Merry Christmas, Texaco!

After being encouraged that some moderate Republicans (including one of our West Michigan congressmen) successfully blocked the agenda of conservative Republicans to open up oil drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the conservatives got what they want by employing a failsafe strategy: attach what you want to a Pentagon spending bill and spineless Democrats (and moderate Republicans) everywhere will cave. (After all, who wants to be seen as against the military?) Shameless, and disappointing. As one congressman put it:

"A can't-pass measure has been added to a must-pass measure in order for the Republicans to give an early huge Christmas gift to the oil companies of the United States," said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Whatever happened to the days when such ludicrous defense spending was not a de facto "must pass" measure?

Welcome Back, Mr. Hitchens?

It was wonderfully refreshing to actually see Christopher Hitchens offer a critique of the current administration, and in particular, the Defense Department's propaganda tactics in Iraq. Hitchens has been so busy defending the war in Iraq I was starting to think he was losing his contrarian edge. This piece in Slate is proof that some of the old Hitchens is still lurking inside his DC apartment. I suspect that the Orwellian in him just couldn't ignore the disturbing echoes of the "Ministry of Truth" in 1984.

[By the way, word on the (blog) street has it that Hitchens' next book will fill out his critique of religion. Warner Twelve will publish God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion. This should be the perfect foil for a book I've got in the works: On Religion: An Open Letter to Christopher Hitchens and Other Cultured Despisers.]

Give a Water Buffalo for Christmas

What to get for that special someone who has everything? How about a water buffalo? Or ducks? Or a mosquito net? Or even a house? Last year while we were in England we bought some gifts for our family through Oxfam: a goat and some ducks as I recall. The "gifts" were then sent to those who really needed them in the developing world.

This year we're doing the same thing through the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee. The CRWRC has set up a great "gift shop" that allows you to purchase a whole range of things for specific justice missions around the world--including all the suggestions noted above, as well as literacy classes in Haiti, seeds & tools in Sudan, school lunches in Romania, and much more. When you purchase the gift (online), you'll receive a card that you can shared with your loved one. Our families loved it. Consider doing it this Christmas!

Un-Natural Law? Alito on Non-Resident Aliens

The Washington Post ran a fairly disturbing analysis of some of Alito's opinions written opinions while serving as a senior lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department. Of particular interest--to me--was his rendering regarding the constitutional rights that are afforded (or not!) to not just illegal immigrants but also non-resident aliens--of which I am one! (I'm a Canadian, for the record--which will explain quite a lot for some of my critics.) In a January 1986 memo to the FBI director Alito said that constitutional rules that applied to citizens (in particular, the prohibition of spreading 'stigmatizing' information about someone) did not apply to nonresident immigrants. He also cited a 1950 Supreme Court case "to support the contention that nonresident immigarnts of other countries had 'no due process rights' under the Constitution."

One could point out just a couple of serious concerns here: first, this is just the kind of aggressive limitation of legal protection that fuels the current administration's "exceptional" stance vis-a-vis the Geneva Convention and a host of other human rights expectations for non-American citizens in custody. Second, such a constructionist or conventional notion of rights would seem to contradict Alito's own natural law philosophy. I'm no fan of natural law theory, but at least it mitigates against this kind of commodified treatment of non-resident aliens.

Political Time North of the Border

Today a no-confidence vote in the House of Commons dissolved the 38th Parliament in Canada. This will now kick off one of the longest election campaigns in the history of the country: 56 days. That doesn't leave much time for mudslinging, though we Canadians can be quite resourceful.

Canadian University Rankings

Many American's are familiar with the US News & World Report rankings of colleges and universities in the United States. Canada has a rough equivalent: the annual Maclean's ranking of Canadian universities.

(In Canada, "colleges" is a term used only to refer to community colleges and technical schools, which don't grant any kind of "degrees," not even an Associates. So in Canada, a high school senior going to the University of Toronto would say, "In the fall I'm going to university" [and yes, without the definitive article]. This always makes it a bit awkward when I'm back home and folks learn that I teach at Calvin College--which they tend to think of as some kind of community college.)

