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"Luke Ford reports all of the 'juicy' quotes, and has been doing it for years." (Marc B. Shapiro)
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff) LATEST POSTS:
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- The Two Gates: Palestinian Memoir and the Apparatus That Cannot Use It
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- Bret Stephens: I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.
- America’s Most Powerful Victimhood Groups
- The Syllabus
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- Nobody in the Room Was Gullible
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- The Awarding Institution
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- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
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* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
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* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
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* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
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* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
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* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
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Category Archives: Desmond Ford
Tournier on Desmond Ford
Paul Tournier built his psychology on a single observation. A person needs a place before he can become a person. In A Place for You he recalls a student who came to him and said he could not begin his … Continue reading
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Tournier on Cinema Paradiso and Desmond Ford
Paul Tournier (1898-1986) argued that a person needs a place before he can become a person, and that the place is granted, not achieved. In A Place for You he set out an order of operations he found running through … Continue reading
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The Whole Cup
A man sits at my father’s table with something he cannot carry alone. My father gives him the Sabbath afternoon and takes him for a five-mile walk. He does this for years. People come with marriages breaking, with sons in … Continue reading
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My Father’s Hero System
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) holds that a man lives under two terrors. The first is death, the animal fact that the body fails and the self ends. The second is quieter and harder to name. It is the terror of insignificance, … Continue reading
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The Desmond Ford Show
Ford preaches from memory, and every witness records it first. He quotes chapter and verse for an hour without notes. He pulls Ellen White from recall the same way. A former Avondale student from the late sixties describes him as … Continue reading
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The Translator: Desmond Ford and the Limits of Adventist Reform
Desmond Ford (1929-2019) is a regional theologian whose career marks the limits of an apocalyptic sect’s encounter with modern biblical scholarship. He has currency within parts of Seventh-day Adventism. He has none outside it. Those two sentences shape everything else … Continue reading
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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Seventh-day Adventist Authority
Seventh-day Adventists do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as faithfulness to Scripture, loyalty to prophetic guidance, or responsibility for the church’s global mission. This is the … Continue reading
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I Want To Understand My Dad Through Alliance Theory
Written with AI: David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory argues that human behavior is driven by the strategic management of alliances. People do not merely hold beliefs. They deploy beliefs to signal loyalty, claim status, and recruit allies. Seen through this lens, … Continue reading
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Decoding My Father
My father would have been 97 today. ChatGPT says: Here’s how Alliance Theory, combined with David Pinsof’s social charisma framework, would apply to your father Desmond Ford. Ford was a gifted theologian and preacher whose influence came from more than … Continue reading
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The Rise & Fall Of Desmond Ford
ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would interpret the history of Seventh-day Adventism and your father, Desmond Ford’s trajectory as the story of an alliance system that initially built a strong in-group coalition and later fractured over boundary definitions and rival maps. … Continue reading
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