Boo!

Halloween is the time when you find out that a whole lot of reasonably intelligent people believe in ghosts.
Neither my understanding of science or my theology has any room for misty spirits of the dead wandering around this mortal plane.
Scientists have come a cropper at finding evidence for life of any sort hanging around after death. And let's face it, those ghostbuster types who shop on basic cable documentaries aren't real scientists.
Christian theology is based on the resurrection of the body, not a disincarnate spirit floating around either here or in the hereafter. The Hebrew scriptures saw humans as a psycho-somatic unity -- body and soul inextricably linked, and early Christian theologians like Paul followed suit. It was St. Augustine, who welded Greek philosophy to Christian thinking, that gave us the idea of spirits. It was Plato who saw the body as the "prison house of the soul" and that the death of the body "freed" the soul.
But that's not how the Gospels depicted the resurrection of Christ. The Risen Lord had some meat on his bones.
And I know that the Scriptures now and then throw a monkey wrench into my neat interpretation. The witch of Endor scared the bejabbers out of King Saul by raising up the ghost of Samuel, after all.
But on the whole, the ghost thing just doesn't make it for me. And those idiots who claim they can talk to the dead -- John Edwards springs to mind -- are outright frauds. Come on, if the dead were right next to him, don't you think they'd stop mumbling and giving messages to loved ones that sound like the dearly departed playing charades?

Are the Eagles really a bunch of turkeys?

The Eagles, nobody's idea of the hardest-working guys in showbiz, have finally released a bunch of new music. Not like the world's been waiting with bated breath for aging LA hipsters to give us their view of the way things are, man. But, you know, some of us thought "Hotel California" wasn't bad, so we'd like to pick up this new CD.
But hold on a minute there, hombre.
Turns out the calicas-loving stoners have worked out an eclusive distribution deal with...wait for it...Wal-Mart.
That's right you can only pick up "Long Walk Out Of Eden'' at that bastion of uber-capitalism, Wal-Mart.
This is worse than when Led Zeppelin decided to shill for Cadillac.

Come back, Arthur Branch: All is forgiven

So it turns out that the U.S. State Department has given immunity to the whole Blackwater crew responsible for various and sundry acts of mayhem and carnage in Iraq. Which makes it hard to actually punish anybody for the crimes.
Hasn't Condoleeza Rice ever watched "Law & Order?" Cripes, it's only on TV every blessed hour of the day on basic cable! You give one skel immunity so he'll testify against the other miscreants. You don't give them all immunity, otherwise Sam Waterston hasn't got anything to do for the second half hour.
Iraq makes even smart Americans stupid.

The Good, The Bad or The Dumb?

My "Only Human'' column in today's paper, "Not-so-brief-encounter," caused a bit of a stir in the newsroom.
Take a gander at it. Go ahead, I'll wait.
There. The question seemed to be whether my actions on that Sunday morning indicated that I had done a good thing, a bad thing or an out-and-out stupid thing.
Let me tell you - most people definitely came down on the bad/stupid side of the moonshiner's fence.
But I'd be interested in what you think.

Stars and dreams for a cure

Occasionally, I do more than plug myself in these blogs.
For instance, let me tell you about a benefit happening Monday, Oct. 29, at Branches, 123 Monmouth Road, Long Branch.
A woman named Maria Frangella Cicillini, who with her husband owns the Rigoletto Trattoria in Middletown, is a colon cancer survivor. She has been cancer-free since 1995, and in the last few years has begun a foundation to raise money for cancer research at Sloan-Kettering.
One of those efforts is coming Monday from 6-11 p.m. The third annual event at Branches includes a cocktail hour, open bar, a three-course dinner, live entertainment, gift auction, silent auction and a raffle. All of this for a tax-deductible $150. Reservations are still being accepted. For more information, call Maria at 732-492-2916 and visit her Web site at http://www.mfffccr.org/

Are you goosing the bottom line? Probably not.

A newly released survey of almost 90,000 employees in 19 countries has found that only about one in five of us proletariats are "engaged workers'' -- engaged being defined as willingness to go the extra mile for the boss.
Let's assume for a minute that you're reading this at work. This is not the sort of thing that's going to make you an "engaged employee.''
On the other hand, my writing this puts me firmly in that category. I don't get paid any extra for blogging these musings, but they tell me that this sort of thing is absolutely vital to the future of the company.
Apparently, once the boys down at the lab figure out a cheaper alternative to fish wrap and bird-cage liner than the Asbury Park Press, you're all going to get your news via the Internet, and it'll be up to me to keep you entertained or at least mildly amused.
But I'm more than happy to help out my corporate masters. There's self-interest involved here, of course. Yet, there's more to it than that. I actually like my bosses, (and man, oh man, do I have a lot of them) and want to do well by them. One of the things I like about them is that they'll let me make fun of their less-brilliant notions before I go off to make a silk purse out of their sow's ear of an idea.
The study says that engaged workers actually increase the amount of money a company brings in. Listen, I'm glad to help.
Now, about that raise....
The results of the survey can be found at http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/few-workers-engaged-work-most/story.aspx?guid=%7BF43DB94E-797D-4D26-9593-0B0C65948F76%7D

