There were many significant images from Iran yesterday tied to Rafsanjani's much anticipated, and surprisingly pro-reform Friday sermon. Those images included photos of Mousawi being seen attending the event, as well as the photo alleging to show presidential candidate Karroubi being roughed up and having his turban knocked off.

I was drawn to the one above, however, published in a post of images at gooya.com. In several stories leading up to yesterday's event, I came across accounts in which young people -- planning to be in the streets on way or the other, but not having taken part in religious ritual for years -- were actually brushing up on their prayers.

The fact the prayer rug in the foreground is bright green could be completely coincidence, but the green scarf worn by the young man in the center of the photo is an unmistakable sign of the pro-Mousawi resistance.

Given the profound combination of political expression and primitive repression in Iran right now, it is fascinating to watch the reform movement patiently adapt its form and tactics by the week. At least at this point, it looks like the change is going to come from within.

(image: gooya.com)

Tribulation Force, pp. 60-63

So the second thing that needs to be said about this sermon by the Rev. Bruce Barnes is that it's not very good.

Well, to say that Bruce's sermon isn't very good would be like saying the Great Wall of China isn't very short. But it wouldn't have mattered much if this had been a good sermon, or even a great sermon, because the first thing that needs to be said about this sermon here is that it's simply the wrong sermon -- the wrong sermon at the wrong time, for the wrong audience, delivered in the wrong way.

That's not how Rayford Steele thinks of it. He sits in the pew anticipating another thrilling dose of his favorite sentiment: earnestness.

Jesus is coming again again. It's a bit confusing to read this summary of "Bruce's message" before Bruce gets up and delivers that message, but it suggests part of the problem with what is to follow here. The paragraph quoted above comes immediately after the one that describes the congregation of New Hope Village Church as "grieving," "terror-stricken" and "looking for hope." So Bruce gets up to give a sermon that is, expressly, not for the timid, but for those already wholly convinced and persuaded and fearless.

To see how this plays out, let's skip ahead four pages to the introduction to Bruce's sermon itself:

This will again strike evangelical readers as reassuringly familiar. They're accustomed to sermons that start off with nervously jokey pop-culture references from 1924.

But those readers aren't just the intended audience for this book, they're also the intended audience for this sermon within the book. Bruce's sermon is designed to be read by pre-Event American evangelical Christians -- by people sitting comfortably at home, convinced and persuaded of their own salvation, their undisintegrated children contentedly watching Bibleman videos in the next room. For that audience, Bruce's sermon might make a warped kind of sense. But for the audience there, in the book, in the pews of New Hope Village Church, this sermon would be intolerably, cruelly irrelevant.

There's only one sermon, one topic, that this traumatized, grief- and terror-stricken congregation needs to hear on this occasion: "What Happened to Our Children?"

This is the only thing that would matter. The only thing. That would be true even to those in attendance who had no children of their own -- even to those who didn't even know any children. Missing children require an explanation. They require a metaphysical accounting. That need, that demand, transcends any specific connection to any specific child. When children are taken, there are things we all demand and require to know.

I moved to Everybody's Hometown shortly after the accident and I had lunch that week with a friend who serves as a pastor there. Five teens from the local high school had been riding together in a car that was going too fast to negotiate a notorious curve. Some of the funerals were at my friend's church. He was exhausted, beaten down. During the course of that meal, he cycled through all of Kubler-Ross' stages of grief several times over.

Five children in a town of about 10,000 turned out to be an unbearably high percentage. The families were distraught. The high school was devastated. No one in town seemed untouched or unaffected or unscathed. People needed answers and many of them were turning to my friend. He is a wise man with a rock-solid faith, but when I met him for lunch that day he seemed to want to run away or hide or beat the rock like Moses and scream at the silent heavens.

In the preceding 60 pages of Bruce Barnes' moaning and whining about his "heavy burden," he hasn't once mentioned this burden. He hasn't once confronted or been confronted with the unanswerable questions about the missing children -- where? how? why? -- or with the hollow inadequacy of the pat answers he has to offer in response. God took them. They're with God. It's all for the best, so there's no need to conduct or consider or even mention the possibility of funerals for the disappeared. Let's just quickly move on already to the business at hand of digging a really big hole for Pastor to hide in.

By not confronting any of that in his sermon, Bruce creates a situation in which the best possible outcome would be people walking out en masse. More likely, there'd be a riot. ("His God did this? Let's get him! Burn the church!")

Then again this is the third Sunday since the Event. Perhaps Bruce dealt with all this last week. But that won't do either. This is not a one-lecture problem in need of a one-lecture fix. Even if he did preach about all those missing children last week, what of it? They're still missing. Their empty rooms and their tangible, ever-present absences are still the black holes at the center of every family -- the all-consuming devourer of light around which everything else slowly orbits.

