Soundingsjohnbarker: ‘You can write that?’ You bet

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) debuted as a WordPress blog two years ago today with a small post headlined “Labour history: Mine-Mill v. Steel” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/labour-history-mine-mill-v-steel/) on September 3, 2014 about Mick Lowe’s The Raids, a 295-page fictionalized work centred on the epic battle in Sudbury in the late 1950s and early 1960s in relation to the Cold War, international politics, McCarthyism, Communism, and the inter-union rivalry between the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Local 598, which had just been published that May by Robin Philpot of Baraka Books in Montreal. Here in Thompson there is a still partially untold story of that same inter-union rivalry between the Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers and United Steelworkers of America between 1960 and 1962. Mine-Mill was the first bargaining agent here in Thompson when Inco workers unionized and had negotiated a contract with Inco that ran through 1964. But the USW was certified by the Manitoba Labour Board as the bargaining agent for Inco employees in Thompson on May 31, 1962. Because the USW itself went on to merge five years later with the United States section of the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers in Tucson, Arizona in January 1967, a lot of that nastiness has been papered over, at least publicly.

There was also a post that day headlined “Black Death: Not so bad?” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/black-death-not-so-bad/) which went onto explain a new study in PLOS ONE, an international peer-reviewed journal, authored by University of South Carolina anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, which suggested that people who survived the medieval plague, commonly known then as the Black Death, lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347. The Black Death killed tens of millions of people, an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of the European population, over just four years between 1347 and 1351, which, it turns out, may not have been such a bad thing after all.

Finally, on Sept. 3, 2014, soundingsjohnbarker had a third posting headlined “A bigger picture,” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/) which focused on Samaritan’s Purse’s “Operation Christmas Child,” which was started in 1990. By 1993, it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 and now run by Franklin Graham, son of 97-year-old Asheville, North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham.  While “Operation Christmas Child” has its share of supporters and critics with meritorious arguments on both sides for and against its “shoebox” gifts collected and distributed in more than 130 countries worldwide each Christmas [each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed], Samaritan’s Purse is about much more than Operation Christmas Child, whatever your views might be on that, I pointed out. In the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, Samaritan Purse’s Ebola care centre on the outskirts of the Liberian capital of Monrovia was right on the front lines. Dr. Kent Brantly, the medical director of the centre, contracted Ebola and was medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States for Ebola treatment, where he was given ZMapp, an experimental drug treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, while Nancy Writebol, who was with Serving in Mission, (SIM), which runs the hospital where Samaritan’s Purse has the Ebola care centre, was also medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital and treated with ZMapp.  Both Brantly and Writebol survived their brush with death Ebola experiences and returned to Liberia.

So that was Day 1 for soundingsjohnbarker on Sept. 3, 2014. And in some ways it set the tone for the 226 posts that have followed since over the last two years. Some of them tell Thompson stories but many don’t. Some (OK, many) are offbeat and the range of topics that has struck my fancy to write about has been eclectic, if not downright eccentric at times. I explained some of my thinking behind how I choose what to write about in a blog post March 7 headlined “Tipping points and blogging by the numbers” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/tipping-points-and-blogging-by-the-numbers/) where I noted, “Write local if you want some big numbers on a given day. While I do from time to time, if some local issue or story interests me in an unusual way, I stay away from that kind of writing for the most part. For one thing, those kind of stories, I find, have little staying power, with three or four rare local exceptions (an unsolved murder story; a story about Dr. Alan Rich’s retirement and local lawyer Alain Huberdeau’s appointment to the provincial court bench; and several Vale stories come to mind). But most of them are one or two day wonders. It’s the more eccentric pieces on other places and even times that have a deeper and wider audience in the long run. Fortunately, I prefer to write on more eclectic things these days without any particular regard for geography or subject matter if the topic strikes my interest. Thompson city council may well make decisions that affect me in myriad ways, not the least of which is in the pocketbook as a local taxpayer, but even that can’t remove the glaze from my eyes long enough to write much about local municipal politics, although our water bills are tempting me to make an exception. But reading newspaper accounts of such goings on is usually painful enough. Mind you, I realize what strikes my fancy to write about when I don’t write local, is not for everyone, and I have no doubt that I’ve created some eye glazing of my own especially when I write on eschatology or some other arcane to some of my local readers religious topic.”

That’s not to say I’ve lost my interest in local affairs. I live here after all. But I don’t have the inclination, or time even if I had, to write about all of them. So, pretty much like everyone else in Thompson, I rely on the local media, including the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, CBC Radio’s North Country, Arctic Radio’s thompsononline.ca and Shaw TV to keep me informed with occasional stories about Vale’s proposed Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project, at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), and what the chances of the 11 million tonnes of nickel mineralization, which form a deep, north plunging continuation of the Thompson deposit, have of being developed into a new mine that will sustain the Thompson operation for up to 15 years when nickel is selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for US$4.5269/lb, with the refinery and smelter, which opened March 25, 1961, set to close sometime in 2018, resulting in lost jobs – don’t kid yourself and think otherwise – as more than 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery.

Take away nickel mining, which isn’t destined fortunately to happen for at least several decades yet in even the most pessimistic scenario, and there’s not much reason for Thompson, at least as we have all come to know it, to exist, all mindless happy talk from politicians, newspaper publishers and other spin doctors aside. Mind you, I have admittedly been a tad critical of newspaper publishers in this space before, writing on Sept. 14, 2014: “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone.”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/).

But if you think being a regional hub for Northern Manitoba, or tourism, or even both, is going to give Thompson a new raison d’etre for continued existence at its current size and state in a somehow magically more diversified local economy sans nickel mining some day in the near-to-mid future, I’m afraid you’ve been drinking too much of the Thompson Economic Diversification Working Group (TEDWG) Kool-Aid.

I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to the local good news peddlers of all stripes. So it’s perhaps best for everyone’s peace of mind, mine included, if I stick these days to writing mainly about the faraway and eclectic. Bad news prophets have a short best-before date at home.

