How strange a year was it? Here's how strange:
Of course, not all the events of 2008 were bizarre. Some were depressing. The only U.S. industries that had a good year were campaign consultants and foreclosure lawyers. Everybody else got financially whacked. So, we can be grateful that 2008 is almost over. But consider this....just because the year is ending doesn't mean our troubles won't continue.
The Federal Reserve is expected to vote Thursday on credit card reforms that may relieve customers faced with late fees, universal defaults and shorter payment periods, Reuters reported.The new rules, which were proposed earlier this year, are expected to prohibit credit card companies from increasing rates at will, with some exceptions, and to ban universal default, which permits changing card terms if the borrower defaults on another bill.
The rules are also expected to ban double-cycle billing, where card companies reach back to earlier billing cycles to help calculate interest charged in the current cycle.
Consumers will also likely see easier-to-read tables on monthly statements.
Credit card companies that initially resisted the changes, however, warn borrowing limits may be reduced and interest rates charged on credit cards will rise for borrowers.
The new rules need the approval of the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration, all are expected to act on Thursday.
It usually goes something like this: you open a beautifully wrapped box only to find one of those tacky holiday sweaters with snowmen on it. Or maybe it's a desk lamp made completely of peanut brittle. Or something super useful, like that battery-operated singing fish that hangs on your wall. Even as you smile and say "thank you," you tell yourself, "This goes in the regifting pile." The problem is-and come on, you know this-regifting is a major faux pas. It makes you look like a complete ingrate should the gift-giver find out. And if the new receiver discovers your thoughtless attempt to pawn off a piece of junk, you'll quickly be in your social circle's proverbial doghouse.
After years of expecting a little something extra around the holidays, most people in the mutual-fund world are getting nothing extra for Christmas this year. That said, it's my job to fill some of those holiday stockings. It's the annual Lump of Coal Awards, my holiday tradition of finger-pointing at the bad boys and girls of the fund business, the ones who should get nothing more than an inky chunk of carbon from Santa this year.
The Lump of Coal Awards recognize managers, executives, firms, watchdogs and other fund-world types for action, attitude, behavior or performance that is misguided, bumbling, offensive, disingenuous, reprehensible or just plain stupid.
With the average equity fund down by more than 40%, it would be easy to carpet-bomb the entire industry with insults this year, but the losing actually has made it harder to pick "winners" -- the buffoons and miscreants who added insult to injury by blunder, ignorance or arrogance.
The 2008 Lump of Coal Awards go to:
1. Bruce Bent, co-founder of the first money-market fund and chairman of the Reserve Funds.
Category: Forgetting that talk is cheap
For years, Bent railed against money funds holding anything riskier than Treasury bills and bank certificates of deposit. He ridiculed competitors for buying commercial paper, short-term corporate debt that's routinely unsecured.
But in 2006, when Reserve's money funds were lagging the field in yield, Bent's firm started buying the same things he once described as "garbage." Reserve's money-fund yields climbed the charts.
Meanwhile, Bent continued ranting well into 2008 about the horrible investment behavior of others, ignoring the fact that his funds had become the most dangerous of the bunch.
Holding $785 million in Lehman Brothers paper, Reserve's Primary fund was forced in mid-September to "break the buck," after that debt was officially declared as garbage in light of Lehman's financial troubles.
2. The Investment Company Institute
Category: Doing too little, too late
The money fund crisis came into full bloom in mid-September. The ICI -- the fund industry's trade association -- established its money fund working group in November, long after the focus of the economic crisis had moved on to other parts of the financial world.
3. DWS Investments
Category: Forgetting why investors gave them money in the first place
When DWS decided to close its miserable small-cap value fund, logic dictated that it move the assets into DWS Dreman Small Cap Value Fund, a sister fund in the same asset category and with a similar investment style.
But DWS Dreman Small Cap Value (KDSAX) was -- and remains -- closed to new investors, so DWS instead folded the fund into DWS Dreman Mid Cap Value Fund (MIDVX) .
As a result, investors wound up in an asset class they didn't pick, missing out on David Dreman's top-rated small-cap issue and getting his below-average mid-cap fund, thereby enduring a much larger loss on the year.
4. Every 2010 target-date fund
Category: Missing the bulls-eye
At the very time that investors most needed life-cycle and target-date investing to work, it failed.
Target-date funds are all-in-one portfolios built to age with an investor, so that the closer they get to the target date, the more conservative they become. As such, 2010 funds -- built for investors less than two years from hitting retirement age -- should be a comparatively safe haven.
Instead, the average 2010 fund is down nearly 30% this year. See related story on target-date funds' losses.
5. Oppenheimer's target-date funds
Category: The year's most off-target performance
Oppenheimer is dead last in its peer group for funds targeted for 2010, 2015, 2020 and 2030. By comparison, Oppenheimer 2025 is a star, standing next-to-last in its category. And Oppenheimer 2040 and 2050 didn't launch until March, but since their inception date, both rank dead last in their peer groups too. With performance like that, Oppenheimer may not be running "life-cycle funds," so much as "death spiral funds."
(Second place in this category goes to AllianceBernstein. Were it not for Oppenheimer's misery, Alliance Bernstein would be dead last in every target-date category tracked by Lipper Inc..)
6. Fritz Reynolds of Reynolds Blue Chip Growth Fund
Category: Faking his way to the top
Reynolds runs the top-performing "multi-cap core" fund in the Lipper database, and the top large-growth fund tracked by Morningstar Inc. The average competitor is down about 41.5% this year, but Reynolds Blue Chip Fund (RBCGX) has lost just 5%. You'd think that would earn him kudos and not coal, but Reynolds topped those stock-picking categories by being mostly in cash; for much of the year, he's been 0% in blue-chips and 100% in cash.
Worse yet, with a 2% expense ratio, when Reynolds goes all to cash in current market conditions, he's virtually dooming shareholders to a loss. If Reynolds was so convinced it was time to hit the sidelines, he should have told shareholders to sell his fund, park the cash in an account paying a bit of interest, and then asked them to re-up when he thinks it's time to buy again.
7. Dreyfus Emerging Markets
Category: Opening the doors and punching new visitors in the face
Dreyfus Emerging Markets Fund (DRFMX) re-opened to new investors the first week of December. Even in a troubled economy, solid funds re-opening to new money attract a lot of interest, mostly from people who had previously been kept out.
But the Dreyfus fund reopened less than two weeks before it is scheduled to pay out a 38% capital gain. In short, anyone who bought in when the fund re-opened will get kicked in the teeth with a big fat tax bill on the money they invested.
8. Regions Morgan Keegan
Category: Not knowing when to quit
Two former high-fliers, RMK's Select Intermediate Bond Fund (MKIBX) and Select High Income Fund (MKHIX) , may have been the industry's biggest travesties over the last two years.
Manager James Kelsoe -- the Lump of Coal (Mis)Manager of the Year in 2007 -- had a huge slug of money in subprime paper, so that both bond funds lost more than 50% last year, then watched things go from bad to worse in 2008.
High Income is down nearly 80% and Intermediate Bond has lost 85% this year. For every $1,000 invested in the funds at the start of 2007, there's less than $100 left now. You'd be hard-pressed to find two funds more deserving of liquidation,
Regions Morgan Keegan finally got rid of Kelsoe, but inexplicably kept the funds open, with a new subadviser running the money.
9. Ron Fielding of the Oppenheimer Rochester Municipal funds
Category: Sticking to your guns when they're aimed at your own feet
The Rochester funds have traditionally flown high on the muni-bond performance charts, largely because of Fielding's penchant for diving headlong into the riskiest portions of the bond market - notably sectors like tobacco, housing and airlines - to capture extra yield. As a result, Fielding's funds - and he's ultimately responsible for 18 Oppenheimer-owned issues - took on a lot more credit risk than the competition.
Results have been a horror show. Most of the Rochester single-state funds are down more than 35% this year, and Oppenheimer Rochester National Muni Fund (ORNAX) is down 48% this year, which is far more abysmal than the average stock fund in 2008.
Fielding has remained bullish, but a combination of redemptions and the continued credit crunch is likely to make things worse before they get better, which in turn could cripple the entire Oppenheimer family. Oppenheimer's target-date funds are suffering because of their bond exposure through Fielding's National Muni portfolio.
What passes for the holiday season began before dawn the day after Thanksgiving, when a worker at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., was trampled to death by a mob of bargain hunters. Afterward, there were reports that some people, mesmerized by cheap consumer electronics and discounted toys, kept shopping even after announcements to clear the store.
