Helpful Things to Know

• If all you eat is rabbit, you will starve to death.
• Denial: not a river in Egypt.
• Alcohol-based hand sanitizers, not antibacterial soaps. For most purposes, regular soap is fine. It's not surgery.
• When drinking soju, as when drinking port, one does not fill one's own glass.
• White on the right, queen on her color.
• When buying sweet corn out of some guy's pickup, don't peel back the husk to inspect. You don't peel an orange at the grocer's, after all.
• Don't sniff the cork, but look at it to see if it matches the bottle if you really don't trust them. The only reason to send back a wine at this point is if it [the wine] tastes/smells like wet cardboard.
• Old silver may not have a fish knife, they'll instead have a set of two forks. Don't be afraid.

And, hey, if you know anybody who needs a cheap room in Chicago in August, I know this guy... Or if anybody needs employees...

boggles the mind.

I was essentially hit with the proposition [of a Calvinist] that God does not love the damned. He was questioning what good God's love was if it was not efficacious in causing a salvific response in a man. I accused him of being a troll. I think I won that exchange. Interestingly, his type of thinking is the exact same as the universalist's, except the universalist rejects Hell for that reason. I think it's safer to be a universalist than a Calvinist if this view is representative.

so, uh, what do you think: does God love the damned?

more seriously...

The Church of England, the ECUSA, and all the rest have produced some marvellous men over the past few centuries. N.T. Wright is friggin' intense, TS Eliot is pretty hip, and everybody loves [and claims as their own] C.S. Lewis. One must respect, even if one disagrees with, Rowan Williams and J.I. Packer. While I make it a general policy these days to avoid Episcopalian women [with few notable exceptions], the Episcopalian men I know certainly are not to be avoided.