And besides there is something just plain fun about writing about the weird and whacky. It’s a good antidote to taking either yourself, or life for that matter, too seriously. Hence I’m just as incorrigible when it comes to posting stories or links from others about the offbeat and odd on Facebook, as I am about my own blog post writing, I must confess. “The internet has been aflame this summer with predictions the Antichrist was coming Aug. 30,” I mentioned in a Facebook posting Aug, 31, noting I had forgotten all about it until the next day. “Me bad,” I wrote. When my old friend from Iqaluit Michèle LeTourneau found herself among those who couldn’t resist joining the thread to comment, she observed “OK. I think I just officially outed myself as a weird nut that posts really weird things on Facebook. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not.” I reassured her by replying, “I think I could give you a bit of competition for the ‘weird nut Facebook poster’ title, Michèle!”

Locally, the Thompson Citizen was moved to editorialize Aug. 31 that “Northern Manitoba’s summer of woe turned [a] deeper shade of blue with the announcement Aug. 22 that Tolko was shutting down its operations in The Pas.”

Tolko Industries said they were going to pull the plug Dec. 2 on their heavy-duty kraft paper and lumber mill in The Pas after 19 years, leaving all 332 employees unemployed. The mill in The Pas has been a money-loser for years. It was conceived by the Progressive Conservative provincial government of premier Duff Roblin in 1966.

Less than a month before Tolko pulled the plug on its mill in The Pas, OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced on July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. OmniTRAX took over the related Port of Churchill, which opened in 1929, when it acquired it from Canada Ports Corporation, for a token $10 soon after buying the rail line. The Port of Churchill has the largest fuel terminal in the Arctic and is North America’s only deep water Arctic seaport that offers a gateway between North America and Mexico, South America, Europe and the Middle East. OmniTRAX created Hudson Bay Railway in 1997, the same year it took over operation of the Port of Churchill. It operates 820 kilometres of track in Manitoba between The Pas and Churchill.

At the time the cancellation was announced, OmniTRAX did not have a single committed grain shipping contract. Normally, the Port of Churchill has a 14-week shipping season from July 15 to Oct. 31. When the Canadian Wheat Board lost its grain monopoly, creating a new grain market several years ago, and was renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, the newly-minted G3 Canada Ltd. began building a network of grain elevators, terminals and vessels that bypasses Churchill and uses the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and West Coast to move grain to foreign markets. Surprise.

While OmniTRAX accepted a letter of intent last December from Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation to buy its rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, the deal has not been completed to date, and its future looks murky to non-existent. Rail freight shipments measured by frequency along the Bayline have been cut in half by OmniTRAX this summer.

“Government announces more grant money to develop tourism during visit to Churchill” headlined the Nickel Belt News in an unbylined front page story Sept. 2.  Don’t get me wrong. I love Beluga whales and polar bears. I’ve seen both visiting Churchill (known as Kuugjuaq in Inuit.) And guess what? While Beluga whales and polar bears will support some local tourism and related businesses, it’s still not enough to make for a local sustainable economy of any scale in the community of less than 800 permanent residents now along our Hudson Bay coast.

That’s about as likely to happen as calling itself the “Wolf Capital of the World” is going make a game-changing difference to Thompson’s economic future. A difference, sure. Great. But don’t bet Northern Manitoba’s future on tourism. We’re still either a resource-based economy or no economy to speak of.  If it’s any comfort that remains largely true for most of our provinces and territories and Canada as a whole. Sure there’s the capital cities and a few other kinda largish provincial cities – Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Moncton, Saint John, Halifax and St. John’s (this is a very generous reading BTW) – and even a few more genuine high-tech areas such as Gatineau, Québec and Kanata, Ontario on either side of Ottawa, along with Kitchener, Ontario and elsewhere in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, all of which are exceptions to the hewers of wood and drawers of water reality, but the exceptions are few and far between.

Oops … did I say that out loud? Me bad.

Kool-Aid anyone?

I may need to quench my thirst unless I intend to pen my next post on UFOs, eschatology or perhaps some virulent disease, preferably a safe distance from Thompson.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left Behind and the Canadian boys from North Bay, Ontario, brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde

 

Sometimes it’s a “special feature” embedded deep on the DVD off the “main menu” that is the real nugget.  After not finding enough bandwidth to watch a Netflix offering, I dug deep into my DVD collection last night to pull out the first Left Behind movie by North Bay, Ontario brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde, filmed in 2000, and which made its theatrical premiere on Jan. 26, 2001 at a star-studded red carpet event at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) theatre on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The DVD special feature, “Seeing is Believing,” has interviews with some of those on hand for that theatrical premiere, including the redoubtable Tom Selleck.

At the time almost 16 years ago, Left Behind: The Movie was the biggest and most ambitious Christian genre movie ever made, and it was hoped by many in the evangelical community to be the big crossover movie that would appeal also to the general public – read the “unsaved” or “non-believers,” as well as those already preaching in the choir. Left Behind: The Movie was an unusual release  because it went to video first in October 2000, then theatres in January 2001.  It opened in 800 theatres and grossed $4.2 million.  It won “Bestselling Title of the Year from an Independent Studio” and “Sell-through Title of the Year by an Independent Studio” from the Video Software Dealer’s Association.

Alas, Left Behind has never quite realized that early promise and the franchise has been beset by problems of various kinds over the last decade.

For the uninitiated, Left Behind started out as a a series of 16 best-selling novels by Americans Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, published between 1995 and 2007, dealing with the Protestant evangelical Christian predispensationalist End Times view of the Rapture and the Tribulation that follows.  The drama comes from the struggle of the rag-tag Tribulation Force against the Global Community and its leader Nicolae Carpathia – the Antichrist.

LaHaye, now 89, is a sometimes controversial evangelical minister, who conceived the Left Behind books, although Jerry B. Jenkins, 66, a  sports-oriented biographical writer, did the actual writing of the books from LaHaye’s notes.

LaHaye was inspired to write the books in part by the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

Jenkins, on the other hand, has said, “I write the best I can. I know I’m never going to be revered as some classic writer. I don’t claim to be C. S. Lewis. The literary-type writers, I admire them. I wish I was smart enough to write a book that’s hard to read, you know?” Having read all 16 books in the series –  from Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, published in 1995, and then Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind; Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides;  Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed;  Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist; The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession; The Mark: The Beast Rules the World; Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne; The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon; Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages; Glorious Appearing: The End of Days; The Rising: Antichrist is Born: Before They Were Left Behind; The Regime: Evil Advances: Before They Were Left Behind; The  Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye: Countdown to Earth’s Last Days, right through to Kingdom Come: The Final Victory in 2007, I can only say, “true that Jerry.”