One significant difference is that the Maclean's ranking is pretty much comprehensive: except for a few small "private" universities (of which there are very few in Canada), this ranking evaluate every university in Canada under three categories: Medical Doctoral (universities with PhD programs, law schools, and med schools), Comprehensive (universities with doctoral programs but not med schools), and primarily undergraduate institutions.

This year McGill and the University of Toronto tied for top spot in what we might call "Canada's Ivy League" (we like to refer to Harvard as the McGill of the United States! ;-) Both are world-class institutions. In the comprehensive category, the University of Waterloo took top honors (I completed my undergraduate degree there). And in the primarily undergraduate category, it was mainly east coast or "Atlantic province" universities at the top, including St. Francis Xavier, Mount Allision (where I always dreamed of playing football when I grew up), and Acadia.

I sometimes find myself a bit homesick for the environs of Canadian universities, which I've always felt was quite different from the American scene (being in England last year reinforced some of that). The Maclean's ranking also includes some good articles exploring the unique challenges of Canadian higher education and research as it tries to resist the brain drain of American universities. Good reading.

Evangelicals Out of the Box: JKAS on NPR

This is probably shameless self-promotion that conflicts with good Calvinist humility, but Fors Clavigera readers might be interested in an upcoming NPR program. Krista Tippett's public radio program, "Speaking of Faith" will broadcast a show next week called "Evangelicals Out of the Box." It will feature conversatiosn with me and Fuller professor Nancey Murphy. The announcement of the program describes it this way:

Evangelicals Out of the Box

Stereotypes tell us this: Evangelical Christians are politically conservative, closed-minded, morally judgmental, and anti-science. We speak with Jamie Smith and Nancey Murphy, two creative members of a new generation of Evangelical thinkers and teachers, who defy stereotypes and reveal an evolving character for this vast movement that describes 40 percent of Americans.

The program will be released on October 21, and then air on stations throughout next weekend. But it will also be available on the web. For more info, visit the Speaking of Faith website. The site includes a listing of stations and broadcast times. Just FYI.

World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals

I have always found the notion of "public intellectual" interesting, but slippery--particularly given that there can be quite a plurality of publics. (The Church, as a public, might have a different set of public intellectuals than, say, the "public" as defined by the NYT. I've often thought that if a particular congregation represents a certain "public," then there should be a sense in which the pastor is its public intellectual. I think this has traditionally been the case in black churches, and was historically in Protestant churches.)

In any case, Prospect magazine, in conjunction with Foreign Policy, recently proposed The World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals. An interesting list to browse (keep in mind that one of the criteria was that the figures must still be alive). Several philosophers make the list (e.g., Dennett, Walzer, Rorty), a couple of theologians (Benedect XVI and Hans Kung), couple of cultural theorists (Negri, Zizek), and my favorite journalist, Christopher Hitchens.

One interesting lens through which to think about the list: I don't know if there is a single Protestant on the list. What about Rowan Williams? Or Cornel West?

Our History of Violence

I finally had the opportunity to see David Cronenberg's new film, A History of Violence, starring Viggo Mortensen (as Tom Stall), with an excellent performance by William Hurt (as Richie Cusak).

As you'd guess, the film very much interrogates violence on a number of different levels, with various kinds of "disturbance": from a sado-masochistic erotic scene to violence against children, coupled with key scenes involving bodily tissues and fluids. (Having been tipped off to the latter in A.O. Scott's NYT review, my wife passed and I went with my friend, Mark.)

Cronenberg is clearly out to de-aestheticize violence that is a staple of Hollywood, and increasingly, our cultural practices. There is a way that he is trying to wake up us up to what we might call, loosely paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, the "banality of violence."

But the final sequence of the film is highly ambiguous, and so one wonders what Cronenberg is after. Clearly, the closing scenes invite theological reflection. [Note: if you've not seen the film, and plan to, don't read any further.]

The closing sequence is launched by a Cain & Abel encounter between brothers Joey Cusak (Mortensen) and Richie Cusak--invoking the "first violence" of Genesis 4. As Richie peers up the barrel of Joey's pistol, he pleads, "Jesus, Joey..." Joey responds with a bullet to Richie's forehead, looks over his brother's body, and then mutters under his breath, almost shaking his head: "Jesus, Richie..."

