Up this week on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling website, is a piece by Kansas writer Rachel Kimbrough.
Check out “How I Know” — a story about doubt, faith, a child and a mother.
Rachel’s a great writer. This is her fourth TYTT story.
Remember, I’m eager to look at all submissions. I don’t pay, but I do edit.
So get writin’.
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
I’m in Charlotte, NC, and decided to dip over the line to visit the former Christian fun-park empire of the fallen PTL televangelists Jim and (now-deceased) Tammy Faye Bakker.
Planned as a Christian alternative to Disneyland, Heritage USA included a magic castle – “The King’s Castle” is what the broken neon lights appear to say. The castle is fenced off and has patches missing. A sorrowful end to a funpark built by an organization that made a killing praising “Prosperity Christianity” — God wants us to be rich, or something along those lines.
The grounds have a 20+ story tower that was supposed to be a condo or something for Christian elderly, I guess. It was never occupied and remains vacant, crumbling slowly amid tangled legal problems.
In the parking lot in front of the castle, a man sat in a folding chair as his son, in a helmet, practiced bike riding. He told me the property is now owned by MorningStar, a nondenominational ministry.
The man said the county will probably one day have the towers knocked down – ditto the King’s Castle.
He was reading as his son rode. His books:
Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-year Coverup and Bigfoot: the True Story of Apes in America
There was a MorningStar women’s conference going on when I visited the hotel. The women were on stage talking about prophetic Christianity and raising children with the Lord. I walked the hotel and an indoor mini-Main Street, a la Disneyland, with shops in quaint Americana style, and a blue-lit ceiling.
The hotel itself is in fine condition, with colonial-style everything.
Surrounding the Heritage property are subdivisions battling for buyers’ eyes — with houses in “the low $170s” to “the $250s” – some offering “0 down payment (see agent for details).”
The streets I drove looked recent, with grown trees having just been transplanted and patched of lawn just installed. There were many children. The houses were what I want to call clapboard – slats of wood, with a bit of stone façade up front.
If I get time, I’ll visit, in Charlotte, the Billy Graham Library and something called the Rod of God Ministries.
Filed under Culture, Religion, Uncategorized
Fascinating findings by the Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life that Protestants no longer make up a majority
of the United States.
Many folks are religious but unaffiliated with any denomination.
As it turns out, I’m in the midst of a story about many Oaxacan Indians, from a Catholicism in their native towns that resembles something from 16th Century Spain, who have converted to various Protestant denominations here in the United States.
This is something I also found in the parts of Baja California where many Oaxacans also migrated. The Valley of San Quintin, where thousands of Oaxacans have come for farmwork, is studded with storefront churches: Pentecostal, Baptist, Jehovah’s Witness and others.
Always seemed to me that converting to Protestant denominations was part of the voyage out of the mountains of Oaxaca, Chiapas and other similarly distant places — a lifting of the blinders, in a sense. Not everyone goes through this, and a lot find other ways to come out of the Old World. But a good many bring clarity to their New World through a Protestant lens.
After all, they come from villages where the priest would visit and everyone would have to take off their hats and cast their eyes to the ground. Where people were prohibited from reading the Bible, but virtually required to participate in mass and annual religious festivals, which often involved heavy drinking.
