Acts 8: 5-8, 14-17 (links validated 12/22/24a)

Jon Marc Smith’s Make Them Cry includes the story of Tomas’s baptism. Tomas is a murderous drug lord who hides in the baptismal font of a Pentecostal church to elude the police who are trying to arrest him. Smith describes how Tomas “dunked himself and slicked his hair back and sprayed water from his mouth and went under again and started rubbing his skin, washing himself. He let his eyes float on the surface like a crocodile. “Did this mean he was saved now? As in salvation, go-to-heaven, all that? That’s what these weird Christians believed, right? You go under, you’re born anew, no? Maybe somewhat saved, a percentage, half- or quarter-saved? Did his soul get some little bit of profit from thus church water? “Probably not. Not even Tomas would let a guy like himself in a place with all those good people. Wouldn’t be fair. Tomas had never read the Bible, never listened to homilies, never paid attention, but he knew that Christianity had some pretty strict rules. A ticket to paradise cost more than a bath. Maybe you got less time in purgatory. Probably it was something like that. A thousand years off his infinite sentence or some [bad stuff].”

always good insights!

Simon’s mysterious story reminds me of the perhaps equally mysterious story of Emad Jamil Al Swealmeen. He killed himself and wounded his taxi driver when he detonated an improvised explosive device outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital on November 11, 2021. Police believe he was what Daniel Pipes on the November 21, 2021, Middle East Forum Blog calls “an Islamist and a jihadi.” Yet Swealmeen’s story is somewhat complicated. When he legally arrived in Britain from Iraq, a retired British army officer took the refugee under his wing after he visited Liverpool’s Cathedral and expressed interest in converting to Christianity. The officer led him through an Alpha Course and into his confirmation in March 2017...

(Puppet Script by Louise Ferry)