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...

Two brothers are at war over one of Victoria's biggest real estate empires , worth more than $500 million, four decades after their Italian family founded the dynasty. Former Carlton Football Club director and developer Colin De Lutis lives in a Toorak mansion three doors from younger brother Paul , who has taken him to the Supreme Court over how their property and business assets will be sliced up. Colin and Paul De Lutis are battling each other in the Supreme Court .  Photo: Supplied Paul has wanted out of the family business since 2014 but an acrimonious argument is playing out in the Supreme Court  over the break-up. Together with their mother Anna the brothers own 38 properties worth more than half a billion dollars, amassed since the family bought a Smith Street, Collingwood, shop in 1973. There, the family founded Westco Jeans and grew it into a chain of 160 retail outlets. It sold in 1999 for $85 million. That money was sunk into property and the De Lutis portfolio ...

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 ...