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.

Notes from around the Internet about the physics and metaphysics of the ABC series, LOST episode, “Through the looking glass”

BY SOUL’S CODE — You never know how good something is until you’ve lost it. For lost viewers, we’ll be without the show until February 2008, writes Entertainment Weekly. The end of the third season represents the mid-point of the show, which will run for another three seasons before its end.

J. Wood has a brilliant analysis of the episode, citing it as an an inversion point. “The narrative itself twists inside-out, with the locus still on the island yet the flashes happening in the opposite direction. Like the White Queen of Carroll’s text explains, we’re seeing the future and its impact on the present,” he writes.

Up until this point we see how the past has influenced the present. Each person has a back-story that has brought him or her to the Island and affects their decisions.

But now we see the influence the future has on the present. The episode is chock full of trippy flash forwards, showing life after the rescue. And for some, it’s not all that hot. But they may not have been “forwards” so much, explains J. Wood. “A physicist named Minkowski realized that by considering time as a component of space, Einstein’s special theory of relativity . . .

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee figured out the grace of the Blind Side

BY PAUL KAIHLA — There is a crisis in America. That crisis is divorce. It is easier to get out of a marriage than (to get out of a) contract to buy a used car.
– Mike Huckabee

Another governor of Arkansas is always running for president — this time, a Republican. Incredibly, Mike Huckabee was even born in the same small town as Bill Clinton (Hope, Ark.). And Huckabee also has a marriage problem, although his isn’t personal. It’s policy.

WDAD? (What Did AMERICA Do?) | Originally uploaded by silki.

In a piece in this week’s New York Times Magazine headed, “With God On Our Side,” the fearless historian Gary Wills illustrates just how deeply religion has permeated the White House, for better of for worse.

Founding father James Madison and Enlightenment-devotee would be taken aback by the degree to which religion gets ”cognized” and empiricized in, say, Karl Rove’s Rolodex.

The nation’s executive mansion is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery. A sly dig there goes, ”Missed you at Bible study,” as David Frum, a Jewish Canadian who worked for Bush as speechwriter, reported in ”The Right Man.” A line from the book: “Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory, either.”

White House etiquette tip: Friends going to intimate dinners with the Bushes should be prepared to lead grace before dining.

The question, then, is that if our government truly is filled with Christians, why, then, does it so often act with so little mercy and compassion? The White House may be religious. But is it genuinely spiritual?

TED Conference: Tony Robbins calls Al Gore a “son-of-a-bitch” . . . to his face!

BY PAUL KAIHLA — The 2007 “TED” conference — an eponymous acronym for ‘Technology Entertainment and Design’ — drew celebs-with-substance like Philippe Starck and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the conference center in Monterey, CA this weekend. It’s slugged as a summit of “icons, geniuses and mavericks,” but it’s really a Silicon Valley boondoggle that parades as Davos Lite.

Few geek/policy-wonk conferences deliver YouTube-able entertainment. But this high-powered, high-tech, Meet-Up totally delivered thanks to the presence of Al Gore, the sole member of Google’s advisory board, and Tony Robbins. The one-time TV infommercial schtick-man used the forum to re-brand himself, up-market.

Here’s the news-making line Robbins shot back after Gore humorously heckled him:

He’s broken my pattern, that son of a bitch.

Fidel Castro | Originally uploaded by Melissa in TN.

BY BRIAN CAULFIELD — Yo, ho-ho. Any dude who bans Christmas for 29 years straight is probably just stone-cold crazy. But Cuba’s dictator’s early letters, now published in English, provide a few surprises, including a spiritual side and what appears to be a concern for human rights.

Taking Castro’s early words at face value provides few clues about his authoritarian streak, or the degree to which he’s become a caricature of the Latin strongman. Check out the outdated military uniform, long-winded speeches that would make Clinton wilt with shame, the jailing of dissidents, Castro’s refusal to let anyone run against him in an election, his self-righteousness —  and to boot, a persecution complex (well, okay, that one may have some foundation in reality). But in sum, he displays more telltale signs of clinical narcissism than an L.A. celebutante.

The telltale clue:

James Cameron and the Virgin Sacrifice | Originally uploaded by Jinxiecat.

James Cameron (in Perez Hilton-style photo, left) goes on record that the tomb of Jesus, the tomb of Mary was a myth — and that Jesus is dead and buried!

Or was buried, until he was dug up in a tomb in a suburb of Jerusalem.

Considering that Jesus and Mary are about as common a name at that time in the antique world as Bob and Betsy are in present-day North America odds are that Titanic-director James Cameron could be in way, way more over his head than he thinks. TIME magazine: “Tales from the Crypt”

A Bible-belt newspaper goes nuts and attacks Zeus worshippers because their god had multiple wives, fought with his Dad, was neglected as a child — Hey, it almost makes Zeus sound like a stereotypical televangelist type:

His view of marriage would fit in pretty well today too. He worked his way through three wives while fathering so many kids with so many other women that most of them didn’t even know one another. That’s something to worship for sure.

Yuri Luzhkov is not gay. He’s, like, Russian. Now *that’s* a spiritual credential!

Here’s our stance: we like a parade, any parade. Not so Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, a religious conservative who says he will never sanction a gay pride parade in Moscow.

“Last year, Moscow came under unprecedented pressure to sanction the gay parade, which can be described in no other way than as Satanic,” Luzhkov said at the 15th Christmas educational readings in the Kremlin Palace.

Well, that was quick, comrade: from atheist collectivism to, well, theological fundamentalism in the space of a decade and change. Sometimes, The Times They Aren’t a Changin’.