President-elect Barack Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is expected to preach at a Macon revival and will preach Monday through Wednesday at St. Paul AME Church. It will be his second visit to the Georgia city. Wright also spoke at St. Paul last year.The Chicago minister drew headlines in the presidential campaign for remarks on racial injustice, conduct of the American government and U.S. foreign policy. Obama resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ during the campaign after inflammatory comments by Wright from the pulpit became a campaign issue.
Dozens of banks and a handful of insurers have applied for funds from the Treasury Department as part of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The Treasury Department has transferred capital to many of these companies. More are expected to announce their participation in the coming weeks.
(Click to enlarge)
...and guess what? No SUVs!
Two explorers conducting underwater surveys of Lake Ontario have uncovered an aquatic mystery - a rare 19th-century schooner sitting upright 500 feet under the waves. Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville located the 55-foot long dagger-board ship unexpectedly this fall using deep scan sonar equipment off the lake's southern shore, west of Rochester.
The ship is the only dagger-board known to have been found in the Great Lakes. Kennard said vessels of this type were used for a short time in the early 1800s. The dagger-board was a wood panel that could be extended through the keel to improve the ship's stability. The dagger-boards could be raised when the schooner entered a shallow harbor, allowing the boat to load and unload cargo in locations that would not otherwise be accessible to larger ships.
The shipwreck was found upright and in remarkable condition considering it had plunged more than 500 feet to its resting place on the bottom, the men said.
The schooner's origin is a mystery so far.
The name of the schooner is unknown and there are no documented accounts of a dagger-board schooner sinking in Lake Ontario.
The explorers suspect the schooner was being converted to a barge or other sailing craft by its owners and perhaps broke free from its moorings in the ice or during a violent storm and was carried far out on the lake before it eventually sank.
The men found it on the very last survey run of the season. A faint image of something protruding from the bottom showed up at the very edge of the display screen, and another run was made to obtain a better image and the position of the object.
The two explorers returned to the site two weeks later and used a remote operated vehicle to explore and photograph the shipwreck.
It appeared from the video survey of the shipwreck that the schooner had been stripped of all useable items such as anchors, iron fittings, cabin with contents, and tiller, Kennard said.
During the past several months, the explorers have been seeking help from Great Lakes maritime historians to learn more about the schooner.
The dagger-board schooner is one of the older ships discovered in Lake Ontario and the Great Lakes.
In May 2008, Kennard and Scoville discovered the British warship HMS Ontario, which was lost in 1780. The Ontario is the oldest shipwreck ever found in the Great Lakes and the only British warship of this period still in existence in the world.
There are estimated to have been over 4,700 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, including about 550 in Lake Ontario.
MICHELLE
Walter & National Geographic sources contributed to this article.
The Enlightenment was not, as is often assumed, exclusively secular. In fact, religious Protestants, Jews and Catholics played a key role in imagining a tolerant, but believing, society. However in the past centuries this has evolved into a fungus of irresponsibility and intolerance of the faithful, particularly because it is the only way angry, burnt, damaged people can revolt against traditional values. It has little to do with tolerance, diversity; it has everything to do with damaged goods and the dead weight of the Liberal Left.In the recent presidential campaign, religion and religious belief appeared to be playing as large a role as they did in the last two presidential elections. Obama’s efforts to cleanse the Democratic Party of its supposedly anti-religious bias and show that belief can have a place in it by softening the Party’s platform on such key issues as abortion, alluding to the Bible, speaking in biblical cadences and referring to his own faith, and perhaps even in his choice of Joe Biden, a Catholic, as his running mate, have been countered by McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, who seems to be in the process of quickly recapturing and energizing the religious right with her own, and her daughter’s, “pro-life” choices. Though Ronald Reagan no longer sits in the White House or directs campaign strategy, his legacy survives.
These appeals to religion are of course rooted in the rough and tumble of daily politics. Republicans want to continue to break the large umbrella alliance of Catholics, blacks, Jews and unions on which the Democratic Party has relied for a majority ever since the New Deal. Democrats want to win back some of the groups that have defected and also make inroads into the Republican strongholds of the suburban and ex-urban megachurches.
