Politics
Wafflehouse Victims

We Should Not Be Seeing These Pictures

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Akilah Sasilva, Taurean C. Sanderlin, DeEbony Groves, and Joe R. Perez. These young people
should be going about their lives in relative anonymity, attending
school, working, and dreaming. And unless one of these individuals is a
friend or a loved one, you should not be seeing these images. But here we are again. Innocent people gunned down at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’re viewing people’s images we would not have seen otherwise.

Uncategorized

Salvation for an Atheist

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A tearful little boy approached Pope Francis
last week with a question about his atheist dad who had recently died. Traditional Christian doctrine teaches that belief in God through Jesus
is essential to life after death. But Pope Francis spoke a more personal
truth about God to this distraught child, who was escorted up to the
Pope after he could not speak his question into a microphone. “Is Dad in heaven?” the boy asked the Pope, whispering in his ear.

Politics

Who Has It the Roughest?

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Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, at age 39. For
a long time she had wanted to read a book about “the most vulnerable
person in society…and it wasn’t around, so I started writing it,” she
told Hilton Als in a 2014 interview. Ms. Morrison’s most vulnerable person: female, child, black. I live in the opposite end of that vulnerability spectrum: male, middle-aged, white. I have been broke and unemployed, but I’ve never experienced the abject vulnerability of a little girl in South Sudan.

Passages
Blue Butterfly

Sunday, April 9, 30 CE: The Resurrection

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Sunday, April 9, 30 CEThe Resurrection

189:4.3 (2025.4) A little before three o’clock this Sunday morning, when the first signs of day began to appear in the east, five of the women started out for the tomb of Jesus. They had prepared an abundance of special embalming lotions, and they carried many linen bandages with them. It was their purpose more thoroughly to give the body of Jesus its death anointing and more carefully to wrap it up with the new bandages.  

189:4.4 (2025.5) The women who went on this mission of anointing Jesus’ body were: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of the Alpheus twins, Salome the mother of the Zebedee brothers, Joanna the wife of Chuza, and Susanna the daughter of Ezra of Alexandria. 189:4.5 (2025.6) It was about half past three o’clock when the five women, laden with their ointments, arrived before the empty tomb.

Passages
Damascus Gate

Friday, April 7, 30 CE: The Crucifixion

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187:2.1 (2006.5) The soldiers first bound the Master’s arms with cords to the crossbeam, and then they nailed his hands to the wood. When they had hoisted this crossbeam up on the post, and after they had nailed it securely to the upright timber of the cross, they bound and nailed his feet to the wood, using one long nail to penetrate both feet.

Passages
Expressionist Eye Painting

Thursday, April 6, 30 CE — The Arrest of Jesus

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April 6, 30 CEThe Arrest of Jesus

183:3.1 (1973.3) As this company of armed soldiers and guards, carrying torches and lanterns, approached the garden, Judas stepped well out in front of the band that he might be ready quickly to identify Jesus so that the apprehenders could easily lay hands on him before his associates could rally to his defense. And there was yet another reason why Judas chose to be ahead of the Master’s enemies: He thought it would appear that he had arrived on the scene ahead of the soldiers so that the apostles and others gathered about Jesus might not directly connect him with the armed guards following so closely upon his heels. Judas had even thought to pose as having hastened out to warn them of the coming of the apprehenders, but this plan was thwarted by Jesus’ blighting greeting of the betrayer. Though the Master spoke to Judas kindly, he greeted him as a traitor. 183:3.2 (1973.4) As soon as Peter, James, and John, with some thirty of their fellow campers, saw the armed band with torches swing around the brow of the hill, they knew that these soldiers were coming to arrest Jesus, and they all rushed down to near the olive press where the Master was sitting in moonlit solitude.