Falwell

I did not like Jerry Falwell. I'm not going to pretend I did, and really my first emotions upon hearing he started a new and exciting career as daisy fertilizer were not ones of deep garment-rending sorrow.

Still, he has a family who grieves him, and people who knew him away from the cameras and unbelievable soundbites. They knew him when the gun he held --the one with which he shot himself, and by extension Christians in the foot-- was unloaded and put away. What was that Jerry Falwell like? I don't know --my closest brush with him was in high school when Liberty University was breathlessly chasing after anyone with a pulse and a triple-digit SAT score-- maybe he was a nice man. All I can say for him is that he seemed to truly have loved the God of his understanding, and maybe if there's something positive to learn from a man who outwardly (at least to me) seemed to be a cartoon of the worst of Christian stereotypes is that perhaps we all ought to seek to serve the God of OUR understanding (which, one hopes, is not a God who sends jumbo jets into office buildings because he has a problem with the ACLU or hot guy-on-guy action) with such fervor.