We then cut to a scene of Joey at the lake behind Richie's mansion, peeling off his blood-stained clothes (casting off the "old man" as it were), and washing himself in the baptismal waters of the lake. He then makes the long trip back from Philadelphia to his (now disrupted) ho-hum farm house in rural Indiana. Walking into his house, his family (who all now know his history of violence), are quietly eating at the table. In silence, the youngest daughter prepares a place for him at the table, inviting him to join the meal. His son Jack, who was enraged by his father's history of violence, passes him the meatloaf as an extension of hospitality, and his wife, Edie, simply looks at him through tears...and the celluloid goes dark. The film seems to end with this eucharistic hospitality, where the history of violence is forgiven when Tom/Joey is welcomed to the table.

But I think that such a reading is taking Cronenberg's bait. In other words, I think that Cronenberg is playing with us here, inviting us to see redemption where there is none. The utter ambiguity of the final scenes--including remarkably ambiguous expressions on the face of Tom and Edie--invites quite a different reading, one that is much more cynical. On this reading, Cronenberg is slyly inviting us to see our implication in violence, our own history of violence. (The use of the sex in the film is clearly intended to suck us into being erotically charged by violence, which is exactly what Hollywood [and Fox News] lives off of.) So on this alternative, decidedly un-Christian and perhaps even "pagan" reading (thinking of Milbank's discussion of the pagan in Theology and Social Theory), the first violence of Cain & Abel is a necessary violence, replayed over and over again, without end and without escape from the cycle. Joey's washing in the lake is not a redemptive cleansing, but more a matter of "washing one's hands," the wistful illusion of being done with violence, when in fact it is violence which nourishes all our practices and privileges. And his silent welcome to the table at home is not a matter of eucharistic hospitality and forgiveness, but rather the silent complacency that wants to act "as if" we weren't implicated, "as if" the violence never happened, "as if" we can just get on with out lives and not talk about it. At the heart of this reading is a heightened sense of the banality of violence--that the pristine peace of every Mayberry is built upon a history of violence.

And I think it is precisely this second, alternative reading which would be the most "Christian." In other words, the real theological import of A History of Violence will be found in refusing the easy, almost trite, identification of Christian symbols and instead seeing in them a more sinister implication of us in our own histories of violence. In other words, I think Christians should read A History of Violence as a pagan comedy, not a Christian tragedy.

Orwell, Foucault, and the State of Urban Public Schools

Jonathan Kozol's recent Harper's essay, "Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid" is one of those pieces that makes you want to just crawl into a corner and sob--right after you find somebody to shout at because of the terrible pain in your gut.

Documenting years of visits and conversations with children, teachers, principals, and education bureaucrats at state and federal levels, Kozol paints the picture of a nation that is clearly going backwards. Fifty years after the supposed 'victory' of Brown v. Board of Education, Kozol shows that civil rights legislation hasn't erased racism, and that legislation for equality needs to be backed up by tax laws that could actually fund equality--but we all know that in that respect, America is headed down the wrong road. Not even Democrats have the courage to talk about raising taxes anymore! I confess to feeling overwhelmed by the direction this nation is headed. How does this happen?

Kozol provides a stark picture by considering the "head start" that suburban white children get, and shows up the ridiculous language of "accountability" that we get from the "No Child Left Behind" Act:

Three years later, in third grade, these children are introduced to what are known as "high-stakes tests," which in many urban systems now determine whether students can or cannot be promoted. Children who have been in programs like those offered by the "Baby Ivies" since the age of two have, by now, received the benefits of six or seven years of education, nearly twice as many as the children who have been denied these opportunities; yet all are required to take, and will be measured by, the same examinations. Which of these children will receive the highest scores? The ones who spent the years from two to four in lovely little Montessori programs and in other pastel-painted settings in which tender and attentive and well-trained instructors read to them from beautiful storybooks and introduced them very gently for the first time to the world of numbers and the shapes of letters, and the sizes and varieties of solid objects, and perhaps taught them to sort things into groups or to arrange them in a sequence, or to do those many other interesting things that early childhood specialists refer to as prenumeracy skills? Or the ones who spent those years at home in front of a TV or sitting by the window of a slum apartment gazing down into the street? There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-old inner-city child "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier.