Yet lurking just beneath the surface of this struggle, or perhaps informing it without usually being articulated, is the presumption that there is a fundamental opposition between the secular and religious in American politics and life, that the separation of Church and state is designed to expunge religion from state and politics rather than to find a mutually enriching manner for the two to coexist, and that this fundamental opposition can be traced back to the “Enlightenment.” The Enlightenment as the source of secular culture and secular politics is the great specter of twenty-first century American politics. There is a presumption, apparently shared by all points on the political spectrum, that the Enlightenment was exclusively secular. The image is, as Evan Derkacz recently put it, that “the Enlightenment was essentially a bunch of proto-Marxist rebels who longed to sit at cafes and discuss Dawkins’ latest book.” There is also a strong sense that there was something conspiratorial about the Enlightenment and that its contemporary adherents continue to be conspiratorial—that they aim to impose their radical secular views on everyone else by whatever means.
There are, of course, good reasons that so many people hold this view of the Enlightenment as the source of secularism (there are few, if any, good reasons to see it as being conspiratorial). Scholars propagated such a notion for a long time, and it was the view that was taught in American colleges and universities. Certainly since WWII, the main scholarly books that students read on the European Enlightenment offered just such a view e.g., Ernst Cassirer’s magisterial The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932; translated 1951), Paul Hazard’s European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (translated 1954) and Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment (1966-1967). This view of the Enlightenment had an admirable pedigree. Cassirer (1874-1945), Hazard (1878-1944) and others championed the Enlightenment as a counterweight to the fascist ideologies that wreaked havoc on Europe and many other parts of the world during the 1930s and 1940s. For them the Enlightenment guaranteed that there was in fact an alternative to the horrors they had witnessed and thus the promise of a brighter future. Peter Gay (b. 1923), an émigré from Nazi Germany, not only championed the Enlightenment in opposition to the Nazism he had experienced firsthand, but also saw it as inspiring the American liberalism with which he had come to identify. His two-volume history, a bestseller that won the National Book Award, appeared at the apogee of 1960s liberalism. His idealization of the Enlightenment of Hume and Voltaire as the seedbed of modern liberalism was the equivalent, in realm of cultural history, to modernization theory—that all societies everywhere were moving toward urbanism, industrialization and democracy—that then ruled the social sciences.
It takes a long time for such a powerful, regnant and, one should add, cogent view first to crack and then to crumble. Yet the view of the Enlightenment as a purely secular phenomenon has indeed cracked and crumbled. Since the 1980s such notable historians as J.G.A. Pocock (Johns Hopkins), Dale Van Kley (Ohio State University), Derek Beales (Cambridge University) and Jonathan Israel (Institute for Advanced Study) have conducted a long-term campaign against it. They have taken issue with individual aspects. Pocock, for example, has argued repeatedly and eloquently against the notion of a single, secular Enlightenment, proposing the notion of a “family of Enlightenments” and demonstrating the importance of what he called the “Protestant Enlightenment” in England, Holland and Switzerland. Dale Van Kley has restored religion, and particularly Jansenism, the major Catholic reform movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to our understanding of the French Enlightenment and the origins of the French Revolution. Beales has shown the centrality of the Catholic Enlightenment to such an epitome of “enlightened absolutism” as Joseph II in the Habsburg monarchy (not to mention his mother, Maria Theresa), and has also recovered the vibrant intellectual and artistic life of Europe’s Catholic monasteries, many of which were plundered and destroyed during and after the French Revolution. Finally, Jonathan Israel has offered a monumental and encyclopedic synthesis of the Enlightenment that recognizes the religious beliefs of its central figures.
Building on these works, I have always argued that the time has come to discard the still popular, if threadbare and outmoded notion of an exclusively secular Enlightenment. The time has come to let go of this false specter and to recognize that the Enlightenment was a spectrum of opinion that included a distinctly religious Enlightenment.
All of the religions participated in, and contributed to, the making of the religious Enlightenment. Its creators all shared the same motivation: they wanted to articulate a version of their religion that could support a religiously plural society. That was, after all, the challenge that faced Europe after the end of the religious wars and throughout the period from the Glorious Revolution in England (1688) to the French Revolution (1789). How could members of different religions live in harmony and peace in a shared society and build a common polity? Religious Enlighteners renounced polemical sermons and disputation literature and instead devoted themselves to arguing for toleration of other religions on religious grounds.
