I’m adding this to my Amazon Wish List, right after the OXO Good Grips Cheese Grater and 180-Piece Rubber Grommet Assortment.

It may become as valuable as Revenge of the Jedi posters . . .

UPDATE: It seems that Amazon has finally taken down 19-0: The Historic Championship Season of the Unbeatable Patriots. On to eBay, I guess.

So Mad magazine—the “usual gang of idiots”—has compiled a gaggle of Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonists to depict George Bush’s “support” of global warming.

I await the “very special” issue of Highlights, featuring an image of the president pushing a baby carriage down a flight of stairs toward a door marked “TESTING,” with a caption that reads “No Child Left Behind.”

After reading of this blog post, about how the Holy Spirit seems to be persona non grata in most theological conversations, I was put in mind of something I read on the website of an Episcopal Church just yesterday.

Second paragraph, second sentence: “allow The Spirit its due.” Its? Slip of the keyboard? I think not.

The early Church struggled with the personhood of the Holy Spirit. Binary and subordinationist conceptions of the Godhead mutated finally into the Macedonian heresy, a form of Arianism that explicitly denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which was formally condemned by the First Council of Constantinople. And it was that council that formulated the Nicene Creed and its affirmation “I believe in the Holy Ghost . . .”

It is still too easy for Christians to view the Spirit as some sort of impersonal “power” that imbues the believer with special, politically correct insight, as if it were one of those magnifying thingees you buy in the drugstore to help you read the small print of newspaper editorials. The rise of New Age self-actualization dribble, with its ideas about the tapping into and the passing along of “energies,” has filtered through the walls of the Church into the thinking of too many Christians about the Third Person of the Trinity—which is why it is so important to recite at least one of the creeds every Sunday.

The Father and the Son send the Spirit to be an abiding personal presence within the regenerate believer and the Church—but the Holy Spirit cannot contradict what Christ himself has revealed. (That is why it is possible to “grieve” the Spirit [Eph. 4:30].) The way the Episcopal priest (and much of the mainline) interprets the Spirit’s role is almost that of a usurper—some thing that acts as an addendum to revelation, allowing the savvy progressive Christian to be up on current events in a way a first-century itinerant preacher could not be, and therefore better suited to answering those tough moral questions that tend to crop up between the dinner and an 8 o’clock curtain . . .

Whether you agree with their endorsement or not, this fact seems mightily important:

The judiciary is different. On Jan. 20, 2009, six of the nine Supreme Court justices will be over 70. Most of them could be replaced by the next president, particularly if he or she is re-elected. Given the prospect of accelerating gains in modern medical technology, some of the new justices may serve for half a century. Even if a more perfect candidate were somehow elected in 2012, he would not be able to undo the damage, especially to the Supreme Court.

. . . was more or less what Wade Burleson was told by the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board. Instead, he resigned as trustee.

Seems Burleson had some serious issues with resolutions passed, including the prohibiting of missionaries from speaking in tongues (presumably not that of the foreign country in which he or she is a guest), and this one: “A trustee must publicly affirm a board-approved action, even if he cannot privately support it.” Says Burleson: “In 161 years of Southern Baptist history, there has never been a worse policy passed by any agency”—not to mention strange, given the Baptists’ history of freedom of conscience.

But this has more to do with the board’s perception that Burleson was telling behind-closed-doors tales out of school—which is not all that hard to understand. Says the board’s trustee chairman: “It’s sort of like if you have a problem in your family, you don’t want the neighborhood to decide for you; you need to keep that within your family.”

To read the blog in question, go here.