In the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist interpretation of Bible prophecy, which posits a pretribulation secret Rapture – there is a belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this belief, pre-tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That is very much an evangelical Protestant rather than Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians,  as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. Catholics do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming.

While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist end times writers is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people.

The premillennial dispensationalism on display in recent years is of a much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

The Left Behind movie franchise, which is now up to four movies with a fifth possible, is perhaps surprisingly, a Canadian phenomenon, spearheaded by two brothers from North Bay Ontario, Peter and Paul Lalonde, who first came to wide notice on television in 1989 with their weekly half-hour show This Week in Bible Prophecy, before going onto form Cloud Ten Pictures in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1995. Paul Lalonde worked as social worker at various group homes in North Bay before attaining his televised pulpit, while Peter Lalonde was a good enough goalie he might had a shot at playing NHL hockey had he wanted to.

Peter Lalonde has said he became a “Christian as a result of seeing The Prodigal in 1983 in a church.  I went back on Sunday, then again, and several weeks later I became a believer.”

Left Behind: The Movie was quickly followed by Left Behind II: Tribulation Force in 2002 and Left Behind: World at War in 2005, all starring Kirk Cameron, 45, still perhaps best known to the larger public as a  teenage actor for his role as Mike Seaver on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains between 1985 and 1992, and Brad Johnson, Gordon Currie,  Janaya Stephens, and Cameron’s real-life wife, Chelsea Noble.

But none of them would be back by the time the fourth movie, simply called  Left Behind, was finally released nine years later in October 2014.

The most recent Left Behind movie was produced by Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, a company he formed in 2012, and released through Cloud Ten Pictures, with Nicolas Cage starring as Rayford Steele, Johnson’s former role as an airline pilot, with Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” being used in the trailer and movie.

The choice of Cage caused some quiet murmurs in certain evangelical circles, although not particularly loud ones for the most part, as Cage, a bankable box office star, is rumored to be Roman Catholic.

Why the long delay? Some nasty litigation is one explanation.  LaHaye, who had sold the film rights for Left Behind to Joe Goodman, Bobby Neutz and Ralph Winter, owners of Namesake Entertainment in April 1997, before the End Times novels became a publishing phenomenon, hated the film. Namesake Entertainment had sold the rights to make the film to Cloud Ten Pictures in 1999. Left Behind: The Movie  was privately financed and cost $17.4 million to make, including production, post-production, publicity, marketing, and distribution costs.Its theological consultants included John Hagee, author of Four Blood Moons: Something is About to Change, published in October 2013, from Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and Michigan televangelist Jack Van Impe.

Widely known as “The Walking Bible” for spending about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 Bible verses, Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to 97-year-old Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching, was hospitalized in early April with serious cardiac problems, missing taping almost six months worth of half hour episodes for his long-running TV show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, which he normally co-hosts with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, while a number of guest co-hosts stepped in during his long convalescence in hospital and at a Michinga nursing home before his return to the airwaves in early October. The Van Impes have been married since 1954.

Sharp-eyed observers in Left Behind: The Movie could get a quick glimpse of Jack Van Impe as one of the passengers caught up in the Rapture mid-transatlantic flight. The Lalondes and Cloud Ten Pictures discovered early on theological consultants, musicians and all kinds of normally behind-the-scenes folk, like most everyone, enjoy the chance to have their 15 seconds of fame on the silver screen, too, which is also good for holding the line on production costs from the filmmakers’ perspective.

LaHaye, however, was not so easily charmed. He sued both Namesake Entertainment and Cloud Ten Pictures in July 1999, claiming the the producers told him that the movie’s production budget would exceed $40 million, although there was no language in the contract to that effect. LaHaye also claimed that he had sold the film rights on the condition that the picture be produced by a major studio with big-name Hollywood box office stars, and released to theaters in late 1999 so as to capitalize on the Y2K phenomenon.

LaHaye’s lawsuit was thrown out of U.S. federal district court in 2003, but by that point Cloud Ten Pictures and Namesake Entertainment had filed a countersuit against LaHaye for breach of contract, among other allegations.

Ultimately, in August 2008, the two sides settled their legal differences out of court, and LaHaye reportedly liked a rough cut he saw of the new Left Behind movie.

Unfortunately for Cloud Ten Pictures, Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, LaHaye, if he did in fact like the finished final cut as well, was pretty much alone in that opinion. To say the film was savaged by critics in both the serious religious and secular press would be a charitable understatement. Two examples, one from the religious press, one from the secular, pretty much illustrate the debacle

Jackson Cuidon, writing in Christianity Today, said, “[t]he Left Behind movie is just a disaster flick injected with the slightest, most infinitesimal amount of Christianity possible. This is, in one way, good – no one needs to be upset, or get angry, or be offended, or question their beliefs, or the beliefs of those around them, or anything, because the film takes no stance on anything. The film is so inept, confused, and involuted that there’s no danger of even accidentally cobbling together something that could necessitate a defense of Christianity.”

That was the mild criticism. Andrew Barker (no relation), senior features writer for Variety, penned this piece published Oct. 2, 2014, the day before the film opened in theaters:  “In what was surely a first in the annals of motion-picture marketing, an early ad for Left Behind featured a quote taken not from a film critic, but rather from Satan himself, who allegedly quipped, ‘Please do not bring unbelievers to this movie,’” Barker wrote.

“This presents a rare scenario in which Christian moviegoers ought to feel perfectly secure heeding the advice of the Devil, as this faith-based thriller is likely to inspire far more dorm-room drinking games than religious conversions. With a Sharknado-inspired visual style and a deeply weary lead performance from Nicolas Cage, Left Behind is cheap-looking, overwrought kitsch of the most unintentionally hilarious order, its eschatological bent representing its only real shot at box office redemption.”

