I’m so happy to live in Ohio.  Stories like this make me proud. Not. According to a Cincinnati TV station: A local pastor said he put a stripper pole on his pulpit to help preach his message.  It may raise some eyebrows, but Pastor Mike Scruggs said he’s hoping it will save some marriages.  Scruggs admits he’s anything but a traditional pulpit preacher.  ”We try to make it relevant, straightforward. We don’t sugarcoat anything,” he said.  On Friday, Scruggs’ sermon series drew a packed house at the Light of Word Ministries on Colerain Avenue.  ”We...

A pastor in Riverside County, CA has been arrested and charged with assaulting a 13-year-old boy. This story is almost too horrible to write about.  The least of the things that he is accused of doing is pinching the boy with pliers while at the pastor’s home for a Bible study. Argh. You can read the story here.

According to CNN, Chuck Colson, the convicted Watergate figure turned evangelist, is in critical condition after undergoing surgery over the weekend following a brain hemorrhage, according to his publicist. “Colson is listed in critical condition at this point but has shown some early signs of potential for recovery,” said a statement Tuesday from the DeMoss Group. A spokeswoman for the PR firm said Wednesday morning that she had no update on Colson’s condition. Colson, 80, fell ill while speaking Friday at a conference outside Washington and “underwent surgery on Saturday morning to...

Turns out NT Wright is actually not who we think he is. Wright gave a rare interview to a UK website recently.  In that interview, he talks about Americans, and why his books on this side of the pond are actually written by NT Wright (rather than his new book in the UK, authored simply by “Tom” Wright… In America they tend to like the initials. The American book buying public, even at a popular level, like to think, ‘this is a serious chap I’m reading’. In the UK we have a different mood. We’re quite an anti-intellectual culture. It was felt that [using] my given name...

Oh… what a wonderful world we live in: