Aaron D. Wolf

Christmas With the Devil

December 24th, 2009 • Aaron D. Wolf • 4 comments • Related • Filed Under
“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes.  “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.”  The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter.
Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of salt.  Most of us will look for certain signs: Is the guilty man able to articulate his repentance in something other than self-serving terms?  With God’s help I have been able to forgive myself just doesn’t cut it.  Also, has the guilty man embraced the justice meted out by the court system?  Or does his conversion conveniently coincide with an appeal?  Furthermore, is the guilty man faithful, both in his confession and his conduct, and for how long?
This will be the prisoner’s 38th Christmas behind bars.  In 1975 he became a Christian, and in 1980 he founded Abounding Love Ministries, preaching the Gospel on the inside and sharing his faith through books and his monthly newsletter.
“If justice would’ve been served, I would’ve gotten the death penalty,” says the prisoner.  “I hope that in no way have I ever given the impression that I blame anything on my parents or drugs . . . I take full responsibility.”
Over the years, the prisoner has received stacks of mail from women—some curious, some bizarre, some out of Christian love.  Some 20 years ago, he began corresponding with a woman named Susan LaBerge.  She identified herself as a new Christian who was reaching out to him with the love and forgiveness of Christ.  He began sending her his newsletter and personal letters of thanks for her encouragement.  Susan said that as she read his letters her chest pounded, and she “cried and cried, realizing he’d come to the Lord, and I’ve come to the Lord.”
After a year of correspondence, the prisoner was surprised to read that Susan wanted to visit him in person.  Letters are one thing, but you just never know what sort of person you’re going to find in the visiting room.  Anyone can fake the lingo of Christianity in a letter.  What was she up to?
When Susan arrived at the Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, she seemed pleasant, peaceful.  They talked for some time, sharing with each other about their faith, how it was that they had become Christians.  As it turned out, Susan had grown up in the area where the prisoner had committed his crimes at age 23.  She had been 21 years old at the time.
There was more.  She hadn’t been sure whether she would say it, but his faith seemed genuine.  “There’s something I want to tell you,” she said, and he braced himself.  Was this the moment he’d dreaded?  Or worse, was she a member of the Family, come to try to work some sort of spell on him?
“My mother was Rosemary LaBianca,” she said.
“You’re kidding,” he said, stunned.
“I’m not kidding.”
They sat and wept.  In fact, he weeps again, retelling the story.
On August 10, 1969, Charles “Tex” Watson, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel stabbed Susan’s mother 41 times in her bedroom.  They killed her stepfather, Leno, in the living room in a similarly gruesome manner and, on the orders of Charles Manson, “left something witchy” behind: the words “Death to pigs” and “Rise” written in Leno’s blood on the wall, and “War” carved into his abdomen.  The night before, the man who claimed to be Jesus Christ had told Tex to round up the girls and begin “Helter Skelter,” an apocalyptic black uprising against whites.  Manson thought “blackie was too ignorant” to get the ball rolling, so he sent out his drug-addled apostles.  Before butchering a pregnant Sharon Tate and her friends, Watson told them, “I am the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.”
Charles Watson was, in fact, given the death penalty, along with Manson and all of the women who participated in those crimes, but the state of California outlawed the death penalty in 1972, which commuted all of their sentences to life in prison.
On the evening of August 10, 1969, Susan, her boyfriend, and her 15-year-old brother entered the kitchen of the LaBianca residence and were greeted by the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” written in blood on the refrigerator.
“All I felt from Susan,” said the prisoner, “was love.”  He calls it a miracle.
Susan LaBerge testified at a parole hearing that Charles Watson had changed.  This enraged Sharon Tate’s mother, nerves still raw, and she called Susan a “stupid sh-t.”  Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi commented that, when it comes to parole, it doesn’t matter whether Watson has changed.  To let him out would be a miscarriage of justice.  Indeed, as Bugliosi and Watson have both said, justice requires the death penalty.  Watson knows he’ll never be a free man, not in this life.
Another Manson Family member will spend this Christmas free for the first time in 34 years.  Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, convicted in 1975 of attempting to assassinate President Ford, was released from prison in August.  In interviews over the years, she maintained her love for the Jesus-of-Death-Valley, who “gave me everything.”
Back in Mule Creek, the prisoner will be celebrating the birth of the Child Who gave him everything, including forgiveness undeserved.