#@%#&* in the workplace

Yehuda Baruch, a professor of management at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, has researched the potty mouths of the proletariat and come to the conclusion that regular swearing at work can improve morale.
No ****, Sherlock.
This seems obvious to me.
Oddly enough, though, the opposite was the case back in my days as a pastor. Cussing up a storm was generally frowned upon in those circumstances.
And newsrooms are kind of genteel places these days, and swearing is kept to a minimum. There is a thin line between a colorful vocabularly and a hostile work environment, after all
But swearing accomplishes some things that poetry can't: swearing among peers can help blow off steam, build team spirit in a "we're all in this together" sort of way, and can be pretty funny if done right.
That's always been my beef with profligate cussers: they don't know how to do it right.
Here are a few of Riley's Rules For Swearing:
1) Children should never swear -- it's ugly and creepy.
2) Adolescents should never swear -- they just sound stupid.
3) Stubbing your toe in the dark -- let 'em fly.
4) In the connubial bed chanmber -- it's better if both parties like a little dirty talk. This is one case where blushing is not helpful.
5) At work -- this is like the court etiquette in medieval monarcharies. I wouldn't curse in front of the boss, unless he or she dropped the f-bomb first.
I'd be interested in knowing if you have rules for bad speech.

Immanuel

I really don't want to turn this blog into a Bible study or anything, but it probably wouldn't hurt to look at a passage or two to get the lay of the land.
The writer of the Gospel of Matthew, when he tells the story of Jesus' birth, mentions Mary's virginity and says, "All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and they will call him Immanuel -- which means "God with us.'"
Well, you ask yourself, which prophet predicted this? 'Cause that's uncanny.
It turns out Isaiah said it -- sort of -- and it wasn't a messianic prophecy.
If you look at the passage in Isaiah to which Matthew refers -- Isaiah 7:14 -- you notice a couple of things. First of all, Hebrew had a word for virgin, but that's not the word Isaiah used. He used the word "almah" a word that means "a young woman of marriageable age, irrespective of her sexual status.
Isaiah used that word because he wasn't writing about the messiah. He was warning King Ahaz not to fret about which nation to ally Israel with. A young woman shall conceive, he tells the king, and by the time that child is old enough to eat solid foods, the rulers he worries about will not be a problem. It would make no sense for Isaiah to tell Ahaz, "You wait a few hundred years, and you'll see I'm right." He was speaking about the near future in his time and circumstance. And any plain reading of the whole chapter shows that.
What Matthew did was to find in that story the truth for him -- that as God had used a son as a sign in the past, in Jesus, God uses a son as a son in a big way.
But again, it's not blindness that keeps all the Jewish people from believing that Jesus is the Messiah. They read the text in its own context. And we'd all be a lot better off if everybody did that with their own Scriptures.

Every tongue confesses, Part 2

Somebody responded to my previous blog about Ann Coulter's latest outrage, the one where she said what a wonderful world it would be if all the Jews saw the light, this way:
"Ann Coulter says the same thing Michael Riley says (and every other minister and Rabbi for that matter). The difference is Riley says it more politely. Same meaning, different words."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's about six different kinds of wrong.
Judaism is not what you would call a prosyletizing religion. So rabbis are not saying the sort of thing that Ann Coulter says.
And while there are some Christians who would think nothing of buttonholing Jewish people and bending their ears about how if they would just read the Old Testament they'd see Jesus playing peek-a-boo all over its pages, I'm not one of them. And neither are most ministers I know.
And by the way, using different words often means you're trying to convey a different meaning.

Where is God when we need Ann Coulter Struck Dumb?

So, Ann Coulter thinks the Jews need to be "perfected'' by getting down with Jesus Christ. That's the gist of her latest contretemps, this time on an MSNBC show hosted by Donnie Deutsch.
Let's forget for a moment that if Coulter wants to hold herself out as what perfected Judaism looks like, I'm gonna convert to the Druids.
She can point to Christian Scriptures all she likes: "Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." "Go into all the world, and make disciples.'' Hey, I can quote them, too.
But those sorts of passages need to be radically reinterpreted in the light of the 20th century, when unspeakable things were done to the Jewish people, and Christians were complicit in the Holocaust no matter how you slice it.
It's an arrogance of faith and a corruption of American ideals to start talking about the conversion of the Jews.
Back in 1982, when I was a student at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, I took a course in Missions. One student asked the professor, "Shouldn't we be out prosyletizing the Jews?''
The professor answered, "We've had 2,000 years of Christian enmity toward the Jews. Maybe we should have 2,000 years of loving them before we even start to think about talking to them about Jesus.''
Amen.
In college, a professor of mine once told a class, "If you doubt that God has a special place for the Jewish people ask yourself this, 'Where the hell are the Hittites?'''
The Hittities are gone, he meant, along with the Moabites, the Amorites and a whole lot of other Hebrew Scripture "-ites.'' But Jews are still around.
Ann Coulter is an idiot. But God loves idiots, too.
I have a little trouble being quite that loving.

