Envy Apartment

The following testimony from JD Hall regarding a recent visit to Jim Bakker’s studio and Morningside Ministries was sent to Pulpit & Pen for publishing. While on a working vacation in Branson, Missouri on August 2 – just prior to my debate on Cessationism and Charismaticism in Cleveland the following weekend – I spent time with my extended family on the campus of College of the Ozarks. While there, I planned to visit the television studios and survivalist retreat (for lack of a better word) of Jim Bakker, the disgraced televangelist who had a multi-millionaire fund his ministry come back and who is now hustling survival supplies in the name of Jesus. Prior to leaving on vacation, I planned this visit to Morningside and received permission for what I had expected would happen from my local church leadership , lest anyone think I am a completely crazy man who had gone rogue or something like that. My leadership gave me the okay to do what I, indeed, ended up doing. First, a few th...

Touring Havana with Legendary Cuban- American Dual Citizen , Attorney Manny Ramos Let’s just say if I had known Manny was a distant cousin of Fidel and Raul’s I might have made it to his daughter Suzie’s wedding in Havana two years ago at the base of the Spanish fort overlooking the Old City. Manny hired 30 vintage American cars and the 102 guests, who had flown in from Belfast and Hong Kong, Paris and New York, San Diego and Charleston, were all chauffered to the La Divina Pastora restaurant for the festivities. Most of Manny’s ex-wives even showed up. He’s had four and is on to his fifth. They still all speak to him, which shows how good a negotiator he may be. Manny Ramos, a founder of the San Diego office of Lewis, Brisbois, Bisgaard and Smith, is the only person I know to hold duel US-Cuban citizenship. At age 8, he was on the last flight out of Havana after the Revolution. His father was the City Treasurer for the Batista dictatorship, his father’s job, to collect the taxes ...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...