“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes.  “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.”  The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter.

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A Tender Unitarian Christmas II: Yankees and Jews Slapping Norwegians

December 22nd, 2009 • Aaron D. Wolf • 13 comments • Related • Filed Under

A Tender Unitarian Christmas II: Yankees and Jews Slapping Norwegians
This [insert preference] Season, the message from the Chicago Tribune to Garrison Keillor is clear: Feel free to slap around Unitarians all you want, but leave the Jews alone.
I like Garrison Keillor.  There, I said it.  (We fellow-ex-fundamentalists-turned-Lutherans must stick together.)  Not everyone on the Chronicles staff agrees.  But that is not the point of this yuletide tale.
A fellow editor who shall remain nameless (for job-security reasons) sent me a link to GK the Lesser’s latest editorial, “Nonbelievers, please leave Christmas alone.”  (Apparently, the title-writer did not get the memo from Bill Hybels about “Seekers.”)  The link was to the Baltimore Sun, and I enjoyed the article very much.
Intent on sharing the editorial with some friends, I sought the uniform resource locator from the Chicago Tribune, where I normally read GK.  And what do you know?  Some of the piece is missing.
Some of it is not missing, of course, because there is a there there.  The there that is there is stunning enough for the Trib:
If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough.
But here’s the part that apparently works in Baltimore but not in the City of Broad Shoulders:
And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.
And just to make matters worse, the Baltimore Sun allowed GK to get all Aristotelian with his A and non-A, which clearly doesn’t belong in the Windy City:
Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah.
Naturally, Jeffery “IDF” Goldberg of the Atlantic let out a Geschrei upon reading GK: “I was pretty sure I didn’t enjoy listening to Garrison Keillor even before I read what he had to say about Christmas music.”
Across the pond, the Independent’s Dominic Lawson pooh-poohed Keillor the “curmudgeon” and (ignoring GK’s slights on nerds and Unitarians) naughty-naughty’d him, “don’t blame all of that on the Jews.  Irving Berlin is not the Anti-Christ.”  In the process, he scolded Christians for trying over the centuries to “de-Jew Jesus” and blamed THAT on . . . ready? . . . “the Roman Emperor Theodosius.”  Graciously, Lawson left “aside the murky matter of anti-Semitism.”  I mean, you weren’t even thinking about anti-Semitism, were you?  You weren’t?  Not till I brought it up?  I didn’t bring it up.  I clearly said I was “leaving it aside.”
Yes, that Babe was both a Jew and God.  And no, Christians won’t leave that aside.
I suddenly have the urge for a powder-milk biscuit.

I like Garrison Keillor.  There, I said it.  Not everyone on the Chronicles staff agrees.  But that is not the point of this yuletide tale.

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Tiller, Roeder, Richert, and Luther

June 15th, 2009 • Aaron D. Wolf • 45 comments • Related • Filed Under

. . . We interrupt this broadcast to celebrate(!) a Lutheran-Catholic lovefest . . .

Recently, there has been a blogosphere brouhaha over questions pertaining to the murder of late-term abortionist scoundrel George Tiller. Our executive editor Scott P. Richert has made compelling arguments against Tiller’s murder at his Catholicism GuideSite on About.com. And yet Scott, who is rightly described by his friendly debate opponents at Takimag.com as a “devout Catholic,” has not made arguments that are what one (I speak as a Lutheran) would call “uniquely Catholic”—except for his citation of Aquinas and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which of course are wildly papist. (And imagine that, at Catholicism.About.com!)