OK, for the record, eh. I’m a big fan of the Sharknado franchise, too, so find your analogical comparisons elsewhere, and for God’s sake, if no other, lighten up namesake Barker! Cheesy is OK. Popular culture is made up of a rich cornucopia of cheesy television and movies that almost require a mandatory bowl of Cheetos® to consume such classics.

I haven’t seen the most recent Left Behind movie yet (although I have seen the first three). Will I? Quite probably should the opportunity present itself. Why?  I’ve been a writer long enough to know critics like to hear the sound of their own voices above all else and if purple prose and hyperbole serve the day’s writing purpose, so be it. Most film critics are about as qualified to write about religion and especially eschatology as I am to perform neurosurgery.

Besides I have something of a soft spot admittedly for the Lalonde brothers, the boys from North Bay. Way back in 1993 and 1994, when I was a first-year graduate student in 2oth century American history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and was contemplating what thesis topic I might pursue for my master’s degree, one of my possibilities under consideration was premillennial dispensationalism and the Rapture, which made watching This Week in Bible Prophecy something of a guilty pleasure. But in fairness, much of what I first learned about the “cashless” society and biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning, all of which came true in the years that followed, so much so they’re almost commonplaces today, I first learned more than 20 years ago watching Peter and Paul Lalonde.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Rejoice: Canadian Catholic author Michael D. O’Brien’s Elijah in Jerusalem, the long-awaited sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, has just been published

Michael D. O’Brien, the Ottawa-born Roman Catholic author and painter, has just had Elijah in Jerusalem, his long-awaited sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, published by San Francisco’s Ignatius Press, one of the largest American publishers of Catholic books, which was founded by Father Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit, in 1978.

He has worked as a professional artist since 1970 when he had his first one-man exhibit at a major gallery in Ottawa. Since 1976, O’Brien has painted religious imagery exclusively.

When one says Elijah in Jerusalem is the long-awaited to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, they should perhaps qualify that by making it clear long awaited by readers. Not necessarily O’Brien, who told Joan Frawley Desmond, senior editor of the National Catholic Register in an Oct. 15 interview, that he had not originally intended to write a sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, published in 1996:

“No, I didn’t,” O’Brien told Frawley, in response to her question asking if he had intended from the beginning almost 20 years ago to write a sequel? “Though the idea of a sequel was often suggested to me by readers, I rejected it for many years,” O’Brien said. “However, during the past few years, powerful images and scenes for the continuing story kept arising in my imagination, begging to be set down on paper. So I prayed and waited. Then came a moment when it was clear that I should write the book – and that the time was now.”

The father of six children, O’Brien, and his wife, Sheila, live in the village of Combermere in eastern Ontario’s scenic, historic, and very rural, Madawaska Valley, about 125 miles west of Ottawa.

I have known about O’Brien, who was briefly both an agnostic and an atheist as a young man, and his work since at least the mid-to-late 1990s, around the time Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, was published, but only got around to reading the novel a couple of years ago. It was a true delight from cover-to-cover. A few years earlier, I had read Plague Journal, one of the novels in his apocalyptic and dystopian 1990s’ trilogy, which also includes Strangers and Sojourners and Eclipse of the Sun. Plague Journal is set in the near future, composed of both written and mental notes made by Nathaniel Delaney, who is the editor of a small town newspaper. The story takes place over a five-day period as he flees arrest by a federal government agency during the preliminary stage of the rise of a totalitarian state in North America. Delaney is one of the few voices left in the media who is willing to speak the whole truth about what is happening, and as a result the full force of the government is brought against him.

O’Brien is an original yet orthodox thinker, writing a novel again with themes rooted in a Catholic view of spiritual warfare, the end times and the Second Coming. While it is not quite uncharted Catholic writing territory, eschatological and apocalyptic themes are often more associated with Protestant premillennial dispensationalist evangelical writers, say Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and their best-selling 16-book Left Behind series.

O’Brien is interested in exploring the battle between good and evil in history, but also through the souls of individuals, and God’s desire for human beings to choose to love him through an act of free will. Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, Notre Dame-educated Chicago Catholic writer Thomas O’Toole has written, “follows not the simplest interpretations that ‘Revelation’ refers solely to John’s own time,” or “it is exclusively a meditation on the end of things,” or even “a map of the Church’s history.” Rather, it is the interpretation ‘favored by most of the Church Fathers … a theological vision of a spiritual landscape’ that combines all three.”

O’Brien himself, in a talk given by him on Sept. 20, 2005 at Saint Patrick’s Basilica in Ottawa, said, “There is always a battle over every soul. Even if our times prove not to be the times toward which St. John’s Revelation is pointing, each of us must go through a kind of small ‘a’ apocalypse. Each of us certainly will be given a capital ‘R’ revelation at the moment of our deaths when we experience our personal judgment, when all that we are, all that we have done or neglected to do will be revealed.

“The Greek word apokalypsis means a revealing or unveiling. During our lives in this world each of us will indeed face the beast, which is the devil, our ancient adversary, the enemy of our individual souls and of mankind as a whole. In some form or other we must learn to personally resist him and to overcome him in Christ. At the same time we must understand that there will come a point in history when all his malice, all his devices, all his rage will be released in a final vicious attack upon the entire Body of Christ. It will be intense; it will be brief. If we find ourselves in the midst of those three and a half years of total persecution, it will not feel so brief. Yet we must always keep in mind that his time is coming to an end; indeed he is already defeated by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross and there remains only the final battle through which the Church and the world must pass.

“We are in the final battle, we are in the apocalypse, we are in the book of Revelation, which the Church, beginning with most of the Church Fathers, believes to be a vision of the entire unfolding of salvation history after the Incarnation, culminating in the total victory of Christ over the entire cosmos and its restoration to the Father. The book of Revelation is not a schematic diagram or a flat blueprint or a purely linear timeline. It is a mysterious multidimensional vision which surely contains linear-chronological aspects, but that is not the whole thing. Indeed it is not the main thing.”

