Five Lords of the Philistines (who, I guess, could correspond to Darwin, Marx, Freud, Kinsey & Sagan, but the exact combinatorics are academic). Therefore, I don't think the aforementioned "Left-leaning chattering classes" really have anything to worry about: by means of the "network of mutually shared and enlightened consensus", they've already have firm control of all the major newspapers, the news media, the courts, the public schools, the colleges and universities, most of the government, and even most of the seminaries. And, just for the delicious irony of it all, things have even have cleverly arranged things so that the tax dollars xtians pay are also used to fund NPR and PBS (so Bill Moyers can get air time to explain, in so many words, why Bible-believing xtians are jackasses), and to fund the National Endowment for the Arts (so all the clever "artists" out there can make "statements" using ingenious combinations of urine and ordure and crucifixes). Yet, strangely enough, in spite of all the power it already wields, which lies securely and tightly in its grip, the "reality-based, progressive community" recently has managed somehow to spook itself into thinking, with horrified dread, that all is on the verge of being lost. Sorry, friends, such a demarche is not going to happen. So please get over the perfervid vapors—we xtians are simply not that clever. But, if need be, go ahead and wear your tee-shirts screen-printed with the words "so many xtians, so few lions". And go ahead and kick us around some more, if it really helps to make you feel any better. We will simply turn the other cheek and not complain.

On a different note, since I am currently studying the life and ministry of Aimee Semple McPherson, I went out and bought another biography. This time it was written by Edith L. Blumhofer and entitled "Aimee Semple McPherson—Everybody's Sister", and was published by Eerdmans back in 2003. Blumhofer is billed on the back cover as an associate professor of history and director of the "Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals" at Wheaton College, which as I recall is one of those big-name xtian universities over on the west coast. (Wow! They actually have whole "Institutions" dedicated to studying evangelicals? What a strange thought! It's as if they were exotic specimens from the planet Zeta Reticuli 4.) Right now I'm still midway through Epstein's biography, which is very interesting, and so I won't get to Blumhofer's book until later. However, the fours years I once spent in a "xtian college" have steeled me to be always very cautious and guarded when it comes to anything professors at "xtian colleges" might have to say. It's sadly too often the case that there's far more stone-hearted, godless unbelief in "xtian colleges" than anywhere else.

After breakfast this morning Ms. Moonbones and I went to Starbucks for a morning mocha pickup, two venti, non-fat, triple shot, one-pump mochas to be exact. It was an absolutely gorgeous morning here in Land-In-Between. The air was clear as clear could be, and the sky was crowded with enormous cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds, with dazzling white tops that swirled up into a sky so blue it hurt to look at it, clouds which through the day dropped occasional rain showers mixed with warm sunlight. And, yes, it is true: there are Starbucks coffee-rooms up here in Land-In-Between, which, I suppose, constitutes irrefragable proof that we do have some degree of civilizedness around here. Up here in the "Appalachia of the Pacific Nortwest", where all the gun-toting neckkies live, we do like our coffee expensively tasteful, just like everybody else.

But while we were coming out of Starbucks, we ran into an old friend, whom I'll refer to by the name "Deborah". She and her daughter were there at Starbucks for the same reasons as ourselves, and we started chatting. Deborah is a sweet xtian lady who lives with her husband and daughter in a double-wide modular home, out in the forest near the foot of a solitary mountain, about five or six miles north of Podunk City (where my now Mom lives). She and her family have been good friends of my Mom, and occasionally I would see them when they were visiting her. Often Deborah has worked in the past as a bus driver for one of the school districts here, and her husband, who is still recovering from the effects of a serious stroke he had a few years ago, is now occupied mostly with being a Bible teacher and part-time minister. Deborah and her husband were some of the first people with whom we made an acquaintance when Ms. Moonbones and I first moved here, up from that howling desert that I call Land-Down-There.

From what my Mom told me, sometime earlier, a while ago Deborah went to see a doctor about the problems she was starting to have with her vision; she was seeing double. Later, my Mom told us that Deborah had been diagnosed as having myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease that causes a progressive weakness of the voluntary muscles. Outside of Starbucks, out in the parking lot, we started talking to Deborah about what condition her condition was in. And Deborah wasn't at all reticent about her situation, nor particularly upset either, and she went on to explain that myasthenia gravis is considered an auto-immune disease, one where the body has been tricked somehow into attacking itself, which would be in this case the nerves that control the voluntary muscles. The disease, as I recall, is incurable, but Deborah said that she was taking special medication that, hopefully, would cause the disease to go into remission and thus prevent her condition from worsening. She said that she was actually improved somewhat over how she was before. We were glad to hear the Deborah's vision had gotten better.

