"She Wanted to Be Oprah At Any Cost" is the most entertaining chapter title among many candidates in What Love Taught Me, the new book by Thomas Weeks III giving his version of the tabloid marital breakup of Atlanta's favorite televangelist couple. His soon-to-be-ex Juanita Bynum was bored with preaching, looking for a secular career, and constantly goading him into altercations so that she could become a poster child for domestic violence and go on to greater fame, according to the book. In the infamous hotel-parking-lot altercation for which Weeks was sentenced to three years probation, he says she swung at his head with a cell phone and he shoved her to avoid the blow, then immediately regretted it because "I have never pushed her that hard." (Ouch!) If you look back over the publishing history of this couple in just this one decade, it started with Bynum's No More Sheets: The Truth About Sex, which details her victory over promiscuity, then--after their televised 2002 wedding--a joint effort called Teach Me How to Love You: The Beginnings, and now Weeks' ironic solo riff on that same theme, What Love Taught Me. Bynum hasn't released her own book yet--she been too busy with her appearances on Divorce Court--but a suggested title would be What's Love Got to Do With It?

Jack Chick Skewers the Atheists

The 84-year-old Jack Chick can never be accused of not being up on the latest breaking heresy, so of course he had to take on Richard Dawkins and the Darwinists in his brand new Chick Tract, "Moving On Up," the story of a confirmed Darwinian named Tyler who becomes god-like and ends up being cast into . . . well, I don't wanna give away the ending.

The Prosperity Gospel Is Not for Amateurs

Let us count the ways that the latest fleece-the-flock scam should have been detected by its smell: 1. Jon G. Irvin of Mission Viejo, California, architect of the Safevest LLC Christian investment scheme, was paying a 10 percent "referral fee" to anyone who brought friends into the investment, at minimum levels of $5,000 for pastors and $25,000 for laymen. Classic pyramid stuff. 2. The whole thing was based on commodity futures day trading, which is the riskiest kind of market play you can make. It's unclear why he cited this market instead of something safer, since he didn't intend to invest a single dollar in commodities futures anyway. 3. The only way you could check returns is by going to Irvin's own password-protected website. 4. Irvin guaranteed a 1 percent per day return, which would be 200 percent per year, which would be better than any investment in the world with the possible exceptions of African dictators stealing diamonds. At any rate, the guy doesn't sound that sharp. Today Irvin sits in a federal jail on wire-fraud charges, investors are out $25 million, and he apparently spent most of the money on trips, expensive restaurants, shopping, golf and an SUV. Can anyone say "redneck"? Once again, brethren, remember the first postmodern commandment: Never trust anybody with a fish on his business card.

All Hail the Garbage People

When I first saw what has come to be known as the Garbage People Video, I honestly thought it was a Monty Pythonesque mockumentary. (Part of the reason is that, working at The Door, almost nothing you receive on video is for real.) But it turns out that the producers, Media Village Productions of Cape Town, South Africa, are deadly serious in telling the story of the Garbage People who live in Garbage City and have to be coaxed out of their Garbage Lives by a Christian holy man, with white beard and sandals, who walks with a shepherd's staff. The arch-Brit narrator relates it much more dramatically than I can, with the kind of elevated faux-poetic script favored by Las Vegas "international co-productions." (Lines like "One step follows another, and each step leads us into the future" have absolutely no meaning, *unless* spoken by a velvet-throated British announcer.) But the gist of the video it is that there's this filthy mountainous area outside Cairo, called Garbage City, and every morning at dawn 7,000 "rubbish collectors" leave for Cairo on horse carts, where they collect 13,000 tons of garbage from 17 million residents, then return to Garbage City, "bringing the refuse into their homes." (Yes, that's what I said.) Once they get it inside, they sort it into organic and inorganic piles and use some of it to raise pigs, who also live in their homes. Wading into Garbage City in the early nineties was Father Samaan, who tells the story of going into a slum of tin huts with cardboard floors, devoid of roads, electricity and running water, the whole of it engulfed in "stench from the dead animals," and the people "hiding in the pig sties" because they didn't want to talk to him. He was determined, however, to "wade through pigpens and pull them through the muck and mire and present them with God's love," so he learned that his two greatest evangelistic tools were a good sturdy pair of hip boots and a flashlight. (He tells this with intense seriousness.) Once he got into the pig stys, he would kiss the people and give them shoes to convert them. Fast-forward ten years and Garbage City suddenly has clinics, recycling centers, schools where young boys are taught to build coffins, and, most important, a 20,000-seat church dynamited out of a stone quarry. Father Samaan is regularly carrying out miracles and healings, and the 7,000 rubbish collectors still go into Cairo every morning and collect the garbage, but now they're evangelists for Jesus, hoping they'll find million-dollar diamond necklaces in the garbage so they can take the diamonds back to the owner and tell them that Jesus made them be honest. The stench today is worse, by the way, because in addition to garbage and dead animals and pig pens, they now have "the strong stench of burning plastic" from the recycling center. Meanwhile, the children of Garbage City continue to frolic and play amid piles of jagged, rusty, foul, stinking trash, and Jesus hasn't yet seen fit to send money for Latex gloves or protective facegear, so the garbage is still collected, sorted and processed with bare hands. Father Samaan has more important things to look after, however, as he's looking to build a new church, this time with only 5,000 seats, for the Zaballeen, or Garbage People. Cue the mystical Egyptian desert music. "It has been said that life is a journey . . ." I pronounce The Garbage People Video a post-modern classic.