Time and again our current notions of toleration have wrongly been attributed to secular thinkers and a secular Enlightenment. In fact, religious thinkers—Protestants, Jews and Catholics—played a key role in imagining a tolerant but also a believing society. The religious Enlighteners saw no tension or contradiction between fervent belief and a fervent commitment to toleration. For them the two went hand-in-hand. They made use of the most potent ideas of the time, the natural law theory that recognized the autonomy of individuals, but they used a religious version of it. They started not with the idea of individuals as thinkers, political beings, or property owners, but with individuals as members of churches (or, for that matter, synagogues). As members of churches individuals were endowed with the right of freedom or autonomy: they could, and should, be taught, consoled, and exhorted yet they were not to be coerced in any manner. Freedom and toleration in the church were to be the basis for freedom and toleration in society.
Perhaps the foundational characteristic of the religious Enlightenment was that its members advocated a new idea of “reasonableness.” They did not espouse a notion of “rationality” that excluded belief. That was a myth scholars who championed the myth of a secular Enlightenment disseminated. Instead, the religious Enlighteners developed an ideal of “reasonableness” that included belief. Reason for the religious Enlighteners was entirely compatible with the authority of scripture, revelation and miracles. They would not accept truths contrary to reason, but they did acknowledge revealed truths and mysteries “above” reason. Similarly, they recognized the validity of testimony and of verifiable traditions in interpreting scripture.
While endorsing reason and revelation, the religious Enlighteners also embraced the latest in philosophy in science. They accepted the heliocentric universe and Newtonian physics. They used the philosophies of Locke and Descartes, Leibniz and Christian Wolff. In fact, they welcomed the new philosophy and science as a means to rearticulate their faith. They did not, however, treat the Bible as a source of science, since they understood it to be the source of salvation. They acted on the saying that Galileo had made famous: “the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”
The religious Enlighteners have largely been forgotten by history. They have been written out of the canon of the secular Enlightenment and have therefore escaped the attention of historians and literary scholars. Yet figures as Bishop William Warburton (1698-1779) in England, Jacob Vernet (1698-1789) in Geneva, Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706-1757) in Prussia, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) in Berlin, Joseph Eybel (1741-1805) in Austria and Adrien Lamourette (1742-1794) in France were well-known and important figures in their day. In fact, most of them were public figures who were known not only, or not just, as theologians but also as writers on politics, history, literature and aesthetics. The religious Enlighteners saw no contradiction between writing about belief and writing about supposedly secular subjects. For them all those subjects belonged to the purview of the Enlightenment.
Moreover, the religious Enlighteners were not isolated individuals but members of identifiable movements in their respective religious traditions. Moderation in England, “enlightened Orthodoxy” in Calvinist Geneva, the “theological Enlightenment” among German Lutherans, the Haskalah in the German-speaking lands, and reform Catholicism in Austria and France, were all substantial movements of religious renewal and reform that had a significant impact on their respective traditions and on the larger society, since all of them gained a form of state sponsorship.
While a revision of our understanding of the Enlightenment might seem an interesting academic exercise, it is in fact highly relevant to contemporary politics. If we can exorcise the abiding specter of an exclusively secular Enlightenment, we can begin to overcome the false polarity of secular liberalism versus faith-based conservatism. We will be able to see that liberalism can equally be faith-based, and that many contemporary debates can be conducted both without and within the realm of faith. We will also be able to see that the so-called “culture wars” were waged on same fallacious grounds of an anti-religious Enlightenment. In short, recognizing the existence of the religious Enlightenment can change the nature of current political and cultural dialogue by liberating us from a specter that haunts our culture.
In Seattle, the Mars Hill Church, one of the fastest-growing evangelical churches in the country, grew to 7,000 members this fall, up 1,000 in a year. At the Life Christian Church in West Orange, N.J., prayer requests have doubled — almost all of them aimed at getting or keeping jobs.
Like evangelical churches around the country, the three churches have enjoyed steady growth over the last decade. But since September, pastors nationwide say they have seen such a burst of new interest that they find themselves contending with powerful conflicting emotions — deep empathy and quiet excitement — as they re-encounter an old piece of religious lore:
Bad times are good for evangelical churches.
“It’s a wonderful time, a great evangelistic opportunity for us,” said the Rev. A. R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York’s largest evangelical congregation, where regulars are arriving earlier to get a seat. “When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors.”
Nationwide, congregations large and small are presenting programs of practical advice for people in fiscal straits — from a homegrown series on “Financial Peace” at a Midtown Manhattan church called the Journey, to the “Good Sense” program developed at the 20,000-member Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., and now offered at churches all over the country.
