Creative Joy

The s*** has hit the fan
(Warren Zevon)

Matthew Sutton’s reflections on the antichrist and American politics can be found in today’s New York Times under the title “Why the Antichrist matters in Politics.“ There is some great food for thought here including how dispensational premillennialism (Sutton wisely didn’t use this term in an op-ed) feeds anti-government sentiment. He also suggests that a power vacuum among politically oriented evangelicals have allowed libertarians and Tea Party activists (like Bachmann, Perry, and Paul) to exploit evangelical energies without the type of religious leadership (previously seen in individuals like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell) who tempered the tendency toward apocalyptic excess. Perhaps a throw-away line, but I appreciated the analogy with Marxism to explain apparent tensions within the evangelical between expectation and action. After all, to those of us who study apocalypticism historically, it is easy to see Marxism as a secularized form of Christian apocalypticism (albeit a this-worldly type). The whole piece can be found here.

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It’s official: Ron Artest (forward for the Los Angeles Lakers) has changed his name to Metta World Peace. I do not find it quite as clever as the 1970s classic change of Lloyd Free, who proclaimed himself “all-world,” to “World B. Free,” but it’s certainly more effective than Prince changing his name to something that no one could say, and then changing it back.

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