Sue: "I hab a bad cod...''

I was talking to a colleague around lunch time when my wife called me.
It turns out that she had tried to go to work today and lasted but a few hours before the virus she's had just laid her low and she came on home.
After our conversation ended, I turned back to a coworker.
"That was the human petri dish I married," I explained. "When it comes to fending off the odd rhinovirus, she's like France -- waving the white flag of phlegm."
My coworker looked at me coolly.
"Well," she said, "at least she has you to support her in her time of need.''
I recognize sarcasm when I hear it.
But honest to goodness, Susan's body just seems to say, "Hellooo, sailor!" to every germ and bug around.
Her sinuses are sanctuary cities for alien infections.
She had a string of such maladies our first year of marriage.
"I know I married you in sickness and health, sweetie," I said to her. "When do we get to the healthy part?"
Sue didn't miss a beat.
"I married you for richer and for poorer," she said. "When do we get to the richer part?"
She gets a little cranky when she's under the weather.

Songs of "Magic": Part 3

It's been said that rock and roll is basically happy music about sad things.
If that's true, "We're Livin' In the Future" is the happiest song about the saddest things on Springsteen's new album "Magic."
Musically, the song is related to "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" or "Out Of Work," a song Bruce wrote for Gary U.S. Bonds. It's bright and breezy, a real toe-tapper. And the lyrics are odd, at first seeming to be about a couple who are avoiding the problems of a relationship by living in the future, where, "none of this has happened yet."
But on stage, Springsteen has been telling the audience that this song is about an America that condones torture, illegal wiretapping and other things that betray its own promises to itself, and how denial is a failed attempt to ignore it all.
It is all there in the song:
"Woke up Election Day," he sings, "skies gunpowder and shades of gray'' and "My ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon.''
But it is the staccato rhythm of lines like "Your boot heels clickin'/Like the the barrel of a pistol spinnin' round" or the alliteration in this: "My faith's been torn asunder/tell me is that rollin thunder/Or just the sinking sound/of somethin' righteous goin' under?''
And the question seems too much to even ask, as the chorus comes in:
"Don't worry Darlin/now baby don't you fret/We're livin in the future/
and none of this has happened yet."
Just forget it all, the music seems to say with its organ riff, sax solo, and propulsive drumming.
But there are the lyrics putting the lie to the chorus.
It's a paradox of the song and that may be what makes it so good.
But you can't live on paradox, even the toe-tapping kind. This song is followed by "Your Own Worst Enemy'' a midtempo song about the foe in the mirror, about how we turn into what we hate if we're not careful: "Your flag it flew so high,'' Springsteen sings at the end, "It drifted into the sky.'' And as that flag drifts, so, too, it seems, does the nation. And if you listen carefully, after the voice of the singer fades and the music fades, you can hear a bell tolling.

Popular culture in my rear-view mirror

I'm expecting something in the mail, and I said so to a young co-worker.
"I'm as excited as a kid waiting for a package from Battle Creek, Mich.,'' is the way I put it.
A blank stare from the co-worker.
"You don't what I'm talking about, do you?'' I asked.
He shook his head, and I explained about cereal boxtops and how you mailed them off to Battle Creek to get your prize.
I'm just shy of 50 and I figure that if I know what "23 Skidoo'' means, it's not too much to ask that 20-somethings have some knowledge of the way the world worked in 1965.

Giuliani to archbishop: I'm rubber, you're glue...

Raymond Burke, the archbishop of St. Louis, said recently that, what with Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's pro-choice position, he could deny the former New York mayor communion.
So how does Giuliani respond?
"Archbishops have a right to their opinion, you know," he said. "There's freedom of religion in this country. There's no estabished religion, and archbishops have a right to their opinion. Everybody has a right to their opinion.''
This goes to show you that people can be simultaneously technically correct and monumentally stupid.
Of course, there's freedom of religion. Of course, people are entitled to their opinion.
But once you pick a religion, there are rules and tenets and stuff. If you can't abide by them, you switch religions. Catholic teaching is pretty clear on the issue of abortion (and on the issues of adultery and divorce, come to think of it) and the archbishop, in exercising his freedom of religion and the dictates of his conscience and understsnding of church doctrine, is perfectly free to show Rudy the door if he steps up to the communion rail.
Someone should tell him he can't have his communion wafer and eat it, too.