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A Share in the Patria

May 5th, 2009 • Aaron D. Wolf • Comments Off • Related • Filed Under

God likes farmers.  Not gigantic corporate agribusiness, but farmers.  He made man from the dirt and for the dirt, to cultivate His Garden.  Adam means “of the red” or “of the soil.

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Rick Warren: America’s Dwight Schrute

January 21st, 2009 • Aaron D. Wolf • 35 comments • Related • Filed Under

In an hilarious episode of NBC’s The Office, Dunder-Mifflin übertwerp Dwight Schrute unwittingly adapts the words of several speeches by Benito Mussolini and Karl Marx in order to appear impressive at a conference for salesmen.  “Blood alone moves the wheels of history!” he cries, and by the time he gets to Il Duce’s “It is a privilege to fight!” the equally witless conference audience is chanting along with him.  “Salesmen of the world, unite!”

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Blago, Bleeps, and—Lincoln?

December 9th, 2008 • Aaron D. Wolf • 39 comments • Related • Filed Under

Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may be right about a lot of things when it comes to former Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s future cellmate—current Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich—but he got one thing very wrong at today’s press conference.

In a nutshell, Governor Blagojevich is being charged with trying to squeeze the Chicago Tribune into firing editorialists who don’t like him and trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder.  After a few weeks of tapped phones and wired pals, Blago managed to give Fitzgerald lots and lots of incriminating comments, many of them laced with f-bombs, including one mother-f-bomb dropped on the name of one President-elect Barack Obama.  Uh-oh.

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Silent Night, Deadly Night

December 3rd, 2008 • Aaron D. Wolf • 31 comments • Related • Filed Under

Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I discovered that Planned Parenthood of Indiana has deployed a new weapon in the War on Christmas—er, Holiday.  Not to mention the War on Life—er, inconvenience.

There’ve been some real dingers lately in the War on Holiday.  I just heard an ad on a sports-talk-radio station in Chicago that said, warm and gentle, “This Holiday Season, give your wife the gift of a vasectomy.”  Talk about a lump of coal! 

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Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: Energized—For What?

September 5th, 2008 • Aaron D. Wolf • 31 comments • Related • Filed Under

I will resist the temptation to steal my own thunder for next week’s John Randolph Club meeting in Philadelphia, where I intend to talk about the most important aspect of the Palin Pandemonium: the conservative Christian rejection of the natural order.

There are at least two other aspects of McCain-Palin that are troubling: abortion and Israel.

James Dobson predictably ate his own words, and pro-lifers now, nearly to a man, are “energized.”  George W. Bush’s words are now in the mouth of McCain, and we’ll hear them again and again until the first week of November—”culture of life.”  What conservative doesn’t want a culture of life?  Sarah Palin, we are told, is a sign, a winkie-winkie to the pro-life community that a Roe-reversal is in the cards.  “Change is coming!”

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Out With the Old

July 2nd, 2008 • Aaron D. Wolf • 24 comments • Related • Filed Under

[Aaron D. Wolf on the revolution in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, grandfathers, the Devil, and the fate of Issues, Etc.]

My grandfather has congestive heart failure. I hate to say it, but I probably won’t see him this time next year. “Gramp,” as I’ve called him since I can remember, taught me how to shoot and hunt, taught me how to change the oil, taught me how to drive a truck, taught me how to run a trot line and how to shake a catalpa tree for worms. He helped me buy a hotrod and a Fender strat. His daddy’s gun sits by my bed, and I have paper money from Okinawa that he brought back from the War. For half of my life, we lived in the same house. I named a son (Carl) after him.

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National Religion

March 19th, 2008 • Aaron D. Wolf • 81 comments • Related • Filed Under

Aaron D. WolfAmericans are a people of deeply held religious conviction. If any has doubts, let him look on the most serious of our sacred holidays and believe.

Naturally, it is a federal holiday, but that fact alone does not convey the magnitude of this special day. For, unlike other federal holidays, this one carries with it a gravitas—a holiness—that says it is special. You can tell, because we don’t mark the day with fireworks and pop music, or the pardoning of a turkey, but by a singular devotion to the very words of our national religion’s founder.

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