(While you’re here, check out more from Making Chutney.)

After looking at some of the comments to a Tulsa World story, here’s what I can glean:

1. ORU is a small community. People know folks who know other folks who heard that so-and-so didn’t do such-and-such. And that he did.

2. A lot of this is old news to ORU folks, or even open secrets. Especially about their knocking out a dorm room wall to give one of Oral’s granddaughters a double-wide.

3. There’s probably more than one game of dirty pool going on here. There’s the politician who might have taken university money. There’s the student who might have broken into a university computer. And, of course, the Robertses.

4. Some of them ORU students write like LOL cats.

For the theologically afflicted. Use at your own risk.

I am a very happy OU fan this week (take that, Texas!), but I thought I could still point to this article about UUs in Athens, GA, home of the University of Georgia.

(While you’re here, check out more from Making Chutney.)

Richard says he pays for everything himself, not the University. If true, this gets him out of legal hot water. But he’ll still have to answer ethically for the $50,000 of clothes, a $30,000 senior trip for his daughter, ORU employees being paid to do his daughters’ homework, and so much more. All of that paid for by money raised by folks donating to his “ministry.”

In other news, I’ve only known three or four ORU students through the years (that I can remember), and all of them have been gay men. Curious.

While you’re here, check out more of Making Chutney.

(While you’re here, check out my blog.)

Oral Roberts University, that is. Oral put himself out to pasture years ago—just after his “call home” got him in deep water—and his son Richard Roberts and his wife Lindsay have been running the show since.

The long and short of it is that Richard and Lindsay (and ORU-attending daughters) have been living high off the hog at ORU’s expense. Really high off the hog. Like Imelda Marcos high off the hog. I’m pasting the allegations down below. They’re too much for summary.

News from ORU always feels odd to me—I went to summer camp there twice during junior high. I remember my friends and I running all over campus with some girls from Corn, Oklahoma, looking for the illusive rubber chicken they’d sent hundreds of us on a scavenger hunt for. I remember jokes that we’d seen members of “The Family” on the Jetsons-like campus: Oral rappelling down from a “thorn” of the Prayer Tower to clean the windows, and Lindsay making all the fried chicken we ate in the dorm cafeteria. We were disappointed Richard didn’t come at speak to one of the camp’s worship services.

And I remember my “call” into the ministry the last night of camp, when a good third of the other guys in the audience were also “called.” That started me down a long road.

Here are just eight of “dozens” of allegations, pasted directly from the AP article: Click to continue reading “Oral Roberts in deep water (again)”

An atheist father writes in to Salon’s advice columnist to ask what he should do about his daughter weeping because daddy is going to hell.

The columnist suggests he buck up and go to church with his daughter. Commenters advise taking her to a different faith community each week, taking her to a UU congregation, and whittling down her evangelicality by ruthlessly pointing out the absurdity of her belief.

Me? She’s thirteen. Being hysterical is in her job description. Daddy needs to put his own beliefs aside for a bit, then put himself in his daughter’s shoes and imagine what she’s going through. And then just sit with her in it. The rest will follow.

In my own evangelical adolescence, I feared for my friends’ salvation all the time. But if they visited my church once or twice a year, that fended of my fear enough that I could put all that aside. I figured that they heard the altar call, so they might have prayed the “Sinner’s Prayer” and just not told me. (I never asked though—better to not know!)

Daddy needs to get to church now and then. It will do a lot to ease the pressure his daughter is under.