Many ministers have for the moment jettisoned standard sermons on marriage and the Beatitudes to preach instead about the theological meaning of the downturn.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who moved much of their door-to-door evangelizing to the night shift 10 years ago because so few people were home during the day, returned to daylight witnessing this year. “People are out of work, and they are answering the door,” said a spokesman, J. R. Brown.
Mr. Bernard plans to start 100 prayer groups next year, using a model conceived by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, to “foster spiritual dialogue in these times” in small gatherings around the city.
A recent spot check of some large Roman Catholic parishes and mainline Protestant churches around the nation indicated attendance increases there, too. But they were nowhere near as striking as those reported by congregations describing themselves as evangelical, a term generally applied to churches that stress the literal authority of Scripture and the importance of personal conversion, or being “born again.”
Part of the evangelicals’ new excitement is rooted in a communal belief that the big Christian revivals of the 19th century, known as the second and third Great Awakenings, were touched off by economic panics. Historians of religion do not buy it, but the notion “has always lived in the lore of evangelism,” said Tony Carnes, a sociologist who studies religion.
A study last year may lend some credence to the legend. In “Praying for Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United States,” David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas State University, looked at long-established trend lines showing the growth of evangelical congregations and the decline of mainline churches and found a more telling detail: During each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in evangelical churches jumped by 50 percent. By comparison, mainline Protestant churches continued their decline during recessions, though a bit more slowly.
The little-noticed study began receiving attention from some preachers in September, when the stock market began its free fall. With the swelling attendance they were seeing, and a sense that worldwide calamities come along only once in an evangelist’s lifetime, the study has encouraged some to think big.
“I found it very exciting, and I called up that fellow to tell him so,” said the Rev. Don MacKintosh, a Seventh Day Adventist televangelist in California who contacted Dr. Beckworth a few weeks ago after hearing word of his paper from another preacher. “We need to leverage this moment, because every Christian revival in this country’s history has come off a period of rampant greed and fear. That’s what we’re in today — the time of fear and greed.”
Frank O’Neill, 54, a manager who lost his job at Morgan Stanley this year, said the “humbling experience” of unemployment made him cast about for a more personal relationship with God than he was able to find in the Catholicism of his youth. In joining the Shelter Rock Church on Long Island, he said, he found a deeper sense of “God’s authority over everything — I feel him walking with me.”
The sense of historic moment is underscored especially for evangelicals in New York who celebrated the 150th anniversary last year of the Fulton Street Prayer Revival, one of the major religious resurgences in America. Also known as the Businessmen’s Revival, it started during the Panic of 1857 with a noon prayer meeting among traders and financiers in Manhattan’s financial district.
Over the next few years, it led to tens of thousands of conversions in the United States, and inspired the volunteerism movement behind the founding of the Salvation Army, said the Rev. McKenzie Pier, president of the New York City Leadership Center, an evangelical pastors’ group that marked the anniversary with a three-day conference at the Hilton New York. “The conditions of the Businessmen’s Revival bear great similarities to what’s going on today,” he said. “People are losing a lot of money.”
But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard times is a Rorschach test of perspective.
For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. ”We have the greatest product on earth,” said the Rev. Steve Tomlinson, senior pastor of the Shelter Rock Church.
Dr. Beckworth, a macroeconomist, posited another theory: though expanding demographically since becoming the nation’s largest religious group in the 1990s, evangelicals as a whole still tend to be less affluent than members of mainline churches, and therefore depend on their church communities more during tough times, for material as well as spiritual support. In good times, he said, they are more likely to work on Sundays, which may explain a slower rate of growth among evangelical churches in nonrecession years.
Msgr. Thomas McSweeney, who writes columns for Catholic publications and appears on MSNBC as a religion consultant, said the growth is fed by evangelicals’ flexibility: “Their tradition allows them to do things from the pulpit we don’t do — like ‘Hey! I need somebody to take Mrs. McSweeney to the doctor on Tuesday,’ or ‘We need volunteers at the soup kitchen tomorrow.’ ”
In a cascading financial crisis, he said, a pastor can discard a sermon prescribed by the liturgical calendar and directly address the anxiety in the air. “I know a lot of you are feeling pain today,” he said, as if speaking from the pulpit. “And we’re going to do something about that.”
But a recession also means fewer dollars in the collection basket.
Few evangelical churches have endowments to compare with the older mainline Protestant congregations.
