Could it be that living vicariously through luminaries is a way of coping with pain and suffering? Something like 'My life is hard, perhaps unfulfilling, but I see others doing well and this gives me reason to trust in the goodness of being.'. Put starkly, does Taylor's imagined joy give me reason to live without it myself?

We need to be careful about where we put beginnings and endings. This story “If you live like him you’ll die like him” Is very different from this story “If you live like him you’ll die like him and be raised with him.”

I've been pastor-ized! Thanks Paul. I think you'll find the second half even more fascinating since it deals directly with Taylor and her relationship to Christianity, which is far more complex than you can imagine.

Paul I am very grateful for all your sermons you are putting up here. They are bringing me closer to Him. Thank you.

Great summary and comparison and great question and insights… Thank you for your ministry PVK

This was interesting as I hadn’t heard of Paul being born as a slave before.

Being a witness and being poured out ... a miracle and a grace.

Paul picture of Paul in a dungeon, can I have a link Pastor?

Taylor Swift is the third horse woman of the Matriarchy.

John The Baptist and a local bringer of the Good News and Paul as an international one is pretty cool 😎. How would those two gents have got on if they met, that would be an interesting heavenly conversation.

I understand there was a tradition of not allowing former slaves to be Roman citizens, as Paul was.

Not first😢

Hi Paul, Always interesting but I struggled to understanding your linking of Paul and Taylor Swift. I've not read Paul but was interested in hearing him talk of not seeing and not hearing in the heart. I suspect most people would interpret this as a poet way of speaking but I heard it as a technical language.

Why stories? We are a complex of stories, experiences, imagination: Gestalt. Mythos not Identity. I use (as examples put forward in this area) Joseph Campbell, or Carl Jung, or even recently Dr. Desmets and his book: 'the psychology of totalitarianism'.. He builds upon Hannah Arendt's work, but simply one quote applies here, and to our modern issues of "who are we, who am I?". Identities are the stories other people tell, that you live, you believe. We must write and live our own stories: our mythos.

"Christianity will go, it will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now......" Nice try, John.

Dang, that Byrne video really impacted you, eh?

Nah man bullying Taylor Swift is crazy 😅 somebody get this boomer a glass of milk and cookies. Paul I think you need to take a nap for this one.

An egg cell and sperm cell are “in chains” in fertilization, and even a “combinatorial explosiveness” thereby, in the then more measured determination, or “relevance realization” - (here a little, there a little, of some to go backward from, and some forward to Christ) - of the midwives - (directly in two differing local places in Catholic and Protestant, or Shiphrah and Puah in Albuquerque and Tyler today as Pergamos and Ephesus, together, within a new nation like our own, epically grown anew in the wilderness, through ships coming to the New World initially from Spain, along with the English as another horn of the altar, in a bull fighting and bull riding to Mexico and the US, since two nations, and two manner of people are in the womb of Rebekah) - in the birthing of a once again sociologically cellular, or replicating and specializing assembly, in pregnancy and birthing, of an immortal or eternally returning and ancient ancestrally remembered body-politic, historically and culturally distinguishing between the living, or quick, and the dead, when the Lord comes quickly. Christ and Paul are the fertilization forming the eternal child of Christ, like the child prophet Jeremiah, in the Nativity, or epical beginnings, necessarily implied anew, time and again, by every New World, and particular new Nation; and like Rome, of course, in such previous Christian times, as scriptures are shown in their fulfillment upon them, by the Lord, himself, at such finally universal heights or horizons of each newly modern, democratically educated, and thus, overall commonly literate and universally marketed age, “literally”, and even nationally and judicially, in scriptural “testimony”, “witness”, and “record”, then also scripturally placing prophetically, as well, a clearly class-legislated “mark” upon Cain - (as a once agricultural aristocracy in our Founding Fathers of the Southern Colonies, transplanted to the New World, or land of Nod as an epical sleeping and dreaming like Rip Van Winkle) - in the “mark” or “high calling”, at the same time, of Jesus Christ, where “every soul”, as a “citizen”, is “made subject to the higher” , or at such times, clearly universal stage of world “powers”, hitherto only building up to that stage in the “four beasts”, popularly and ethnographically of nationalism, like Napoleonic France, Victorian England, Nazi Germany, and the US today.