Bruce is eager to skip ahead to the next item in his End Times check list, to make some progress through the litany of judgments listed in the book of Revelation. That litany, we've noted before, is a variation on an older theme. John of Patmos assesses the Roman oppressor and suggests this Caesar is nothing more than the latest Pharaoh, so he invokes against him all the plagues of Egypt.

In LaHaye and Jenkins' reimagining of Revelation, they embellish that book's listing of the plagues, adding the one that's missing and reordering the list so that it comes first instead of last. And then they up the ante. It's not enough of a blow in their view for death to come to the first-born of every family, they have to take away every child.

They never grasp how this alters and undermines what Revelation presents as an escalating series of calamities. All the earthquakes and locusts and hail-and-fire-mixed-with-blood come across as wan and anticlimactic after every parent on earth has already been subjected to every parent's worst nightmare.

Go ahead and ask any parent, even the worst parent you've ever met, ask them which they would choose to have happen, if they had to choose: The inexplicable and instantaneous disintegration of their child? Or merely something like this:

That's the sixth seal of judgment from the sixth chapter of Revelation. It sounds bad, but not nearly as bad as the Event. Who really cares if "every mountain and island" is removed from its place after every infant and child has been removed from theirs?

The pages we skipped past a moment ago are filled with Bruce Barnes' long and rambling throat-clearing introduction to his sermon in which Bruce says, about six different ways, that he has something desperately urgent to tell everyone. You get the sense that if a large object were falling toward your skull, Bruce wouldn't just yell, "Duck!" but would, instead, say something like, "I want you to listen very carefully to what I'm about to say and not to dismiss it as the overwrought concerns of a religious zealot, but rather to appreciate my earnest sincerity and passion and to glean from that that attention ought to be paid to the desperately urgent warning I intend to deliver to you shortly ..."

Here's how Bruce begins:

What Bruce ignores, probably because he's been re-reading Revelation instead of talking to any of his neighbors, is that the congregation is in even worse shape than he is. The Steeles may have "dressed for God" this Sunday morning, but the rest of these people haven't done laundry or shaved or slept since their kids disappeared.

Reaching for some kind of analogy for the unimaginable aftermath of the Event, I keep comparing it to something more familiar, like a mining disaster. We've discussed how communities faced with such tragedies do tend to congregate at churches. But they don't show up freshly scrubbed and dressed in their Sunday finest. They show up in whatever they happened to have on when they heard the news -- in jeans or sweats or even bathrobes hastily grabbed on the way out the door. This Sunday gathering isn't exactly like that, but it's far closer to that than either Bruce or the authors realize.

And that brings us to the strangest, cruelest aspect of this Sunday service and the sermon Bruce delivers: It's like a service after a mining disaster in which no one even mentions the miners. No one prays for them or for their families. No one discusses funeral arrangements or any other way for the community to acknowledge and begin to cope with the pain and loss. No one weeps with those who weep and no one mourns with those who mourn.

Once again we find ourselves up against a wall in reading these books. We can't move on without accepting the authors' framework, which requires them, and us, to work our way rat-a-tat through the discrete and unrelated events on the End Times check list. We cannot continue reading if we're going to dwell on the meaning or repercussions of events that have already been checked off. Nor will we be able to continue reading if we expect the characters in these pages to respond or react or change as a result of those over-and-done-with occurrences.

So, yeah, the kids are all gone. That's over with. It was in the previous book; this one's about the next thing. If Rayford, Buck, Bruce and everyone else in the world of this story can casually move on without giving those missing children a second thought then we, as readers, must be expected to do the same.

Other stories in other books persuade readers to go along through the willing suspension of disbelief. Tribulation Force insists on the willing suspension of the reader's humanity. It requires the reader not just to accept but to participate in the monstrous absence of empathy displayed by the characters and authors alike. The word empathy has recently become something of a partisan football, so it's worth reminding ourselves here of what the opposite of empathy is: sociopathy.

There's a monster at the end of this book. And if the authors succeed at what they've set out to do, that monster is you.

That's part of why one should only read these books slowly, in small, weekly doses, while pausing to scream at or mock every page.

Apologies to the White House, but this just gets me. On the exact same day New Haven firefighters ganged up  against Sotomayor in D.C., the visually savvy WH had the idea, playing tit for tat, to get the photo above on the wire.

Cute. First responders from NYC "one upping" the boys from Connecticut (the scene set at the Wall Street landing zone, no less!). But then, haven't we had enough of milking 9/11?

The family in this story bought a house.