“We are at the front end of a $10 million building program,” said the Rev. Terry Smith, pastor of the Life Christian Church in West Orange, N.J. “Am I worried about that? Yes. But right now, I’m more worried about my congregation.” A husband and wife, he said, were both fired the same day from Goldman Sachs; another man inherited the workload of four co-workers who were let go, and expects to be the next to leave. “Having the conversations I’m having,” Mr. Smith said, “it’s hard to think about anything else.”
At the Shelter Rock Church, many newcomers have been invited by members who knew they had recently lost jobs. On a recent Sunday, new faces included a hedge fund manager and an investment banker, both laid off, who were friends of Steve Leondis, a cheerful business executive who has been a church member for four years. The two newcomers, both Catholics, declined to be interviewed, but Mr. Leondis said they agreed to attend Shelter Rock to hear Mr. Tomlinson’s sermon series, “Faith in Unstable Times.”
“They wanted something that pertained to them,” he said, “some comfort that pertained to their situations.”
Mr. Tomlinson and his staff in Manhasset and at a satellite church in nearby Syosset have recently discussed hiring an executive pastor to take over administrative work, so they can spend more time pastoring.
“There are a lot of walking wounded in this town,” he said.
And the voters of Silverton (pop. 7,400) elected as mayor Stu Rasmussen, 60, an openly transgendered, longtime resident who previously served as mayor while a man but who now sports breasts and dresses exclusively as a woman (especially miniskirts and cleavage-enhancing tops). Actually, Rasmussen still describes himself as a man and lives with his longtime girlfriend, but explained his switch as just his particular "mid-life crisis." [Los Angeles Times, 11-20-08]
"I'm really sorry. ... I thought he was just tired," said Lynne Stewart, who was arrested in West Melbourne, Fla., in October and charged with stealing items from a 56-year-old, unconscious man who in fact had just suffered a fatal heart attack during sex with Stewart. She blamed her larceny on a cocaine binge that impaired her judgment such that (according to a police commander) she had sex with 20 men that weekend. (However, she was not charged with prostitution. Said the commander, "No, she just likes sex.") [WESH-TV (Orlando), 10-15-08]
Lame: A woman being interviewed for jury duty on a murder case in Bronx (N.Y.) Supreme Court in October asked to be excused for the reason that she was once murdered, herself, by her husband (but had somehow been revived by a doctor). (She was dismissed from the jury, but on other grounds.) [New York Post, 10-8-08]
In a recent report of DUI excuses in the Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, a 56-year-old woman had asserted that, though she had been drinking, her driving was not affected because she had remembered to keep one eye closed so as not to be seeing double. [The Local (Stockholm), 10-30-08]
Strange Justice: The Saudi Arabia delegation to the United Nations sponsored a conference on religious tolerance in November. (Not only does the kingdom employ a police force "on the prevention of vice and the promotion of virtue," but it is accused of widespread internal discrimination against disfavored Islamic sects.) [International Herald Tribune, 11-11-08]
Janice Warder, a former Texas judge and now the incoming district attorney for Texas' Cooke County, was accused in March by a Dallas judge of having improperly withheld evidence in a 1986 case to secure a murder conviction. (The Dallas judge ordered a new trial.) [Dallas Morning News, 9-26-08]
Patricia Howard filed a lawsuit against her USA Environmental employer in 2006 (just recently unsealed by a judge) for subjecting her to dangerous work during 2003-2005. The workplace was in Iraq and involved detonating surplus munitions to prevent their falling into insurgents' hands, but that was not the "danger" she feared. Rather, the munitions were located in abandoned football-field-sized warehouses that had long been home to pigeons. Foot-high piles of feces had dried and turned to powder, and Howard charged that the company's respiration protection was nearly useless, subjecting workers to Hantavirus and other diseases. [St. Petersburg Times, 9-15-08]
Veteran Massachusetts thief Robert Aldrich applied for compensation because his latest arrest happened to have been illegal, and a state law permits recovery for lost income during wrongful incarceration. However, in November, a Suffolk County judge turned him down as she was unable to find any "income" that Aldrich might have earned during his six wrongful months in jail except from more burglaries or for home-improvement money that Aldrich admitted he earned "off the books" so as to evade taxes. [United Press International, 11-5-08]
