From MCJ

• The kind of mistake I spend about 15-26 hours on a Tuesday into Wednesday trying to catch and keep out of print and off the Web. LOL.
• Protestant America, 2000s version. We entered the Worship Centre, an immense auditorium shell, where Warren was preaching from a stage at the front, where an altar might have been. Saddleback assiduously avoided traditionally churchy architecture, costume and decor. Its campus was relentlessly quotidian, designed to suggest the shopping malls and office parks where members spent their time during the week. Saddleback is religion for people who don’t like religion: transcendence is not on the menu. It seemed the butt end of Christianity: stripped of history and icon­ography, wholly immersed in its secular surroundings, constructed according to a business model and promoted by motivational speakers – bland, cheerful, dull. We drove away, past immaculate housing estates and strip malls iterating chain restaurants and shops, replicated in every suburb from coast to coast. I wondered why anyone would want to live in that charmless place, much less to get more of the same at church. Arturo and I would argue that Novus Ordo neocons, certainly under John Paul the Overrated, were infected by this. It’s part of the MO of Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ.