I read this morning in Yancey that Thomas Merton emerged from his Trappist Monastry to stand and gaze a the masses and was “..suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation that I loved all those people..we could not be alien to one another though we were total strangers…’out of the world’ monks are in the same world as everybody else…” [Soul Survivor, p87]

Unless we do get ‘out of this world’ I wonder if we can be so overwhlemed with love. I read what Merton or Robert Coles or Nouwen or Dave Andrews or Ray Overend writes…and realise that their writing is more than a gift but the fruit of sitting and gazing and thinking and meditating and life …You can tell the difference when a writer is marketting smart words that gloss over an empty mind and heart.I wondered if “Harry Potter” was another thinking writer’s muses, but when a movie appears so soon and plastic Harry’s are in K-Mart I turn off. I have still to read it, but it’s popularity makes me wary! A theologian friend in the USA won’t buy a Christian book that is a “best seller.” Think about that in the light of what’s being read at the moment.

In the last “Sojourners”, Tom Sine [“Mustard Seed Conspiracy”] wrote of Tim LaHaye that he is the most influential Christian in the 20th C – more than Billy Graham.

Sine’s question, and mine, is for a writer with such a premillenial and religous right bent what does that mean for the mindset of millions of Christians? What if his views are not the whole picture? He sure influenced my wife and I in the 70’s with his “How to be happy though married”. His stuff on temperaments is still touted and used by Christians as a rather simplistic analysis of why we do what we do.

…On Monday “The Australian ” featured a Doctor and his wife in Queenstown Tassie who suggested, at a town community meeting, that the scores of empty houses in Queenstown be offered to the Government as housing for refugees and asylum seekers. His house was rocked by townspeople. Prejudice is alive and well in Australia!

[An Australian Pastor]