But I mention Deborah because it reminded me of something I had been reading in Daniel Mark Epstein's biography of Aimee Semple McPherson. So let me begin by saying that I have some fabulous good news, especially for all those people out there—people such as Deborah—who are afflicted with very serious auto-immune diseases, whose bodies have been severely ravaged by the effects, and whose lives chronicle, day after day, various degrees of pain and suffering that is caused. Well, actually, the news didn't originate with me but instead it comes from Mr. Epstein. The good news is that the cure for your auto-immune diseases is already here, that in fact, the cure is really in your heads. For you see, Mr. Epstein, at couple of places in his book, explains that if a person would only just psyche himself enough, gets excited to just the right degree, then the brain will immediately secrete a healing flood of neurotransmitters, and other good chemical stuff, which will completely cure whatever disease you had within minutes. Yes. That's right. A person can be completely bent over and twisted up, by the ravages of advanced rheumatoid arthritis for example, reduced to barely walking with crutches, and living in constant debilitating pain and humiliating disability; yet inspite of it, according to Epstein, with just the right enough of excitement, some good old hoot and holler—maybe, who knows, obtained by screaming and dancing naked in the mosh pit during some heavy metal rock concert put on by AC/DC—but yes, with just enough frisson, suitably elicited by whatever means, a very sick person will be cured of his disease, and all the devastating damage that the disease had done will be completely and totally reversed and undone. Yes, all the pain and injury will be gone, gone, gone—all of it within the space of just a few minutes. Therefore, the good news for Deborah, at least going by Epstein's explanation of things, is that it's really all in her head, that if she would only just dance and shout, and let it all hang out, she could be cured in a flash. All she has to do is just get hyped up enough so her brain juices itself to get all those good psychochemicals to start secreting and flowing, and washing over her like a fast-moving restorative tide.

Does the above sound too good to be true? A little preposterous? Does it sound at all ludicrous and ridiculous? At least it did for me when I was reading in Epstein's book what, in so many words, amounted to basically the same thing. Yet for Epstein, it was really all just very "scientific" historiography, simply the sort of explanation—one that his editors certainly would have liked—that Epstein found easy to cook up when he finally encountered something that his secularistic mind found unpalatable and difficult to swallow, namely miracles. For above all else, an historian has to remain stoutly "scientific"; therefore, he came out and said (p.111) the following:

The healings present a monstrous obstacle to scientific historiography. If events transpired as newspapers, letters, and testamonials say they did, then Aimee Semple McPherson's healing ministry was miraculous. Since a miracle by definition is a thing which defies reality, there is no place in scholarly or scientific history for recurrent miracles.

But notice Epstein's definition of miracle as something that "defies reality". His definition of "miracle" amounts to just one more variation of the only definition acceptable to secularism, because for secularists there isn't any reality outside of the visible one that they happen to be able to see, or at least were told about in college. For them, they only got themselves; and the present cosmos, composed only of Matter + Energy + Time + Space + Chance, is the only thing that ever was or ever will be; and therefore the word "miracle" is merely another synonym meaning "something that cannot possibly happen". On the other hand, for xtians, such as Aimee Semple McPherson, this present world is not entirely everything there is, and a miracle is really something that happens precisely because there is greater world which we cannot see, although invisible but yet one which can act to overrule, according to its own higher laws, the things which happens in the world that we can see. In other words, miracles don't happen in defiance of reality, but rather they happen in compliance with a higher reality, one we cannot see.

Nevertheless, Epstein as a biographer certainly found himself in a sore predicament:

It would be convenient if we could find some evidence that Sister Aimee's miraculous healings were faked for the benefit of publicity; but there is no such evidence. Alas, the documentation is overwhelming: very sick people came to Sister Aimee by the tens of thousands, blind, deaf, paralyzed. Many were healed, some temporarily, some forever. She would point to heaven, to Christ the Great Healer, and would take no credit for the results.