O’Brien told Frawley earlier this month: “Satan attempts to mesmerize, like a serpent paralyzing its victim with fear before devouring it. The many fronts of evil are components in the vast and complex war between good and evil  the war that will last until the end of time. As the forces of evil, visible and invisible, appear to spread and grow ever stronger, we who follow Jesus must keep before the eyes of our hearts the ultimate truth of his coming victory. A healthy balance is needed in our pondering of ‘end times’ questions. We should remain prayerfully alert, but we should never allow ourselves to become obsessively over-focused on the darkness. Again, the eyes of the serpent can delude us into discouragement and even despair.”

In the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist interpretation of Bible prophecy, which posits a pretribulation secret Rapture – there is a belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this belief, pre-tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading, nor would it be O’Brien’s reading, of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, as does O’Brien, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming.

While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist end times writers is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people. This is all alien to both Catholic theology and even the premillennialist views of some of the early Apostolic Fathers.

The premillennial dispensationalism on display in recent years is of a much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

Elijah in Jerusalem, published earlier this month, is the continuing story of Father Elijah, formerly David Schäfer, a convert from Judaism and survivor of the Holocaust, who has for nearly two decades been a Carmelite friar at a monastery on Mount Carmel, the mountain of the prophet Elijah, overlooking the Bay of Haifa in Israel.

In the earlier novel, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, Father (later Bishop) Elijah Schäfer confronted the president of the European Union, a man rising toward global control as president of a soon-to- be-realized world government – a man who displays certain anti-Christ-like qualities – and calls him to repentance as he attempts to sow the seeds to transform the heart of this “Man of Sin” on a secret papal mission that will take him from Israel to Vatican City and Rome, and to other cities in Italy, Poland and Turkey.

In Elijah in Jerusalem, Bishop Elijah Schäfer, appointed by the Pope in pectore as the titular bishop of the ancient Titular Episcopal See of Panaya Kapulu near Selçuk, in Central Aegean Turkey, about 200 miles from Constantinople in western Asia Minor, near Ephesus, and travelling incognito, accompanied by his fellow friar, Brother Enoch, enter Jerusalem just as the president arrives in the city to inaugurate a new stage of his rise to power. They hope to unmask him as the Antichrist prophesied by scripture and to warn the world of the imminent spiritual danger to mankind.

As the story unfolds in Jerusalem, people meet the secretly episcopally-ordained Bishop Elijah Schäfer, and in the process their souls are revealed and tested, bringing about change for good or for evil.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Billy Graham, Jack Van Impe, G.K. Chesterton and Saint Paul the Apostle and the human enigma

It has taken me months, but yesterday I was able to finally finish watching the last 18 minutes of a slightly more than 26-minute TED conference talk titled “On technology and faith” that a then 79-year-old Billy Graham gave in California in February 1998. If you are interested, you can watch it here at: http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering#t-399663

The talk, like many Graham has given over his long life, is remarkable for any number of reasons, and delivered with his usual homespun, folksy North Carolina wisdom. If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’ve long considered the Southern Baptist preacher with a worldwide appeal transcending Christian denominationalism, and even extending to non-Christian religions, as somewhat analogous to a living saint (Catholics don’t have living saints, much less Protestant ones, but grant me a moment of literary licence.)

Graham, of course, would never think of himself that way either because he well recognizes the sinful and depraved nature of man, something we Catholics also recognize, although not as total depravity in the Calvinist sense. Interestingly, Graham in that talk more than 17 years ago, was talking about end of life issues and getting ready to go home and meet his maker. Apparently God still isn’t quite ready for Billy since he’s now 96. While he’s not well enough these days to be giving a TED or any other public talk in all likelihood, methinks God leaves people like Billy Graham and Mother Angelica, a similar age to Billy, and founder of the worldwide Catholic Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) among us longer than we might expect as a reminder of what a shining witness is, even long after they can make public appearances. The very fact of their lives is their Christian witness.

Saint Paul the Apostle, describing the human enigma in his Letter to the Romans, wrote:  “My own actions bewilder me; what I do is not what I wish to do, but something which I hate. Why then, if what I do is something I have no wish to do, I thereby admit that the Law [of God] is worthy of all honor; meanwhile, my action does not come from me, but from the sinful principle that dwells in me.

“Of this I am certain, that no principle of good dwells in me, that is, in my natural self; praiseworthy intentions are always ready at hand, but I cannot find my way to perform them; it is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves that I find myself doing.

“And if what I do is something I have not the will to do, it cannot be I that bring it about; it must be the sinful principle that dwells in me. This, then, is what I find about the Law [of God], that evil is close at my side, when my will is to do what is praiseworthy. Inwardly, I applaud God’s disposition, but I observe another disposition in my lower self, which raises war against the disposition of my [heart], and so I am handed over as a captive to that disposition towards sin which my lower self contains.”

G.K. Chesterton, one of the four greats, at least to my mind, of Edwardian letters (the others on my Dead White European Males – or DWEM – literary canon shortlist being Hilaire Belloc, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw) was asked in 1907 by The Times of London to write an article on the theme, “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton’s pithy reply was: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.”

Influenced by his wife Frances, he first became an  Anglican and later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. This is the convert to Catholicism after all who wrote: “[W]e should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Privately, he joked, “One pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/catholicism-is-a-big-tent-with-an-eclectic-communion-of-saints-will-there-be-room-for-g-k-chesterton-some-day/)

In September 2013, Bishop Peter Doyle, bishop of the Diocese of Northampton, appointed Canon John Udris, a priest of the diocese and currently spiritual director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, to undertake a fact-finding exercise on his behalf into whether a cause for Chesterton’s canonization should be opened. Udris in due course will submit a dossier to the bishop on whether to open the cause for Chesterton’s canonization.

As Udris told the Catholic Herald in an interview in March 2014, Chesterton, one of the most important Catholic writers and apologists for the faith of the 20th century, is “potentially a huge model” for the Church who “breaks the mould of conventional holiness.”

Udris noted Chesterton, a married layman, was not conventionally devout and could show Catholics “you don’t have to say your rosary every five minutes to be holy.” The first stages of a canonization cause include collecting evidence of heroic virtue.

Instead, Udris suggested, “Chesterton’s holiness could be found in his humour, his charity and his humility.” His defence of the faith in particular, Udris said, “was a model for Catholics.”

Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, and a former Baptist who converted to Catholicism, said in 2013 the idea that someone like Chesterton could be a saint attracted him to the Catholic Church: “The fact that a 300-pound, cigar-smoking journalist might be a saint of the Catholic Church made me understand what the communion of saints is all about. They’re not just one particular type of person.”

Exactly so. Did Chesterton lead a perfect life? Hardly.  His excessive enjoyment of food and drink exhibited a distinct lack of temperance, the cardinal moral virtue “that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it. As well, some of his utterances, contemporaneous with his times, clearly sound anti-Semitic to the modern ear. There should be no whitewashing of Chesterton’s life.

Saints, we are reminded time and again, lead holy, but not always conventionally holy, and never perfect lives. They were human beings before they were saints.

Another who has lived a life of Christian witness, in my opinion, although many Catholics may not share it, is Jack Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching.

Van Impe, an American televangelist best known for his long-running half-hour weekly television show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, is a premillennial dispensationalist in his interpretation of Bible prophecy, positing a pretribulation secret Rapture – the belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this Pre-Tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming. While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by Van Impe, which is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people, is all alien to both Catholic theology and even the premillennialist views of some of the early Apostolic Fathers.

The premillennial dispensationalism that Van Impe adheres to is of much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican  Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

Van Impe, who co-hosts Jack Van Impe Presents with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, has been hospitalized since May and missed several recent broadcasts of his show. The couple have been married since 1954.

Van Impe is widely known as “The Walking Bible.” He says he has spent about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 verses through two hours of daily memorization, including virtually the entire New Testament. Divine gift? Photographic memory? Neither, Van Impe says, chalking it up to simple hard work and study.

David Allen was his role model. His ability to quote the scriptures in his work as a successful pastor and teacher convinced Van Impe of the value of memorization in giving authority to one’s ministry.

The actual method using index cards, he picked up fortuitously from his father, Oscar, who on a return trip home to Belgium left his “Bible memory cards” behind inadvertently in Michigan, and Jack found them.

Van Impe graduated from Detroit Bible College, as it was then known (later William Tyndale College) in 1952 as an undergraduate, but he calls himself “Dr. Van Impe” in that annoying habit some have of  using honorary, or even worse, somewhat sketchy doctorates, to self-justify the honorific before their name. Call me elitist, but if it isn’t an earned PhD from a properly accredited graduate university program, you shouldn’t be using the title doctor before your name in an academic sense.

Van Impe was known in his early years of ministry as being anti-Catholic, but to his credit, that changed by the early 1980s, so much so that he’s taken much heat over the issue from some of his fellow Protestant evangelical brethren.  While he doesn’t like Pope Francis, perceiving him as too liberal, and rants about him on air from time to time, Van Impe has only good things to say about his two immediate conservative predecessors, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI and Saint Pope John Paul II. He just doesn’t trust Pope Francis and occasionally alludes to the possibility Pope Francis may be the last pope by a somewhat specious use of the Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139, which is a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/)

Jack Van Impe Presents works as good television not because of Jack’s bombastic jeremiads, but because of the chemistry between him and his wife, Rexella, 82, who calls herself “Dr. Rexella Van Impe,” although she didn’t complete her undergraduate music and Bible history studies at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina before Jack swept her off her feet.

There’s something transcendent about how they look at each other several times each show and speak to each other. Rexella in some ways is still the blushing bride she must have been on their wedding day in 1954. And Jack clearly has eyes only for her. Here’s this crusty old televangelist, who actually is well named as Impe as he acts like an impish boy around her at times. He simply unabashedly melts in her presence after six decades of marriage. For that kind of authenticity, I can put up with some sketchy, in my view anyway, theology, and questionable academic credentials. Besides, at the end of the day, how can you not like a couple who do a VHS video and DVD called Animals in Heaven? and, along with Billy Graham, believe we will see our pets in heaven one day? Sadly for those of us of Catholic persuasion, early sensational media reports of Pope Francis reportedly saying animals go to heaven during his weekly Wednesday general audience at St. Peter’s Square last Nov. 26, which would have contradicted centuries of common Catholic theological opinion that the souls of animals do not survive death, turned out to be premature, the result mainly of some garbled translation of an interpretation of Pope Francis’ remarks by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Jack Van Impe Ministries in Troy, Michigan reported in the November-December 1998 issue of their Perhaps Today magazine that people from the largest denomination ordering their materials were Baptists, followed by Roman Catholics, then the so-called “unchurched” in third spot, and then Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists – in that order.

Most recently, Carl Baugh stood in as guest co-host of Jack Van Impe Presents with Rexella. Baugh is 78 and a young earth creationist. To be fair to Baugh, he had an impossible task. The show may ostensibly be about Bible prophecy, but in reality it works because of the chemistry between Jack and Rexella.

While I think he’s wrong or misguided about some things (who isn’t?), I can’t help admiring his steadfastness and thinking when Jack arrives at the Pearly Gates he’ll hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Faith and reason. Pray, think: Some recent posts on religion on soundingsjohnbarker

Some recent posts on religion on soundingsjohnbarker. Most have a decidedly Catholic flavour, but definitely not all, as my writing on religion can be as eclectic and wide-ranging into other areas of the Christian realm as my writing on non-religious topics can be. So, if you’re a Catholic, buckle in for some discussion of eschatology in the form of Bible prophecy, premillennial dispensationalism, Petrus Romanus, the Prophecy of Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes, the Antichrist, the False Prophet and The Rapture, and if you’re a Protestant evangelical … well, welcome to my world, which includes St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints.

