Suddenly what the Bible says about refugees matters, but about gays . . .

. . . or marriage, or divorce, or abortion, or the vow of poverty et cetera et cetera et cetera, not so much.

Purported Catholic Christopher Jolly Hale thinks walls are anti-Christian, but obviously hasn't visited the Vatican

Here.

Is the pope's wall anti-Christian?

Hale used to be a director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which was exposed by Wikileaks as an organization working for a progressive revolution in the Catholic Church.

In other words, he's a commie.

Aquí Me Coloco: President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod adopts the euphemism "undocumented immigrant" for "illegal alien"

Here:

The LCMS, he writes, “is doing everything possible within its capacities to assist you in compassionate action” toward immigrants. “We have and will continue to stand with Jesus’ mandate to ‘love your neighbor’ in the case of immigrants, documented or not, even as we provide assistance within the bounds of the law.”

Well, without Hispanics, the LCMS in North America is probably dead, so it's understandable.

And yeah, he's the leader of the conservatives. Think what the liberals want.

The Pecksniffian New York Times defends accepting Syrian refugees at a ratio of 1% Christian to 99% Muslim as representative

Ignoring the Obama administration's own declaration of a genocide against religious minorities on March 17, 2016, which Trump's policy seeks to address.

Here:

While only about one percent of the refugees from Syria resettled in the United States last year were Christian, the population of that country is 93 percent Muslim and only five percent Christian, according to Pew. And leaders of several refugee resettlement organizations said during interviews that it takes 18 months to three years for most refugees to go through the vetting process to get into the United States. Many Syrian Christians got into the pipeline more recently.

"Many Syrian Christians got into the pipeline more recently".

Yeah. They mean the ones who survived.

The rest were tortured, crucified or had their heads cut off before there even was a pipeline. An untold number of Christians has died in an officially declared genocide at the hands of ISIS since it took over parts of Syria and Iraq beginning in 2014. Perhaps over 1000 before that. 

Trump presidency to prioritize Christian refugees persecuted by Muslim fanatics, restoring balance

From the story here:

[A]bout 99 percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. were Muslim, while less than 1 percent were Christian.

The difference between Christianity Today's Ed Stetzer and a Lutheran

Ed Stetzer in Christianity Today here makes Kellyanne Conway own "alternative facts" like a Democrat would, or a fundamentalist, whereas a Lutheran would "put the best construction on everything", cut her some slack for the oxymoron, and grant that competing crowd estimates are just that, estimates, not facts (every reasonable person knows that's what Conway meant, but Ed's not being very reasonable, he's being a literalist):

Yet the Trump Administration is starting with a new version of facts—called “alternative facts” by Trump’s spokeswoman. That’s not helpful. This is a bad start and a problem for the Trump administration. 

The Eighth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

What does this mean?--Answer: We should fear and love God that we may not deceitfully belie, betray, slander, or defame our neighbor, but defend him, [think and] speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything.

Donald Trump takes the oath of office on his boyhood Bible today

I've got one just like it from my boyhood, but slightly more used.

The triple tradition says that Jesus broke the prime directive to pieces

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

-- Genesis 1:27f.

For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

-- Matthew 22:30

For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

-- Mark 12:25

And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.

-- Luke 20:34ff.

Martin Luther King Jr. was not a conservative, but someone who thought Christians could in some sense immanentize the eschaton

King, quoted here in WaPo:

“My friends,” Dr. King said in his Detroit sermon, “all I’m trying to say is that if we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind. That’s the only way that we would be able to make of our world a better world, and to make of this world what God wants it to be. . . .”

The sermon is noteworthy for King's utopian inveighing against hate as if it were not ineradicable:

It’s wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong! It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China! It was wrong in two thousand B.c., and it’s wrong in nineteen fifty-four A.D.! It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong! 

Yes, it's in there: "Money is the answer for everything"

Ecclesiastes 10:19

Truth comes like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome

Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome. We all pay an involuntary homage to antiquity. ... To the great majority of mortal eyes, Time sanctifies everything that he does not destroy. 

-- Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Volume 1 (London: 1841), p. 314. 

The 12-year old Jew who ate a salami sandwich on his front porch on Yom Kippur 1937 has died

Nat Hentoff, uncompromising defender of freedom of speech, reported here.

Stupidest story of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation: "Das Ende" on Playmobil Luther Bible is anti-Semitic

My KJV page at the end of the Old Testament: The End of the Prophets

Only a fool or a malcontent would fail to recognize the heretofore customary and universal editorial use of "the end". In this case, it's a malcontent, but it's fools who take his lies seriously.

Here:

Why was the word “END” written so prominently, Brumlik asked. “Theologically, there can be no other reason than that the ‘Old Testament’ and its validity should be seen as ended and superseded,” he wrote in the Berlin newspaper tageszeitung [sic]. 

My KJV page at the end of the New Testament: The End

WaPo runs op-ed by Michael Horton of Westminster Seminary in California, explaining the heterodoxy surrounding Donald Trump

Here. Not everyone in California is crazy.

Triumph through defeat: New Yorker music critic observes that Bach's understanding of the Lutheran theology of the cross may have been ahead of its time

Here:

You need not have seen the words Passio secundum Johannem at the head of the score to feel that this is the scene at Golgotha: an emaciated body raised on the Cross, nails being driven in one by one, blood trickling down, a murmuring crowd below. It goes on for nine or ten minutes, in an irresistible sombre rhythm, a dance of death that all must join.

What went through the minds of the congregation at the Nikolaikirche, in Leipzig, on Good Friday, 1724, when the St. John Passion had its first performance? A year earlier, Johann Sebastian Bach, aged thirty-nine, had taken up posts as the cantor of the St. Thomas School and the director of music for Leipzig’s Lutheran churches. He had already acquired a reputation for being difficult, for using “curious variations” and “strange tones.” More than a few of his works begin with gestures that inspire awe and fear. Several pieces from his years as an organ virtuoso practice a kind of sonic terrorism. The Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor feasts on dissonance with almost diabolical glee, perpetrating one of the most violent harmonies of the pre-Wagnerian era: a chord in which a D clashes with both a C-sharp and an E-flat, resulting in a full-throated acoustical scream.

In the St. John Passion, Bach’s art of holy dread assumes unprecedented dimensions. The almost outlandish thing about “Herr, unser Herrscher” is that it does not simply take the point of view of the mourners and the mockers. It also adopts the perspective of the man on the Cross, gazing up and down. Aspects of the music that seem catastrophic acquire a triumphant tinge. ...

If the good people of Leipzig understood that they were in the presence of the most stupendous talent in musical history, they gave no sign. Indeed, Bach removed “Herr, unser Herrscher” from the score when he revived the St. John the following year—a hint that his listeners may have gone away unhappy.

Two gather for the 5:15 PM Sunday service at St. Luke's Episcopal Cathedral, Portland, ME, and one of them was the priest

A female priest, and the male reporter, who was feeling "adrift".

From his story here:

The wide, empty nave was dark except for the light coming in through the stained-glass windows. My footsteps had never sounded louder as I walked toward the little octagonal chapel at the back, where the Rev. Anne Fowler sat alone by the altar.

“Oh,” she said. “I guess it’ll just be us tonight.”

I was the only one who’d shown up for the 5:15 service.

Too bad Eleanor Rigby wasn't there.