So to explain away the historical evidence that was blatantly staring him in the face, and in order to maintain his secular bona fides, Epstein had to launch into artfully inventive "scientific" explanations for some of what happened during Aimee's ministry (e.g., the case of Louise Messnick). For if Epstein, if even for a minute, were to hint at any serious credence in miracles, were to remotely suggest that "hey, maybe, just maybe, something supernatural happened here", then one can safely bet dollars to donuts that those enlightened souls at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich would have tossed him out on his nates, followed by throwing his book manuscript after him. For one has to remember, before all else, that the educated elite are very, very picky about what "serious books" they will publish, especially in the more respectable venues. After all, there are reputations to uphold, and nobody wants to be caught in the same boat with those ignorant "christers". But Epstein's "scientific" explanations ended up sounding, oddly enough, even less credible than the historical evidence that was confronting him. One may as just as well believe that dancing naked in the mosh pit at an AC/DC concert, just as much as hypnosis or whatever else, will somehow within the space of a few minutes reverse all the horrific damage that a disease, such as severe rheumatoid arthritis for example, can do to one's body. Yet this is the sort of jackassery that Epstein will believe (and wants us to believe) long before he will ever believe even what his own historical evidence was telling him. This is because Epstein knows, as all good secularists already think they know, that miracles are a priori impossible. They've already decided ahead of time that there can't be any historical evidence for miracles, even if it were to fly up their noses and out their ears.

But I am reminded of something XP said in Mark 8:11, which we read as follows (ESV):

The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said "Why does this generation seek a sign? Truely I say to you no sign will be given to this generation."

Why did He refused to oblige them, even though elsewhere he had done miracles? It is simply because he knew that even if miracles were done, even right before their eyes, they still wouldn't believe: He was looking beyond the outward appearance to the real attitude of their hearts, to where they were really coming from. Even if He had done a miracle, in the case of the Pharisees they would have simply dismissed it as the working of Beelzebub. But on the other hand, being more sophisticated, Epstein simply shrugged it off as being nothing but biochemistry.

This late afternoon I sat on the back porch of my mother-in-law's house, while several of Ms. Moonbone's relatives were in the backyard gutting and cleaning the half-a-dozen or so bass they caught earlier that that day. They were pretty large fish, together about 30 pounds or so. Her brothers-in-law had gone fishing earlier at the lake that borders the nearyby town of Bogwater, here in Land-In-Between. One of them was here on his way to Montana, where he would be meeting up with his father, and together they would be flying tomorrow up to Alaska for an extended vacation.

While watching this from the porch, I was reading Daniel Mark Epstein's biography of Aimee Semple McPherson, entitled "Sister Aimee", published back in 1993 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, which I had checked out from the library in Bogwater. (Yes, we do have libraries here in Land-In-Between.) Epstein's biography appears to be well researched, and the book has an extensive bibliography. So far I don't have many complaints about the book, but it is clear that Epstein will tendentiously interpret his materials within the framework of his secularistic categories of thought. That he does this wasn't at all surprising or unexpected for me. It's just that occasionally the results can be a little ludicrous. For example, after retelling McPherson's childhood account of her escaping a dangerous encounter with an irate bull, Epstein concludes by saying:

But we can read this story, with its vivid details—the girl in the white frock with red moons, the bucket of kindling, the polled bull—as an elegant and precise sexual allegory.

This is, to put it simply, pish-posh. But I am sure the jaded perverts editors at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich probably liked it for its quasi-freudian insight. But then again, probably not many of the editors have ever grown up on farms. Livestock can be a little dangerous to be around if they're in a surly mood; even a seemingly docile cow can throw around many hundredweight's worth of mass, enough to break some bones if you're in the way, and so one always has to be careful. All this is just a simple everyday fact of farming life—Aimee grew up on a farm in Canada—and people who've grown up on farms can tell zillions of stories about farming life. And I guess modern biographers in turn will never fail to dream up flapdoodle freudian interpretations for these stories. But inspite of Epstein's occasional flights of inventiveness, he does keep the narrative mostly on course—at least so far.

I understand of course Epstein's predicament as a biographer. He doesn't have any personal faith in the Gospel—at least none that can be discerned in his book—and furthermore, to get his book even published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, he necessarily has to approach his subject—the life of a flamboyant woman evangelist who was very emphatically a believer—purely from the viewpoint of a contemporary secularism that is acceptable to the educated elites, the foundation of this secularism being its unspoken confidence in its own intellectual superiority to xtians such as Aimee. Yet, even though Epstein confidently supposes he can always explain Aimee better than herself, there are some aspects of her life that necessarily will remain completely and forever opaque to him. (Then again, XP is also opaque, far, far more so.) And, of course, if Aimee were still around today, she herself would probably disagree with many of Epstein's interpretations of what was happening in her own life, maybe going as far as to denounce them vigorously. (And, who knows? I probably would shout an hearty "amen".) Nevertheless, by herself Aimee is such a fascinating personality that, in various places in Epstein's book, she somehow still manages to explain herself fairly well, even stealing the show from her own biographer, despite his best attempts to do the explaining for her.

I've always wanted to read a complete biography on Aimee Semple McPherson, especially considering that she has had, howbeit indirectly, a great influence on my life. By the way, on several occasions, many years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Angelus Temple, back in faraway Land-Down-There, but that is a long story. Anyhow, I did take a peek at the ending of the Epstein's biography where I found out that Aimee had died on September 27th, 1944, from an accidental overdose of a prescribed sleeping medication.

Yesterday was rather eventful. First of all, my aged mother moved to her new home in Podunk City, here in Land-In-Between. She had been living on her five acre property, out five miles north of town in the forest, which she greatly enjoyed. She had a large, beautiful garden; grew raspberries, strawberries, and all manner of flowering plants; fed the quail until they grew to be the fattest quail ever, and other wild birds nested all around the place; ran her snow-blower in the winter (it gets to be three feet deep where she lived); and chopped the wood for the wood-burning stove. But taking care of five acres of property grew to be a little too much for her; therefore, she thought it was time to sell it and move to a smaller place.

I and Ms. Moonbones were out yesterday at my Mom's place to help her move to her new home. Moving all her furniture and belongings certainly would have been an all-day and very exhausting task. Yet, without my Mom asking anybody for help, about a half-dozen men, and several ladies, from her Podunk Backwoods Bible Church came out to help her. (Podunk is where she is going now.) They brought their big redneck trucks, towing big redneck trailers. Some of them were brawny, plain looking men who work hard and don't talk much. One of them reminded me of my grandfather, although with his long greyish beard, he looked as if he could have been someone in the blues band ZZ Top. But I guess they all would be considered the sort of Bible-believing neckies that would give Dan Rather nightmares, that would cause, just by thinking about them, Bill Moyers to break out in a cold sweat; the mere sight of them probably would make Peter Jennings go into convulsions; and the haut monde of Academe would tartly curl their lips in disdain, dismissing them as merely ignorant and unwashed. (They are washed in the Blood of the Lamb however—the only washing that really counts.) Yet these were just some ordinary folks here in the "fly-over country" of Land-In-Between, people whom the CMEs (Coastal Media Elites) don't want to know very much about and wouldn't want as friends anyway. And it was these ordinary folks who came out to help my aged mother.

And I was thankful and more than glad to have them on my side. They helped us to load up the big U-haul my mother rented. The piano alone, it seemed, weighed as much as a block of granite from the Great Pyramid of Giza, yet we managed to get it into the U-haul with little difficulty. Besides loading the U-haul, they loaded up their trailers with all the overflow, of which there was considerable. And so what would have been a nearly impossible, exhausting, and all-day ordeal was finished before the morning was even over. We prayed with them, the people from my Mom's Podunk Backwoods Bible Church, and thanked them for their help.

The task was done so quickly that we had enough time for my Mom to be able to take me and Ms. Moonbones out for lunch in a small cafe, named Granny's, across the street from the main Burlington Santa Fe railroad track that cuts through Podunk City. But just before this a funny thing happened. For we had loaded the U-haul with the dolly and the folded-up moving blankets, stacked neatly near the back edge. But somehow we forgot to completely shut and lock the door on the back. While my Mom and I drove the U-haul to return it to the rental in nearby town of Bogwater, Ms. Moonbones was following in the pickup so as to give us a ride back, and she noticed that the counterweight spring had pulled the door wide open on the back of the U-haul. She tried honking to alert us to the situation, but unfortunately we didn't hear her. When the U-haul went over a railroad crossing on the highway, there was enough of a bump to cause about half of the blankets to jump out and fall out onto the road. Consequently, Ms. Moonbones had to pull over to retrieve the blankets, being careful to dodge any traffic. It was a good thing the dolly hadn’t fallen out, because that could have caused a serious accident on the thoroughfare. When we reached the U-haul rental, I was puzzled when I saw the door open on the truck, and it seemed some of the blankets were missing. Ms. Moonbones drove up after a few minutes and explained what had happened.

There was enough time left in the day for us to help my Mom unpack a few of her things, to get some living room furniture arranged, and to get her bedroom set up. One of my brothers, who has been staying with her, would be returning that evening from work to help with the rest of the other details. Later, she told us that she woke up at three o'clock this morning thinking over all the multitude of things that needed to be unpacked and stowed. Her new house is simply beautiful and quite large, and located in a nice neighborhood of Podunk City. It has a large fireplace, and spacious kitchen, along with gas-heating, and large insulated garage. Although her front and back yards are very much smaller than her previous property, she has several very large ponderosa pine trees. Her beautiful backyard has an assortment of bird feeders that were set up by the previous owner.

But the move was a somewhat sad occasion for me. My father had died of leukemia in the previous house. And I have the feeling that this will be the last place where my Mom will be living.