"I would like an apology," explained Michael Wax, who was ejected in July from the Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City because of customers' complaints about his body odor. "There's no question I stink. ... I do have an odor. I've been playing for 17 hours," said the 440-pound man. Nonetheless, Wax filed a complaint with the Casino Control Commission, claiming that he should not have been so rudely treated in front of other patrons. [MSNBC-AP, 7-30-08]
Ms. Hang Mioku, 48, is winding down her 20-year obsession with cosmetic surgery, having been at one time bulked up with enough silicone in her face to earn the nickname "the standing fan" because her head was so large compared to her legs. Hang moved from South Korea to Japan for better access to surgery and said she had convinced herself that each procedure in her odyssey only made her more beautiful than the last. When finally no surgeon would treat her, she began injecting cooking oil. Finally, she was talked into face-reduction surgery (removal of 260 grams of foreign substance from her head and neck) but, according to a November report in London's Daily Telegraph, she remains grotesquely misshapen. [ABC News-Daily Telegraph (London), 11-14-08]
One of the items in a November seized-contraband auction by the Denver Police Department was a 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass that was ultimately bought for $350 by a 19-year-old woman, but which is still evidence in an active murder investigation. Police eventually took back the car, which has bullet holes and a bloody interior and contained blood-stained clothing. Furthermore, a second shooting victim who was in the car survived and was among the bidders at the auction. He dropped out, but did later sell the winning bidder his spare key to the car for $40. [Denver Post, 11-20-08]
The quasi-religious "philosophical" group Summum has been on the 360 Degrees radar since 1988, when leader "Corky" Ra and his small band in Utah began offering to mummify household pets for $7,000, or create statues of them for $18,000 (though the price is considerably higher today), with an eye toward future mummification of humans, as illustrative of its core precept that "the soul moves forward" even though the body is memorialized. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments that a city park in Pleasant Grove, Utah, must allow Summum to place a monument with "The Seven Aphorisms" next to the existing monument of the Ten Commandments. (Summum's Aphorisms shore up the soul-movement belief by recognizing, for example, such properties as psychokinesis and the constant vibration of bodies.) The court is expected to rule later this term. [CNN, 11-11-08]
Recent Public Appearances: Arkansas City, Kan., September (Jesus on the ceiling of the One Stop Body Shoppe weight-loss clinic). Pittsburg, Texas, August (Jesus on the body of a moth). Goshen, Ind., July (Jesus in the facial fur of the family cat). High Ridge, Mo., July (Jesus on a Cheeto). Arlington, Texas, September (Mary on a grape). Pompano Beach, Fla., November (Jesus on a slice of French toast). Gulf Shores, Ala., September (Jesus in the drywall of a home under construction). Arkansas City: [KTLA-TV (Los Angeles), 9-19-08] Pittsburg: [KLTV-TV (Longview, Tex.), 8-27-08] Goshen: [WNDU-TV (South Bend), 7-30-08] High Ridge: [KTVI-TV (St. Louis), 7-28-08] Arlington: [Dallas Morning News, 9-5-08] Pompano Beach: [KUSA-TV- NBC (Denver), 11-11-08] Gulf Shores: [WKRG-TV (Mobile), 9-19-08]
A New York Times dispatch from India highlighted the growing problem of intra-family frauds in which one member claims a living relative's land or wealth by swearing to the government that the relative is dead. According to the Times, the "deceased" had finally begun to fight back. An advocacy group, the Association of Dead People, helps aggrieved citizens figure out how to prove that they are alive, which can be difficult, given India's slow-moving bureaucracies. The association's founder said that he personally had tried to authenticate his existence by public actions such as running for office, filing lawsuits and getting arrested, but that he nonetheless remained officially dead. [New York Times, 10-24-00]
The art critic John Berger once wrote: "To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself." I'm pretty certain he never met Bettie Page, naked, nude or otherwise.
Yowza! The advertisement was for a short titled "Teaser Girl in High Heels," distributed by a New Yorker named Irving Klaw, who, with his sister, Paula, sold movie star photographs and very special specialty items through their downtown store and mail-order service. In the late 1940s the Klaws began shooting and selling their own bondage and fetish material, catering to the tastes of a loyal clientele: "Corset and Stocking," "Girls in Extreme High Heels," "Battling Girls." There was no nudity, just a lot of rope and kink. In 1952 Ms. Page started working for the Klaws and quickly became their most popular model. "She could do looks of real horror or happy shots with ease," Ms. Klaw said of the seminude cutie. "She was a natural."
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