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Last fall, I drove down to the Calvary Church of Granbury, a Pentecostal congregation in the little town southwest of Fort Worth that was devastated by last night's tornadoes. It's a tiny building with vivid green carpet, next to an empty field and just up a narrow country road from the town cemetery. I was there to hear Irvin Baxter, an End Times preacher who's pretty sure the Apocalypse is due any minute.

Last night, as Calvary notes on its Facebook page, a group of congregants was sitting in the church, in the middle of reading Revelation 11. The chapter deals with the "two witnesses" who prophesy for "a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth," just before the seventh trumpet sounds. As they reached the last line of the chapter, the hail started.

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Joel Osteen, getting ready to double-team Dallas.

MegaFest, Bishop T.D. Jakes' massive annual gathering of evangelical Christians, is a pretty big deal, a $10 million production that draws 100,000 incredibly well-behaved visitors. The Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau was so stoked when Jakes decided to move the festival to Dallas, it chipped in a half-million dollars.

But it wasn't clear exactly how big a deal MegaFest 2013 would be until Jakes and Joel Osteen announced in a recent video that the Houston megapastor will be lending his silver tongue and waxen Ken-doll good looks to the conference.

It's clear from their banter that both Jakes and Osteen are very excited about the chance to collaborate. The key exchange goes like this:

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Dallas Area Interfaith

Interfaith groups from across Texas held a rally for healthcare expansion on February 20.

Dallas Area Interfaith held a news conference this morning at Temple Emanu-El, where more than a dozen faith leaders from the Dallas area gathered to support Medicaid expansion. Since Friday, 60 clergy members from Catholic, Protestant and Jewish congregations have signed a letter calling on state lawmakers to opt in for the Medicaid expansion offered in the Affordable Care Act. The DAI will deliver the letter tomorrow to Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst.

The letter reads, in part:

We believe humanity rises to our highest fulfillment as we treat each person with dignity, precisely as we ourselves would hope to be treated. We acknowledge our enduring responsibility to care for one another. As faith leaders, we believe expanding healthcare in Texas should be inclusive, affordable, accessible, and accountable and should strengthen the lives of the working poor and better enable Texans to take care of themselves and their families.

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Linda Harvey, quietly seething.

Meet Linda Harvey, a talk radio host on a Christian station in Columbus, Ohio. In her free time, she's the founder and main opinion-spewer behind Mission: America, which promotes itself as "Christian commentary on the culture." Harvey is deeply concerned with pressing social issues like "paganism" (she means Halloween and Harry Potter) and feminism (which is apparently also paganism. Good to know).

But Harvey saves most of her animus for The Gays and how they're ruining the country, to the extent that the Southern Poverty Law Center at one point designated Mission: America as an anti-gay hate group (a charge the organization denies, sort of). And as Right Wing Watch pointed out this morning, in her latest column for World Net Daily, Harvey charges that the Boy Scouts' new policy of accepting openly gay youth will be disastrous for both the organization and The Children.

Specifically, Harvey claims, by allowing openly gay kids in the Scouts, the organization's leadership is "advancing the sexual anarchist agenda and drawing countless numbers of children into sin." Also, she's pretty sure those gay troopers are going to show up sporting "nail polish, dangling earrings and make-up."

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Typically, Molly Forthright's advice column in Fort Worth, Texas Magazine goes completely unnoticed by the Internet. Her insights on proper gym etiquette, obnoxiously over-involved sports parents, and snoring husbands garnered nary a comment or Facebook share.

Then, Forthright went and wrote about breastfeeding, and the Internet exploded.

In the column she penned for the March issue, Forthright responds to a reader who complains of being distracted by a woman in a neighboring pew at church who began nursing her infant midway through the service.

Forthright begins with a simple "Ick" before going on to elaborate.

"I know that many think a woman providing nourishment to her baby is a beautiful and natural thing, but putting on a show in the house of the Lord is unacceptable in my book," she writes. "In fact, I can't think of a place in public where I would want to ever see that. So for those women out there who bare all at the mall food court or in line at the supermarket, consider waiting until you can be a little more discreet."

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Christian Arts Museum

Before news broke of the brazen murder of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife at their home, reporters were doing what they do every agonizingly news-less Easter weekend: scrounging for something to report on, preferably, given the season, religiously oriented.

That's must be what led CBS 11's Joel Thomas to the Christian Arts Museum in Fort Worth this weekend where he discovered that, yes, the sign outside tells the truth: there really is a life-sized wax display of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper."

The display takes up an entire room and features a beatific, flaxen-haired Jesus flanked by his 12 disciples, who are in an uproar following his prediction that one of them (Judas, carrying a money pouch) would betray him.

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Last year around Easter-time, local conservative talking head and life-sized Cabbage Patch doll Ben Ferguson was upset with the Dallas Fort-Worth Coalition of Reason, our local band of godless heathen sodomites. He was unhappy that they'd chosen Easter for their newest ad campaign, the theme of which was "Our Families Are Great Without Religion." (He wasn't the only one who got upset; as you might recall, a couple of movie theaters also refused to show the ad.)

This year, DFWCOR is wishing their Christian friends a joyous Good Friday the only way they know how: with the cheery graphic you see above.

"Last year, Ben Ferguson of WBAP criticized the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason's campaign for showcasing our many atheist families in the Metroplex during the Easter season," Zach Moore writes, DFWCOR's coordinator and media point person. "This year, we decided to take his advice and send out a message of celebration and collaboration. The following message has been sent out to local pastors, including Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church Dallas, and will be promoted on our website throughout the Easter holiday."

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Rowlett Mayor Todd Gottel

This week in godlessness brings us to Rowlett, where Mayor Todd Gottel is feeling pretty good. He'll be running unopposed soon for his second term as mayor and third term on the City Council. The rest of the time, he owns a "sales and marketing" company, per the city of Rowlett's website, is a precinct chair for the Dallas County Republican Party, and runs the sound boards over at First Baptist Church of Rowlett, from whence he posts frequent Facebook updates. And he's not about to let a bunch of atheist malcontents take that away from him.

"Interesting visitors at the Rowlett Council Meeting tonight," Gottel wrote on Facebook on March 5. "The Metroplex Athiests [sic] came to protest our Council Invocations before our City Council meetings begin. Please pray for them that they may be open to God's love and His word."

The Metroplex Atheists contend that Gottel seems to have missed the point of their visit.

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YouTube

Robert Jeffress, illustrating with his hands how sex is supposed to work.

It was hard to fathom how Robert Jeffress could possibly refine his already highly nuanced views on human sexuality, but the First Baptist pastor has managed, somehow, to do just that.

Right Wing Watch brings us a video of Jeffress's appearance last week on Trinity Broadcasting Network's "Praise the Lord" in which he further toned down his anti-gay rhetoric.

His premise is there are many ways to deviate from "God's standard," sexually speaking. Premarital sex, adultery, unbiblical divorce, man on man, woman on woman, man on woman on man -- they're all wrong in the Lord's eyes.

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In his column Sunday, the Morning News' Steve Blow wrestled with the the problem of hell, or at least the conservative Protestant vision of it. How, the question goes, can a supposedly loving, forgiving God condemn souls to an eternity of unbearable torment?

Blow's answer is that God doesn't. Without delving too deeply into theology, he concludes it's simply not plausible and not in line with what most Christians believe.

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