All posts by Chuck Fager

A Titanic Evangelical Ship of Fools: Michael Cromartie’s Doomed Voyage

Politico linked to a lengthy 2013 profile of Cromartie & his mission from the main intellectual evangelical mouthpiece, Christianity Today. It’s a very interesting period piece, clearly aimed to help Cromartie shore up fundraising for the project in the rocky post-Crash years.
Under the subhead, Michael Cromartie is guiding media elites into a more accurate view of conservative Christians, the article also highlights both the value of Cromartie’s work, and in retrospect its poignant, perhaps even tragic underlying folly

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A Labor Day Memory: The Big Eclipse?? Wake me When It’s Over

I learned a few things along the way, which lightened the tedious miles: particularly that many of the Canadian towns we passed through had been founded by “United Empire Loyalists.” After some cogitation, I realized these were the tyrannical Tory scum the victorious colonials ran out of the new United States after our revolution. That explained, among other things, the guy in the red coat on the sign for Shelburne; a “Redcoat.” 

But their progeny, after these eight intervening generations, seemed not preoccupied with this old quarrel, happy to take our few US tourist dollars. And on the morning of July 10, 1972, though road-weary, we were headed out toward the far eastern end of their oddly-shaped island, looking for a spot to park and watch the day turn to night.

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Breaking: North Carolina YM-FUM Shuts Down

There’s a notorious set of photos from St. Louis, of a public housing project called Pruitt Igoe, being brought down in a controlled detonation of high explosives. The story is that the project, meant to provide sturdy housing for the poor, had become toxic and uninhabitable. It could be a fitting parable for North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM – NCYM for short)

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Yearly Meeting Dispatch: Baltimore & home

Yes, all too soon, I had to pack up the car and head out of Frederick Maryland back south to North Carolina; first to join my colleagues in the cast of “Pathway to Freedom,” a Quaker-inspired outdoor drama about the Underground Railroad, followed later today and tomorrow by the final session of North Carolina Yearly Meeting FUM, which, unlike BYM, is about to go out of business after 320 years.

More on that later. I drove over to Interstate 81 to take the scenic route down through the Shenandoah Valley, then jogged east toward Charlottesville and then turned south again in US 29, through Lynchburg and Danville to the North Carolina line.

Lynchburg has been practically absorbed into the ever-expanding Liberty University complex, down to and including the Jerry Falwell Parkway, to memorialize its late founder.

Sixty miles farther, Danville, or at least some of its prominent residents, made their sentiments clear in a couple of ways . . . .

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