If this isn't haunting enough, he goes on to provide a picture of urban school regimens that sound like they're lifted right out of the pages of Foucault's Discipline and Punish or Orwell's 1984. The picture is so overwhelming, it's hard to know how to respond except in a psalm of lament.

Above All, Save the Merchandise

In the face of al-Quaeda's attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, the White House's admonition was clear: "Shop." The one thing the enemy won't destroy is our freedom to go the mall.

And now, in the wake of a national tragedy, we find a similarly ridiculous focus on the market and merchandise. From the NYT:

With police officers and National Guard troops giving priority to saving lives, looters brazenly ripped open gates and ransacked stores for food, clothing, television sets, computers, jewelry and guns, often in full view of helpless law-enforcement officials. Dozens of carjackings, apparently by survivors desperate to escape, were reported, as were a number of shootings.

On Wednesday night, Mayor Nagin ordered 1,500 police officers, most of the city's force, to turn from search and rescue to stopping the looting.

While children remain stranded on rooftops without fresh water or food, and corpses floating past them, the Mayor is channeling precious human resources to protect Wal-Mart. This is akin to police chases over a stolen $13,000 Honda as justification for lives lost.

Grief over a national tragedy is compounded by an overwhelming sense of the amoral tentacles of the market squeezing our very imaginations.

A Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank

I've enjoyed being a part of a new venture launched by Stephen Bush called "Generous Orthodoxy: Think Tank." This creates the space for some excellent conversation between evangelicals scholars, graduate students, and practitioners who want to both push the envelope but also remain faithful to the tradition. It includes some of the sharpest young voices in evangelical theology such as John Franke and LeRon Shults. That it has been taking up far too much of my time is testament to how valuable this site will be.

Oh, well, if it's biblical...

I was glad, or at least relieved, to see evangelical leaders--including even Al Mohler--roundly denounced Pat Robertson's remarks about assassinating Hugo Chavez. And Christian charity also requires me to acknowledge that, after some curious backpedalling (in which Robertson seemed to become a deconstructionist as he waxed eloquent about the dissemination of meaning around the phrase "take out," as if the meaning of the word "assassination" was determined by reader-response!), Roberts has now apologized for his comment (though not to Chavez).

However, there's another gem in this news cycle. Marvin Olansky, editor of World magazine (favored periodical of evangelicals devoted to America's civil religion), while criticizing Robertson, also suggested that "Biblically, assassination may be used in times of war, last time I looked we were not at war with Venezuela."

I have not the least doubt that Olansky has "chapter-and-verse" to support this notion, but I'm honestly trying to imagine the hermeneutical framework and biblical theology that could make such a claim possible.

Benedict XVI at World Youth Day

World Youth Day in Cologne looked like a stunning event--a richly international gathering of Catholic youth from around the globe. While they displayed some of the exuberant features of North American youth culture (I saw "the wave" making its rounds at one point), one must also be struck at how radically different this Catholic youth movement is from dominant strains of evangelical youth culture, which seems captive to an entertainment model and mimicks a kind of MTV-ized version of the faith. The 11th commandment for evangelical youth pastors seems to be, "Thou shalt not be un-cool" (playing right into the hands of the "Merchants of Cool").

But World Youth Day is eminently successful precisely because in many ways, they reject cool. Here's an elderly man (not even as charismatic as his predecessor), dressed in anything but hip clothes (no GAP or baggy jeans in his vestments), who refuses to talk down to them. I was able to watch some of the beautiful Marienfeld Vigil on the Saturday night. Benedict XVI's address at this vigil was inspiring: inviting them to tread the way of the Magi, he noted that the wise men were seeking "true justice that can only come from God." He noted that the king they found was quite different from their expectations, forcing them to rethink their entire paradigm of "power." The baby king "contrasts the the noisy and ostentatious power of this world with the defenceless power of love, which succumbs to death on the Cross." He went on to admonish these young people that "only form the saints, only from God, does true revolution come, the definitive way to change to the world." Unlike most youth events I've experienced in evangelical subculture which usually just invite kids to stop having sex, Benedict XVI was inviting these young people to a mode of political discipleship intimately tied to the Church (this is not about a "private Jesus" he said) and the sacraments.

