Think it has anything to do with the coerced [voluntary] illegal taxation – that not only invades privacy and enslaves – but since we’re larger than the European UNION, corrupts us domestically and the entire world to boot – a wee-bit more than it has to do with Christ. ?

And (yet) it is only via him, [whether in one's own mind a believer in God or a believer in no-God] via jesus christ that we even have learned to get close to standing just above the lesser and conflicting verities of the world…thanks to athens rome jerusalem as well.

in the meantime as long as the biggest game in town is getting one’s fangs into the essentially unconstitutional u.s. federal tax pool is also really the only game in town, think it will change much? – even if say r. paul is elected – he’ll be r. reagan, won’t he? or worse huckabee… please, don’t make me laugh and barf simultaneously. i may choke to death – to your delight.

I was just impressed because you’d never find such an interesting and informative reference in a modern textbook (public or private). Back then, a 9-year old was better equipped to understand what words actually mean. We try to use older textbooks when possible.

RE:38 I thought the ELCA was largely made up of various Scandinavian Lutheran groups. I thought Krauts tended towards LCMS or WELS.

Tim, not all Krauts go that way. Some of us in the Missouri Synod started writing E?CA years ago (after the “Call to Common Mission”), but then it became E??A, and now it really should be ???A. They really are America.

Sinclair Lewis’s novel, as awful as it is as a piece of art, was describing certain currents in the United States at the time. I actually have a small collection of public-school textbooks from the 30’s that are festooned with fasces, and even with swastikas. They’re not Nazi, as in German Nazi, but they are clearly national socialist.

I’ve written about this a couple times in Chronicles, by the way. In the public schools, much of this was tied to an abstract American nationalism that thrived between the wars, and had the effect of undermining the European national identities of European ethnic groups in America, without really “assimilating” them. In the long run, particularly in the wake of the immigration liberalization of the 1960’s, this had disastrous consequences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasces