The crazy lady strikes again for Saturday, August 26, 2006

Another one of the articles in the Chicago Sun-Times series on evangelicalism talked about the racial divide in Chicago churches. Black Protestants in particular tend to think of evangelicalism as a whites-only phenomenon, a club filled with right-wing Republican bigots. Therefore, this group of Christians is very reluctant to call itself evangelical. One of the very few black pastors to call himself evangelical is Rev. James Meeks, a Baptist minister who runs a church on Chicago's South Side.... Sign in to see full entry.

Because this is about a specific Protestant movement - and more specifically, about my observations of that movement - this entry is going in here. It doesn't belong in From Death Into Life. I've read yet another article on the Sun-Times website - actually, the first in a series of articles on the Protestant movement I call evangelicalism. ( Here is the link to the entire series.) Right now, I'm reading the article in the series entitled (for the purposes of this blog entry) The Image Problem.... Sign in to see full entry.

According to this link on the Chicago Sun-Times website, God has apparently become a subject for polite discourse. As this website states accurately, it used to be considered very rude (particularly in upper-crust white society) to discuss religion. Those who evangelized or proselytized for their religion - no matter what that religion might be (although most proselytizers were of the fundamentalist Christian persuasion back then) - were considered uncultured hicks from the wrong side of the... Sign in to see full entry.

Many of my story ideas have come from the website of The San Francisco Chronicle. This newspaper offers an excellent Strange But True section, with many of the same stories as those on the equivalent AOL News site. The Chronicle site also has very talented headline writers. For example, on the main web page of the newspaper, the article about an Apple iBook catching fire is entitled It's Apple flambe. Their Strange But True site is literally loaded with such creative headlines, specifically... Sign in to see full entry.

Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies fans will remember that the Warner Brothers cartoon character Bugs Bunny had a distinct Brooklyn accent. He apparently inherited this accent from his mentor, and the man who provided him with his speaking voice, Mel Blanc. This link from AOL's Strange But True news service proves definitively that Bugs Bunny is not the only one with a distinct regional accent. Apparently, farmers in Great Britain have noticed that their cows moo with distinct regional accents,... Sign in to see full entry.