Admittedly, I'm still bothered by a deep tension in Benedict XVI's vision: on the one hand, he argues that true justice and true revolution are tied to the Cross and the Church; on the other hand, he speaks in more generally theistic, natural-law-like terms because he wants to invoke God's justice as something to which Europe (as such) should be subject. So there is a lingering nostalgia for Christendom. Or, if I could put it otherwise, there is a deep tension, I think, between his Christological/crucicentric emphasis and his natural law desires. What would correct this, or at least humble the natural-law side of the tension, is a more robust account of sin coupled with a more specific pneumatology. Why should we think that "Europe" would embrace the foolishness of the cross?

Who Would Jesus Assassinate?

I'm not one to caricature the Religious Right by taking Pat Robertson as the norm. However, that Robertson could--on air on the 700 Club--openly call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (one of several leftist leaders in South America), and that this wouldn't cause an uproar amongst religious convervatives--such a scenario surely is some kind of indicator of the degree to which the conservative religious imagination in America has become captive to forces that have less to do with following Jesus and more about protecting the American way.

Wanted: Tickets to NYC

While I will have just landed from Spain, I find myself wishing for some mode of ominpresence as I've just seen that Christopher Hitchens is going to be debating George Galloway in New York on Sept. 14! Readers of Fors Clavigera will have found (qualified) praise of both in previous posts.

Donations for airfare to NYC would be happily accepted! :-) But in lieu of such patronage, if anyone can make it and take notes, please contribute to my envy by passing them along. (For the record, I expect Hitchens to carry the day.)

Africa, Poverty, and America's Empty Promises: or Why Bono's Wrong

The Council on Foreign Relations has provided the transcript of a fascinating and enlightening discussion with Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs on the question, "Can We End Global Poverty?" Sachs is particularly forthright on how out of step the American position on African aid really is:

SACHS: Most of us that have looked at this in recent years--and I've been looking at this intensively for about a decade now--believe that if we're going to help the impoverished regions get out of a trap of disease, hunger, environmental degradation, excessive population growth, and the whole spiral of disasters, we must provide serious financing. And there now is pretty much a worldwide consensus on this, except in the United States, which stands aloof from that consensus. And we have a pretty deeply ingrained feeling in this country that we should not do more. That's a feeling that has many different roots. But when George Bush said to Tony Blair last week, "We won't do more," he was expressing what is a commonly held belief in American politics.

He also documents the way in which even the aid that is promised translates into almost no real significant contribution toward development. Here Sachs tries to demythologize the impressions we have about aid that is promised:

The biggest myth--if I could just filibuster for one more minute on this--the biggest myth in our country is how much aid we give and how much has gone down the drain. This is what I confront every day, many times a day from hate mail, to questions, and so forth. Let me just run through, if I could, what we actually do for Africa.

The U.S. aid to Africa is $3 billion this year. That $3 billion is roughly divided into three parts: The first is emergency food shipments. Of the billion or so in emergency food shipments, half of that, roughly $500 million, is just transport costs. So the commodities are maybe half a billion dollars. That's not development assistance, that's emergency relief. The second billion is the AIDS program, now standing at about $1 billion. That, on the whole, is a good thing. I would call it a real program. It's providing commodities; it's providing relief. It started late and it's too small, but it's there. The third billion is everything else we do for child survival, maternal survival, family planning, roads, power, water and sanitation, malaria; everything is the third $1 billion. Most of that, approaching 80 percent, is actually American consultant salaries. There's almost no delivery of commodities, for example. There's essentially zero financing to help a country build a school or build a clinic or dig a well.

When you get down to it, the actual financing we provide to help Africans invest in their future is well under $1 per African per year. Then, the politicians say--as George Bush did yesterday--we give so much money and it's misused; we won't let that happen. The fact is we put in almost no funding, and it accomplishes almost nothing. And then we bemoan the waste. I don't know how to break through that misunderstanding. That's what I've been trying to do for many years, but it's very, very powerful in this country.

