The GOP has good reason to celebrate this week. Thanks to the enthusiasm of those who imbibed the spiked punch at the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh’s generalship has been grandly endorsed and the President of the United States has quietly conceded failure, as he assumed responsibility for the Democrats’ deafening defeats.

In the summer of 1973, at the urging of Gordon Hyde, Director of the Biblical Research Institute, the President’s Executive Advisory Committee approved plans for a select committee to meet for the purpose of “giving through and adequate study to the role of women in the church organization.”[1]

The letter to the Colossians offers arguments to prevent its readers from being led astray by those who are teaching them “philosophy and empty deceit” (2:8). At the core of these teachings, it would appear, “the elements of the world” play a central role.

PROLOG (given by a narrator)

We have all been told that in the hereafter there will be those who arrive in heaven without having heard the gospel message. This is a story about one such woman. She had lived her entire life in an isolated area of the country, an area that certain believers fled to in the final days of earth’s history. As our story opens the woman, Mary Jane, is sitting on her front porch, smoking a cigarette and worrying about some folks she had sheltered just the night before.