Omission

Writing at Mockingbird, Sarah Condon explores how often Christians like to lay the blame for bad things at the foot of the devil, and how little that tendency squares with that entity as it is described in the Bible.

It's a good meditation -- the upshot is that we all too often tell Ol' Scratch to put his feet up and sit a spell because we'll do fine sinning all by ourselves without his help.

The omission mentioned above is the criminal absence of Geraldine Jones, who was one of the major proponents of this way of thinking during the late 1960s and 1970s, even appearing on television to spread her message. She made no apologies for her teaching, explaining that what we saw was what we got.

Unfortunately Sister Geraldine never explained where she developed this way of thinking, although there is some speculation that she was taught it by the Rev. Leroy of the Church of What's Happenin' Now.