And so he explicitly notes that Bono's modus operandi, which is to never criticize the Bush administration (but rather kiss their butt because they hold the biggest purse strings) is, when it comes down to it, a futile endeavor:

Bono's belief has been that being nice is going to be the way to bring everyone along. And everything that's been announced has been championed. We get good headlines for the Millennium Challenge Corporation. We say it's wonderful. The Bush administration claims it's tripled aid to Africa, which, aside from the fact that you can multiply three times an insignificant number and still get an insignificant number, it's also not even true in terms of the numbers.

But this is an administration that people don't like to take on head-on. You get slammed when you do it. They work very closely with the White House, Bono and his group, because they think that that's what's going to bring--that's what's going to bring everything along. I mean, Bono's not only well-meaning, he's heartfelt and earnest, and incredibly hardworking, and I admire him enormously for it. But my job is to know the arithmetic, and we're not solving the problems. We're just talking about them.

I would highly recommend reading the Sachs interview in tandem with Bill McKibben's Harper's article on "The Christian Paradox," where he very simply but clearly documents the disconnect between all the Christian rhetoric that fills political airwaves in this country and the actual practices of a developed nation with a disastrous infant mortality rate, a singular and really astonishing commitment to the death penalty, and a trigger-happy tendency to militarism.

When Even "Realism" Starts to Look Good...

I am no fan of "realism" as a doctrine--either in foreign policy, or in terms of the Nieburhrian project for public theology. However, I must say that in wake of neocon idealism, a little dose of even realism is a welcome relief! This is clearly articulated in an excellent NYT editorial today from Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs. Rose provides a fascinating account of the dialectic of American foreign policy in which a nagging idealism (the legacy, I might suggest, of our Puritan founding) keeps rearing its head, only to run up against the "reality" of what even Rose calls "a fallen world." This dialectic plays itself out through the election cycle, with idealists being chastised and replaced by realists. Quite a convincing history.

The hook for this piece is Rose's suggestion that Bush Jr.'s idealism (newly adopted after 9/11) is now being de-fanged by Rice's realism. But the problem with this picture is something that Rose himself notes: Rice and the realists in the State department "still believe in American power and the global spread of liberal democratic capitalism." Well, then, they're not really realists, are they? This continued commitment to an idealist democratic peace theory and export of American democracy pursued with missionary zeal would suggest that Rose's obituary for the administration's idealism is a bit premature.

How to Get Your Hands Dirty: On the Myth of Pacifist "Withdrawal"

Just a pointer to a little piece of mine on the so-called "just war" challenge to risk "dirty hands" for the sake of justice: http://www.perspectivesjournal.org/2005/06/seeit-hands.php.

Jesus and Petroleum

I finally got a chance to watch "I Heart Huckabees" last night: a fun-enough pop-existential film a couple of notches up from "Garden State." It probably tries to be a bit too smart (the film centers around a couple of "existential detectives" well-played by Dustin Hoffman and Lili Tomlin), but at least it doesn't resort to name-dropping--despite ample opportunity to do so in a film that references angst and deconstruction.

But for my money, one scene was worth the price of the rental. Tommy (Mark Wahlberg) and Albert--the existential seekers in the film--end up in the suburban home of a nice Christian family. They sit to dinner with the family but when it becomes apparent that they have a couple of "philosophers" in the house, Dad becomes nervous. The one thing not allowed in their house is questions--no doubts, no anxieties, no sneaking out at night to expose oneself to the yawning abyss, etc. But Tommy and Albert are rife with questions about meaning and justice. And so a snippet of the conversation:

Mrs. Hooten: Albert, what brought you to the philosophical club?
Albert Markovski: You mean the existential detectives?
Mr. Hooten: Sounds like a support group.
Cricket: Why can't he use the church?
Mrs. Hooten: Sometimes people have additional questions to be answered.
Cricket: Like what?
Albert Markovski: Well, um, for instance - if the forms of this world die, which is more real,the me that dies or the me that's infinite? Can I trust my habitual mind or do I need to learn to look beneath those things?

Tommy's particular concern is humanity's wanton addiction to petroleum that is ravaging the planet and the fine-knit interconnections of the universe. So it doesn't take him long to castigate Dad for the mammoth SUV in the driveway, remarking how angry God must be with him for not being a better steward of creation--to which the young daughter replies:

Cricket: Jesus is never mad at us if we live with Him in our hearts!
Tommy Corn: I hate to break it to you, but He is - He most definitely is.