Retroactively spiked: The post-publication killing of Msgr. Charles Pope’s blog post on New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade

In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time “kill” a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/

EWTN: The late 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and The Hound of Heaven

Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) routinely offers intelligent television viewing, employing the best in Catholic faith and reason. But sometimes it offers something truly extraordinary such as its Oct. 16 special telling the story of the late and now largely forgotten 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and his famous 1893 poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” published in his first volume of poems.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/ewtn-the-late-19th-century-english-catholic-poet-francis-thompson-and-the-hound-of-heaven/

St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Saints vs. Scoundrels – EWTN’s TV for the Thinking Catholic (and atheists, too)

Whoever said television can’t tackle big ideas apparently forgot to tell that to Benjamin Wiker. Tomorrow Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the network which presents around-the-clock Catholic-themed programming, founded by Mother Mary Angelica, which began broadcasting on Aug. 15, 1981 from a garage studio at the Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama, which Mother Angelica founded in 1962, will air in several different time slots Part 1 of its series Saints vs. Scoundrels, hosted by Wiker, a senior fellow at the Veritas Center for Ethics and Public Life at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Wiker guides viewers through pairs of influential Catholic saints and thinkers and those the church considers important historical figures, but scoundrels and sinners nonetheless.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/st-augustine-and-jean-jacques-rousseau-saints-vs-scoundrels-ewtns-tv-for-the-thinking-catholic-and-atheists-too/

The Prophecy of Malachy

While most people looked at U.S. President Barack Obama’s first meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican March 27 as a brief getting-to-know you session at the Vatican between two charismatic world leaders, who while they both champion economic social justice, are deeply divided philosophically on other moral issues such as abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage, others see them working in concert ushering in an eschatological end times.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/

Blood Moon rising

Science and religion. In astronomical terms, on April 15 there was a total lunar eclipse. It was the 56th eclipse of the Saros 122 series. But in religious terms, it was known as the first Blood Moon of the 21st century.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/blood-moon-rising/

News and religion: Where the twain meets

“Is this the Gate of Hell? Archaeologists say temple doorway belching noxious gas matches ancient accounts of ‘portal to the underworld.’” For a minute, I thought I must be reading a headline on April 4, 2013 (after checking to make sure it wasn’t April 1) from what had to be the second coming of the late Generoso Pope, Jr.’s Weekly World News, a supermarket “news” tabloid published out of Lantana and later Boca Raton, Florida from 1979 to 2007.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/news-and-religion-where-the-twain-meets/

Spiritual warfare

Spiritual warfare?

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”

Spiritual warfare was what Lewis was talking about almost six and a half decades ago, just as the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians almost 2,000 years earlier had said, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/

We’re caught in a trap: Suspicious minds

Way back when, 20 or more years ago, when I decided religion was a subject journalists should take seriously if they wanted to understand the world around them and what animates many people, I happened to read a book called Faith, Hope, No Charity: An Inside Look At the Born Again Movement in Canada and the United States, published 30 years ago in 1984 by Judith Haiven, now an associate professor in the Department of Management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/were-caught-in-a-trap-suspicious-minds/

Today marks the Oct. 9 Feast of St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints

St. Denis, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who sometime after 250AD was martyred but not before, according to the Golden Legend, miraculously is said to have picked up his severed head and preached a sermon with it in his hands while walking seven miles from Montmartre where he had been beheaded.

The Catholic Church, of course, when it investigated the story of St. Denis wanted to make sure the distance he walked with his head in his hands was correctly asserted as about seven miles. There was some suggestion it was only six miles. Now, that’s a true Catholic debate. Also honored along with Saint Denis today are his two companions, a priest named Rusticus, and a deacon, Eleutherius, who were martyred alongside him and buried with him.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/today-marks-the-oct-9-feast-of-st-denis-patron-saint-of-paris-and-one-of-the-catholic-churchs-most-famous-cephalophore-a-k-a-head-carrier-saints/

John McCandlish Phillips

John McCandlish Phillips, who died last year at the age of 85, lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952.

Just how good was McCandlish Phillips, the byline he would eventually write under after first writing as John M. Phillips, although colleagues knew him as John in the newsroom, as a reporter and writer? According to Timesmen, he was without peer. Fellow New York Times writer and noted author Gay Talese described Phillips as the “Ted Williams of the young reporters” after the legendary baseball slugger. “He was a natural. There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.” His stories often focused on forgotten people and he was best known as a feature writer with a flair for style.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/john-mccandlish-phillips-the-best-reporter-of-his-generation-walked-away-for-god-at-the-top-of-his-game/

Shemitah: The next sabbath year begins Sept. 25

Most of us are familiar with the concept of sabbaticals every seven years for tenured professors in academia, where their university employers release them from regular teaching and research duties to re-charge their intellectual batteries and perhaps pursue some specialized interest or write a book in some suitably warm climate. What more convivial or better place to write a monograph on your latest polar research than some island in the Caribbean after all is said an done?

The roots of such sabbaticals or shemitahs, also spelled as shmitas, however, long pre-date the modern or even medieval university. Their ancient roots are 3,000 years old and are grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judiasm. During a shemita year, the land is left to lie fallow. Israel has alloted $28.8 million to farmers for the upcoming shemitah year, budgeting $863,000 less than the last shemitah, when lands were left fallow seven years ago. More recently, some Wall Street analysts have pondered the mystery of what appears to be seven-year economic cycles tied to shemitah years. And wondered why crashes often seem to come in September and October.

The next shemitah year – and the first since the demise of Lehman Brothers investment bank on Sept. 15, 2008, triggering the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939 – begins in less than three weeks on Sept. 25, running until Sept. 13, 2015. Before declaring bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman Brothers, founded by Henry and Emanuel Lehman in 1850 in Montgomery, Alabama, was the fourth-largest investment bank in the Unites States, behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, doing business in investment banking, equity and fixed-income sales and trading, especially in U.S. Treasury securities, research, investment management, private equity, and private banking.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/shemitah-the-next-sabbath-year-begins-sept-25/

High school redux

Being a Catholic high school graduate wasn’t high on the list of things top of mind when I moved to Manitoba in 2007. That’s mainly because my high school days were some 30 years behind me – or at least so I thought at the time.

Turns out, however, Sister Andrea Dumont, the longest-serving religious in Thompson, is originally from St. Catharines, Ontario and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, who – wait for it – just happen to be the same sisters who taught some of my classes from September 1971 to June 1976 when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English classes – and Grade 10 general math at Oshawa Catholic High School (previously known as St. Joseph’s High School and later Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School.) Sister Dorothy also taught high school in Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton, as well as Oshawa.