They saved up and paid for it. No sub-prime loans or exotic balloon-payment ARMs. No granite countertops or vaulted foyers. Just a nice, modest $89,000 piece of the American dream with an affordable, $926-a-month mortgage.

Then his job disappeared and now they're going to lose the home. But this family isn't facing foreclosure, they're facing repossession.

The needlepoint samplers are all wrong. It turns out it isn't love that "makes a house a home," it's the deed to the land the house sits on.

So, OK then, let's make these houses homes. Let's convert these cars into homes by converting all of these feudal mobile home "communities" and trailer parks into resident-owned communities -- into neighborhoods with houses that are homes, places where homeowners don't have to pay rent on or worry about eviction from the land on which their house sits.

When I say "let's" I mean "us" as in "We the people." As in the federal government. With taxpayer dollars.

Feel free to call this "stimulus spending" or "a massive new government program," but don't pretend it's going to add to deficits or wind up costing taxpayers anything in the long run. In the long run, we would all benefit.

What we're talking about here are hundreds of thousands of mortgages. Safe, boring, long-term loans that produce a safe, boring, long-term profit. These loans would all be fully collateralized by the land itself, and the people receiving these loans are all, by definition, A) responsible homeowners, who B) already have a track-record of making monthly rent payments on the same land. If the folks at FHA or FDIC or Fannie or Freddie can't figure out a way to turn those rent payments into loan payments while also turning a no-risk modest profit, then those folks need to quit their jobs and let someone competent take over for them.

It might not be dramatic, but this would have a stimulus effect by providing hundreds of thousands of working-class households with a small increase in their monthly disposable incomes. And being working-class families, they'll notice that difference, and they'll spend it.

The impact on the financial security of these families will be dramatic. They will no longer have to fear sudden displacement. A nice side-effect of that is another economy-boosting bit of stimulus. It will suddenly begin to make sense for these families to invest in their homes. And they will begin to do so.

But the story above illustrates the most significant economic implication of converting all of these landless "car"-dwellers into property-owning homeowners. A house that sits on someone else's land depreciates just like a car. It loses value over time. A house that sits on land owned by the homeowner appreciates. That builds equity for the homeowners themselves, improving their security and their lives, but it also builds equity for the economy as a whole. It creates wealth, which is the very definition of stimulus or economic growth.

Look at the Halls in the story above. They spent $89,000 for their home. It's now worth less than that. What happened to that money? It's just gone. Poof. The economy shrank by that amount.

Multiply that contraction by the total number of manufactured homes sitting on landlord-controlled properties and you can begin to get an idea of how these feudal communities and parks are acting as massive machines for the destruction of wealth. Sure, some landlords may be able to enrich themselves by operating these colonies, but no matter how much they're able to skim for their own bank accounts, it can't begin to offset the economy-shriveling effect of the cumulative depreciation of all of those houses.

Reversing that effect -- turning these communities into equity-building engines for economic growth while simultaneously improving the financial health and security of hundreds of thousands of Americans -- would be a large undertaking, but it would not be a complicated one, or a risky one, and it would save taxpayers money in the long run.

So OK, I've written about this a bunch of times and I am, obviously, quite taken with the idea. But what am I missing? I'm too much of a fan of this idea to step back and poke holes in it myself, so please help me out here. Play Oligarchy's Advocate and try to talk me out of this. Tear the idea apart. Highlight its weaknesses. Explain why it couldn't and shouldn't ever happen.

What I don't really get is the title MSNBC chose for this suspenseful photo in their "Week in Pictures" slideshow. It reads:

Last-second escape

A U.S. Marine of 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade runs to safety moments after an IED blast in Garmsir district of Helmand province in Afghanistan on July 13. Two Marines were killed in the explosion, which occurred as they tried to clear a route into the Taliban heartland of southern Helmand province. About 4,000 Marines are battling insurgents in a massive offensive launched in the south in early July to clear Taliban militants out of strongholds.

I get it. The Marine in the foreground escaped.

(image: Manpreet Romana / AFP - Getty Images)

If this photo of a mass funeral convoy passing through the town of Wootten Basset doesn't end up marking a turning point in English popular opposition to the Afghan war (the Brits lost these 8 soldiers in a 24-hour period last week), it has certainly ratcheted up the tension over the Afghan"investment." The angle of the Getty photo not only captures the entire procession, it also suggests how the death toll is on an upward path with no end in sight.

And then, with American casualties also increasing as the result of the U.S. escalation, I can't tell if this kind of imagery -- amidst the noise of ultimately uneventful happenings like the the Sotomayor hearings or the G-8 summit -- has a better or a worse chance of capturing domestic attention.

(image: Carl de Souza/Getty Images. Wiltshire, England. July 14, 2009)