Running with the Devil

Wed, Jun 3, 2009

I’ve been intermittently reading Richard Posner’s judicial opinions. They have been less witty and piquant than I had been expecting, but there are moments. Consider his decision to retell this, for example:

James Gilles (“Brother Jim”) [. . .] is a traveling evangelist–the latest in a line of Christian itinerant preachers stretching back to Saint Paul and prominent in Methodism in nineteenth-century America. Born near Vincennes, Gilles gives the following account of his salvation. As a result of Satan’s machinations, he devoted himself as a youth to drugs, sex, booze, and rock and roll. At a rock and roll concert at which the well-known Van Halen band performed, singer David Lee Roth shouted to the crowd: “Not even God can save your soul at a Van Halen concert!” Gilles saw the light, called on God to save him and thus refute Roth, and was saved.

That’s from Gilles v. Blanchard.