Cheap grace and American hedonism

Patrice Lewis stresses Christians' need to 'work in the vineyard'

" .  . .anyone who objected was intimidated into silence, including many churches. An exception was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who helped found the Confessing Church in Germany. Since he refused to be intimidated into silence, he was imprisoned, sent to a concentration camp and later executed.

"But his words live on, especially his searing analysis of what he called “cheap grace” where he rebukes nominal Christians: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”

"Repentance is working in the vineyard. Discipline is working in the vineyard. This is God’s way, not our way. We can’t choose to do whatever we want as long as it feels good and expect to be rewarded for our decisions. We need repentance and discipline.

"Just some rambling thoughts on this Resurrection weekend. May you all be blessed by Jesus’ sacrifice."

Dancing with the Scars

HopeNChange Cartoons

"For the record, Hope n' Change wouldn't want any president of the United States to lose his cool and change his schedule in the face of every terrorist attack overseas. We would, however, like him to make a sincere show of sympathy, anger, resolute leadership and - oh yeah! -not act like a completely spineless dweeb when our allies are suffering and Americans have been injured and possibly killed.

"As a case in point, following the carnage in Brussels and the president's much-criticized appearance at a Cuban baseball game with new BFF Raul Castro, Obama (and his huge entourage) jetted off to Argentina  . . ."

Bill Clinton might look at this photo and think, "Man, next year that'll be me dancing with her!"

The beach in La Jolla; 1911

History Things

"Southern California has an amazing history. Now known for its beautiful topography and large cities, California has long been a crowded and expensive place to live. That wasn’t always the case. Long settled for a thousand years by native American tribes, California was first discovered by the outside world in the 16th and 17th centuries by the Spanish and soon claimed in her name. In 1891 it became part of Mexico till it was “liberated” in the Mexican-American war of 1848. It became the United States 31 state in 1850. The picture above shows that all the way till the early 1900’s, you could find more livestock on the beaches than people, a far cry from the modern California we know today."

CARLOS EIRE: OBAMA’S INGLORIOUS SPEECH

"The second context is the location where the speech was delivered, the so-called Great Theater of Havana, a building stolen from its proper owners and renamed to hide that fact. The Orwellian sleight-of-hand reified by the building’s new name mirrored in many ways what was most significant about the speech: its contrived avoidance of historical facts and present-day realities."

 

Power Line
("NOTE: Interested readers will also want to check out Professor Eire’s “Theater of the absurd in Havana: Dissidents meet with the Great Visitor.' ”)

"Carlos Eire is professor of history at Yale and author of the National Book Award-winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. At Babalú Blog Professor Eire wrote a proposed speech for President Obama in Havana that was posted as“The speech never given, the op-ed never published”.  . . ."Seeking the opinion of Professor Eire on the speech Obama actually gave, I invited him to comment on it for Power Line readers. Professor Eire has graciously responded with the essay below; we are grateful to Professor Eire for the opportunity to publish his thoughts on the speech. Professor Eire writes:"

. . . "In Obama’s thinly disguised Marxist narrative there is a constant dialectic between an imperialist power (the United States) and an unjustly exploited subaltern (Cuba), and in this poisoned relationship, the United States is responsible for most of Cuba’s ills.

"The exploitation, said Obama, began with the Spanish-American War: “The blue waters beneath Air Force One once carried American battleships to this island — to liberate, but also to exert control over Cuba.”

"After that, with “control” over Cuba, the United States could not help but behave very badly. “Before 1959,” said Obma, “ some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption.”

"This is pure Castroite propaganda, which all Cubans born after 1959 have had force-fed to them as “history.” And in this false “history,” of course, it is always assumed that the Castro are the heroes who rescued Cubans from all of the exploitation.

"That an American president should parrot such lies tells us a lot about the character of such a president, and the real-world value of his speech to the enslaved Cuban people." . . .

A Gentle Reminder On Who We’re Voting Against

Earl of Taint

Hat tip to American Thinker

Krauthammer: Obama’s ideological holiday in Havana

Charles Krauthammer  "The split-screen told the story: on one side, images of the terror bombing in Brussels; on the other, Barack Obama doing the wave with Raul Castro at a baseball game in Havana. 

"On one side, the real world of rising global terrorism. On the other, the Obama fantasy world in which romancing a geopolitically insignificant Cuba — without an ounce of democracy or human rights yielded in return — is considered a seminal achievement of American diplomacy.

"Cuba wasn’t so much a legacy trip as a vanity trip, vindicating the dorm-room enthusiasms of one’s student days when the Sandinistas were cool, revolution was king and every other friend had a dog named Che.

"When Brussels intervened, some argued that Obama should have cut short his trip and come back home. I disagree. You don’t let three suicide bombers control the itinerary of the American president. Moreover, Obama’s next stop, Argentina, is actually important and had just elected a friendly government that broke from its long and corrupt Peronist past.

"Nonetheless, Obama could have done without the baseball. What kind of message does it send to be yukking it up with Raul even as Belgian authorities are picking body parts off the floor of the Brussels airport?" . . .

OBAMA: 'There's Little Difference Between Communism and Capitalism'...

"Just choose from what works"

. . . "For a more accurate breakdown of how capitalism beats socialism every time, watch the video below." . . .

Infowars  "President Obama has stoked controversy after he suggested to an audience of Argentinian youth that there was no great difference between communism and capitalism and that they should just “choose from what works”."

“ 'So often in the past there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate,” Obama said.

“ 'Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it really fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory. You should just decide what works,” he added.

"Obama went on to praise Cuba’s socialist system under dictator Raúl Castro, touting the country’s free access to basic education and health care, although he acknowledged that Havana itself “looks like it did in the 1950s” because the economy is “not working”.

"Obama concluded his comments by arguing that a market-based system “has to have a social and moral and ethical and community basis”.

"Reaction to the remarks wasn’t pretty." . . .
Tell me again, why is this man at the top of the presidential popularity list?