Soul’s Code

23-year-old Thomas Kyle Nursey parked his Ford F-150 pickup truck inside a Catholic church Tuesday morning, according to news reports. The Floridian decided he wanted to go to church at 3 A.M. and drove his truck straight through the front doors to display his anger at God. Police booked him.

The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has opened up a new course of study in homemaking for female seminar students, raising ire from various camps, according to AP reports.

“We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God’s word for the home and the family,” Seminary President Paige Patterson says. “If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed.”

Some have criticized this “move against the tide,” calling it anachronistic.

A camouflaged bible may be hard for deer to see, but this product’s path to profitability certainly isn’t. The $50 publication is sold by Christian Outdoorsman, a site that caters to Bible-thumping hunters.

A big market, apparently. A survey of licensed hunters and anglers last year commissioned by the U.S. National Wildlife Federation found half of those polled identified themselves as evangelical Christians, as Reuters reports. Add that to the fact that profit margins on bibles are generally on the order of 90% since there are no royalties to pay an author or copyright issues.

But more than a lucrative business idea, the camo-bible is a reminder of how linked hunting and evangelism have become.

Felicia Teske, a resident of Delaware, was eating dinner when she noticed that the slice of eggplant she was about to eat spelled out the name of the Creator.

She set it aside and did what any reasonable person would do: Called Action News to get her story on air — before launching an eBay auction for the slice of divinity.

This isn’t the first time that the Almighty has chosen eggplant as a means of making itself known. A woman in Mendhasalis, India, sliced into an eggplant and found seeds spelling out “Allah” in Urdu script in 2003 . . .

A group of Buddhists ran afoul with the state of New Jersey, when they bought hundreds of eels, frogs and turtles and released them into the Passaic River, the Trentonian reports.

The state says the Buddhists needed a permit to stock the river with the exotic animals. The Biologists say that the action may have done harm to other species living in the river. One of the Buddhists says: “When I pass by the fish market, I cry. I tell people: ‘Stop killing them.’ Then: ‘Don’t eat them.’ Then your heart goes to mercy.”

Contrast the highly Cartesian approach of the medical experts in HBO’s Addiction with, say, the non-dualistic diagnosis of addiction offered by three spiritual teachers we’ve posted about during the past couple of weeks. HBO probably deemed this kind of examination too challenging for its mainstream audience:

Don’t misinterpret stillness with going off to sleep, or the kind of stillness you might have after a few drinks. You might drift off a bit, you can’t remember your problems so you might feel a little bit better. People sometimes drink to get rid of, for a little while, the torture of their mind telling them what their problems are. So they drink, and for a moment they don’t remember their problems. But of course there’s a price to pay because there’s a lowering of consciousness. So you go lower towards the vegetable realm.

• Eckhart Tolle, Living the Liberated Life and Dealing With the Pain Body

There is no such thing as an addiction to an object; there is only attachment to the uninvestigated concept arising in the moment.

If you think alcohol makes you sick or confused or angry, then when you drink it, it’s as if you’re drinking your own disease. You’re meeting alcohol where it is, and it does exactly what you know it will do. And if you believe that you really want to keep drinking, just notice what it does to you. There’s no pity in it. There’s no victim in it. And eventually there’s no fun in it — only a hangover.

• Byron Katie, chapter 11, Loving What Is

Preachers take care, the pulpit is not a place for railing against local businesses. Or at least that’s the message behind a lawsuit filed in Tasmania. The company that owns the Players Club franchise of strip clubs is suing the Anglican Church for the “continual harassment and media campaign” against the club and its business, according to a local newspaper.