Terry Firma, though born and Journalism-school-educated in Europe, has lived in the U.S. for the past 20-odd years. Stateside, his feature articles have been published in the New York Times, Reason, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Wired. Terry was the founder and Main Mischief Maker of Moral Compass, a now-dormant site that pokes fun at the delusional claim by people of faith that a belief in God equips them with superior moral standards. He was the Editor-in-Chief of two Manhattan-based magazines until he decided to give up commercial publishing for professional photography... with a lot of blogging on the side. These days, he lives in an old seaside farmhouse in Maine with his wife, three kids, and two big dogs.
This case is remarkable in different ways. A couple were jailed on Friday for glorifying the murder of the soldier Lee Rigby in videos posted on YouTube that were “offensive in the extreme.” Royal Barnes, 23, and his wife Rebekah Dawson, 22, of Hackney, north-east London, recorded and uploaded three videos shortly after the murder in Woolwich, south-east London, last May. Barnes was jailed for five years and four months at the Old Bailey after admitting three counts of disseminating a terrorist publication and one of inciting murder. Dawson admitted disseminating a terrorist publication and was jailed for 20 months. … Before sentencing, Judge Brian Barker QC asked Dawson’s lawyer to confirm the defendant was the woman in the dock in the full veil. Earlier this year, Dawson admitted an unrelated charge of witness intimidation, after she waived her right to give evidence in her defense, arguing it was against her religious views to remove her veil. Barnes has previous convictions for using threatening words or behavior, and one for assault on a security guard at a mosque. He also has a five-year antisocial behavior order for taking part in vigilante patrols of east London promoting sharia law, the court was told. Read more
Perhaps the New York Daily News needed to fill its daily quota of oy-I’m-kvelling human-interest stories. How else to explain this opening paragraph? It was a gift from above, miraculously recovered from the ruins below. A decades-old Bible from the ravaged Spanish Christian Church was pulled from the East Harlem gas blast rubble by firefighters, an incredible find amid the carnage on Park Avenue. “The Word was preserved,” said the Rev. Rick Del Rio of Abounding Grace Ministries, who turned out for a Saturday prayer service on 116th St. That’s fantastic. A copy of the most common book in the world was saved (although I can appreciate that this specimen was special to the congregation, dating back to the church’s founding some eighty years earlier) — but eight people lost their lives, more than sixty residents got injured in the explosion, and more than a hundred other people were displaced. Praise God! Oh, the Almighty almost killed another person — after the good book was found in the rubble. Read more
In the just-posted Gwen Shamblin compilation below, the nineties diet guru from Tennessee talks (in multiple inadvertent double entendres) about “how to transfer a relationship with food over to a loving relationship toward God.” My favorite line: “He is not a wimpy lover; He is a passionate, jealous god!” Also: “Let him feel you as you have never been feeled before.” That’s hawt. Read more
How would you feel if you got an official letter that held you, an ordinary homeowner, responsible for the repairs of a local church? Even if you didn’t belong to the congregation and never set foot inside the building? That, amazingly, happens frequently in England and Wales. When Elaine Hession opened the letter she almost passed out, and her partner Jonathan Hill turned “as white as a ghost”. Last month the couple received a notice from the Land Registry informing them their local church had registered its right to make them contribute to the cost of repairs. Under chancel repair liability, homeowners living within the parishes of churches built before 1536 can be held liable for costs. Read more