Trying to teach me high school math must have given real meaning to terms like “long suffering” and “patience of a saint.” As I recall, there were two mathematics “streams” back then: “advanced” and “general.” Since these were in the days before there was much articulation of the concept of “bullying,” many of your classmates had no reservation about saying that “general” math was for “dummies” or “dunces.” Self-esteem aside, I’d have been hard-pressed to argue the point, especially since I struggled with math no matter what the label: algebra, geometry, functions and relations – shoot me now, just remembering the words, much less the symbols and equations. If I had known how many percentages I would have to convert as a journalist, I might have paid more attention to high school math, but perhaps not.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/high-school-redux/

Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’

The 10-day Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) from Sept. 4 through Sept. 14 just wrapped up yesterday. In the cinema world, TIFF is a big deal. An important arts event eagerly anticipated every September.

But flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar there is a whole slew of movies released over the last year or just about to be released, which  might surprise you both in their totality and who stars in them because Hollywood, for a season at least, has rediscovered the Christian movie genre and the religious, spiritual and supernatural themes that are woven into their fabric. In a word, Christian movies are “hot” in 2014. Hollywood, which is usually a synonym for  Sodom or Gomorrah  in the vocabulary for many Christians, is this fall on the side of the angels. There is apparently an upside for Hollywood where commercial potential stands in for faith in salvation if need  be.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/

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The Prophecy of Malachy

While most people looked at U.S. President Barack Obama’s first meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican March 27, 2014 as a brief getting-to-know-you session at the Vatican between two charismatic world leaders, who while they both champion economic social justice, are deeply divided philosophically on other moral issues such as abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage, others see them working in concert ushering in an eschatological end times.

In that vision of unfolding history, Obama is cast as the “Antichrist” and Pope Francis the “False Prophet.” This is the kind of thing you are not likely to hear discussed in polite company, except maybe in a dismissive fashion or to be held up to scorn and ridicule. Yet millions of people around the world believe in just such a scenario. Within hours of Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI announcing his resignation Feb. 11, 2013, becoming the first pope to resign in almost 600 years (the last having been Pope Gregory XII, who resigned at the request of the Council of Constance on July 4, 1415 to help end the Great Western Schism) some folks were talking excitedly about “Petrus Romanus” (Peter the Roman) who would be history’s last pope, according to the Prophey of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139.

The fact Pope Francis was formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and the name Peter appears nowhere in his former or current appellations, hasn’t much fazed Petrus Romanus true believers, who happily point out the first Pope to take the name Francis did so after St. Francis of Assisi, an Italian whose original name was Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, but nicknamed Francesco (“the Frenchman”) by his father. Pietro in Italian translates to Peter in English. Is this “Francesco di Pietro (Peter) di Bernardone, literally, ‘Peter the Roman,'” as Tom Horn and Cris Putnam, co-authors of the 2012 book Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope is Here, have argued?

While their research was prodigious, in a sense, the result falls pretty far short of anything approaching coherent scholarship in any true academic sense. The strategy much of the time seems to be to dig up what you can and if you throw enough of these scattered historical documents against the wall of the “Romanists” something will stick. You don’t have to be anti-Catholic, pro-Catholic, neutral or even much of a scholar to know the historical record has lots of less than flattering documents when it comes to the Catholic Church, many of them quite authentic. Marshaling such disparate sources into a coherent and convincing argument to support something approaching a thesis is something else again.

Horn and Putnam are also stuck with the problem of time. Inconveniently for them, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI  resigned in February 2013 – just after their book was published – rather than slightly earlier in 2012 – before Petrus Romanus was printed – which would have fit on their timeline a bit better. The longer out in time Pope Francis’ pontificate runs, as it approaches the beginning of its third year, the farther removed it is from their graphic images of Rome burning. While Horn and Putnam are careful not to fall into the trap personally of being “date setters,” which can cause one’s reputation to evaporate quite literally in a second if you’re wrong, they’re not above conveniently quoting other writers to make those kind of points at times, such as the ersatz Ronald L. Conte Jr., a self-described “Roman Catholic lay theologian and Bible translator” who publishes something called Catholic Planet. Conte, as Horn and Putnam noted in 2012, predicted that by “July 2013, Rome is destroyed when it is struck by a nuclear missile.” Conte also predicted, again parroted by Horn and Putnam, that after Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, the next pope would be Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze and that he would take the name Pius XIII. Wrong and wrong again.

As prognosticators on the papacy, Horn and Putnam are no better than Conte. Their 2012 Top 10 list in Petrus Romanus to succeed Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI included Arinze; followed by Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was dumped as secretary of state by Pope Francis in October 2013, seven months after he took office. Rounding out their list in descending order for “Final Pope” were Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson; Italian Cardinal Angelo Scola; Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi; Argentinian Cardinal Leonardo Sandri; Italian cardinal Ennio Antonelli; French Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran; Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn; and Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet.  While they did have an Argentinian cardinal on their list, unfortunately for Horn and Putnam it wasn’t Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair, born in Armagh in 1094, later to be known as St. Malachy, was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint on July 6, 1199 by Pope Clement III, and was the former archbishop of the Irish Archdiocese of Armagh and Diocese of Connor, and while in Rome in 1139 reportedly experienced what is considered by the Catholic Church to be an unapproved private revelation – if the incident even happened – in the form of an apparition of the 112 popes following Pope Celestine II, who died March 8, 1144. Malachy was said to have recorded his Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes (and antipopes) as a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope. “In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit, Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people. The End.”

Malachy’s manuscript was supposedly deposited in what is now known as the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum before he returned to Ireland as the papal legate. And there the manuscript is said to have sat, forgotten and gathering dust until re-discovered more than 400 years later by Arnold Wion, a Benedictine monk, who published them in 1595 as Lignum Vitae (Tree of Life). Or not. Given the very accurate description of popes up to 1590 and lack of accuracy after that year, “modern scholars have unanimously noted, in the 37 subsequent mottoes, a radical departure from the unfailing precision and appropriateness of the previous 74, and they are agreed that the Prophecy of Malachy is a counterfeit,” wrote John J. Driscoll in the Roman Catholic theological scholarship journal American Ecclesiastical Review in June 1944.

Historians generally conclude that the alleged prophecies are a fabrication written shortly before they were published, perhaps in a failed bid to see Italian Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli elected Pope during the second conclave of Oct. 8, 1590 to Dec. 5, 1590 where Pope Gregory XIV was eventually elected as the successor of Pope Urban VII.

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