OneNewsNow is the daily news feed of Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association in Tupelo, Mississippi, but since they’re so afraid of the pagan elitist liberal media infecting their news site with anti-Christian thought, they put word filters on the incoming Associated Press stories, so that offensive ones are automatically changed or removed. One of those words is “gay,” which the AFA objects to as promoting homosexuality. But that can result in some strange news reports when the fastest human in the world runs the 100 meters:

That would be the man known to his friends as Tyson Gay.

Jesus Is a No-Show in Florida

Todd Bentley, our favorite biker-dude preacher [1], currently holding the Revival That Refuses to End in a Lakeland, Florida, RV park, told his audience [2] that Jesus would come down in his chariot in clouds of glory and walk on Todd’s stage on June 8th. But apparently Jesus promised and then didn’t show up, which seems very un-Jesus-like to us. I would imagine that on June 9th Todd was upset, which would explain why he had to kick a man in the stomach [3] to get rid of his stage IV colon cancer.

Mama, Stop Writin’ ‘Bout Us

Apparently that parenting book by Britney Spears’ mom [4] is back on again. Michael Hyatt, the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, couldn’t wait to get back to the office last week, so he sent out an instant message on his Blackberry: “The Lynne Spears manuscript is totally compelling. I can’t put it down–and I’m not even the market!” What? The head of Thomas Nelson is not the market for white-trash confessionals? I’m stunned.

500 Christians in Jersey Can’t Be Wrong

Of all the things I’ve blogged about these past eight months, my (admittedly snarky) item on the “Envision ‘08" conference at Princeton [5] last month engendered some of the most outraged responses, many of them suggesting I’m an arrogant judgmental Neanderthal. Now the 500 Christian leaders at Princeton have emerged from this convocation with a “Declaration on the Common Good,” [6] in which they talk about this “critical moment in the history of the United States” (without being too specific about why it’s critical), then calling for “the way of Jesus” and defining that way as “struggling for peace, social, economic, and racial justice, and a flourishing creation.” (I thought the way of Jesus meant picking up the Cross, but let’s not quibble.) For this Princeton group, the “new vision of the common good” involves ethnic diversity, elimination of poverty, and saving-the-planet eco stuff, but acknowledges that “we do not have all the answers.” In other words, another position paper that nobody will read, that manages to be even more boring than a United Nations position paper, and has the added disadvantage of being disingenuous. This entire conference was set up as a rebuke of the religious right. Rather than saying that out loud, they pussy-footed around the topic, denied that they represent the religious left, and cut off fellowship with those who also follow “the way of Jesus” but do it as conservatives. Leave it to a summer intern [7] at the Institute on Religion and Democracy to write the most dead-on analysis of the whole event. Nobody who simply transfers the culture wars from the political arena to the religious is helping us find the one way, which, should we need to be reminded, is narrow.