The songs of "Magic:'' "You'll Be Comin' Down''

When I first heard this, I thought it was a "she done him wrong'' song. With a chorus like "You'll be comin' down now, baby/You'll be comin' down/What goes around, it comes around and/You'll be comin' down,'' that's what springs to mind.
If this was the case, it would be unusual. Springsteen rarely does these kinds of songs. Relationships go south in his music, but the blame is generally fixed on both parties.
Then I figured it was in the "Like A Rolling Stone'' mode: a cautionary tale tinged with some bitterness.
But there is no bitterness in the singer's voice: he's singing in a straight-forward manner. These are the facts - "You'll be fine as long as you're pretty face holds out/Then it's gonna get pretty cold out'' -- interrupted at times by a soaring saxophone. The singer's voice is doubled at times, and more on the chorus, as if to say, "This isn't just me talking.'' The whole world knows that this is how the world works.
"Like a thief on a Sunday morning'' Springsteen says, ''It all falls apart with no warning,'' an interesting twist on Jesus' eschatological warning of bad times coming "like a thief in the night.''

The songs of "Magic'': Part one

Springsteen's new album with the E Street Band, "Magic,'' hit the stores today and Springsteen fans will pore over it like linguists studying the Rosetta Stone. The man can turn a phrase and write a tune.
The thing is, those of us who grew up on Springsteen are now getting older with him and what we hope is that the songs will still tell us things we need to know about our lives these days.
It's always a risk to take on the songs one by one. It's part of the Springsteen mythos that he conceives albums as a whole, designed to tell a story moving songs on and off any given album, reconfiguring song order until he gets it right.
But for now, let's just take them as they come.
"Radio Nowhere''
A sonic blast of guitar and drum begins the song -- a rock 'n' roll Emergency Broadcast Signal -- and then the message: "I was tryin' to find my way home,'' Springsteen sings.
And in these dark times, who isn't?
The singer wants to know, "Is there anybody alive out there?'' -- something Springsteen's been asking his audiences for decades now.
"Radio Nowhere" -- with its "thousand guitars, pounding drums and a million voices speaking in tongues'' -- becomes the rallying cry for the gathering of a community, a community of those who stand ready to listen to the bright music and midnight black sentiments that follow.

No ben-wa balls in 'Bama

The Supreme Court yesterday refused to hear a challenge to Alabama's ban on the sale of sex toys. And what do you want to bet that Clarence Thomas breathed a sigh of relief over that particular turn of events? ("Oh, come on guys. Let's not go there. I don't need the aggravation.'')
So it's illegal to buy sex toys in Alabama, but not illegal to own them. You just have to cross state lines to get them, which probably makes returning faulty merchandise a real pain in the...neck. A slow leak in the blow-up doll and it turns into a day trip.
Look I understand that Alabama is thick with the sort of Baptists who are against sex because it might lead to dancing. But these are also red-state folks who want less government and capitalism up the wazoo.
If someone can make a buck selling a vibrator, legal everywhere but in Alabama, why not let the free market work? If the citizens of Alabama take umbrage at battery-powered pleasure, fine. But some folks might want a little technological kickstart and who can blame them.
The Supreme Court wants to let states into our bedrooms (or the living room, if the kids are out of the house) and something seems wrong with that.

Helping out the Supremes

The Supreme Court begins its work today, the first Monday in October. Judging from news accounts of the cases they will decide, this has to be an easy term for them. This probably explains why Clarence Thomas is all over television hawking his new book. The guy has a chip on his shoulder, if you ask me.
But the nine judges can clear at least some of the docket pretty toute de suite:

Lethal injection: the case is whether the current cocktail of drugs used to introduce a death row inmate to the Grim Reaper creates an unnecesary risk of pain so as to render it cruel and unusual punishment. For or against capital punishment, there's no reason for the state to torture someone before they execute him or her. That's what the Taliban does.

401(k): so this guy loses $150,000 from his retirement fund because somebody was asleep at the switch and didn't switch his money to less risky investments after he specifically asked him to. If my wife asks me to bring home milk and I forget, there's hell to pay. I say, pay the guy.

Guns: Nice try, D.C., but you can't do an end run around 200 years of history and the Second Amendment itself (even with the word "Militia" stuck in there) and ban handguns outright. This law should be overturned.

Voters: Requiring a photo ID to cast a ballot seems like a good idea, except that Republicans have photos of themselves at the country club and mostly Democratic stalwarts in the minority community and folks like my 90-year-old mom would be hard pressed to come up with the proper documents at the polling place. Republicans must be getting nervous when they think my mom, a registered voter in Roosevelt Democrat mode, shouldn't be able to vote.
See? This Supreme Court stuff is easy.