I arrived early enough at the New Life Church of Turner Falls on Sunday to get a priority-section seat for what I was assured would be the beginning of a historic, world-changing, paradigm-shifting revolution in our very understanding of what it means to be human.

I half expected to be recognized, even among the thousands who queue up well in advance for the church’s flagship weekly broadcast, and booted out in retaliation for last week’s newsletter. Instead, I was treated to nearly an hour of pre-show programming, most of it concerned with ensuring parishioners are tithing to the fullest extent of their financial ability. (Semantic quibble: doesn’t “tithing” mean giving 10 percent of whatever you’ve got? Either you’re tithing or you’re not!)

For new subscribers — allow me to extend a grateful welcome to Trash Tabs readers and an ungrateful unwelcome to the PatriotWire trolls who have been flooding my inbox with threats and hate speech — here’s where we’re at: a billionaire lightly kidnapped me last month in an attempt to convince me he had resurrected the President of the United States from the dead, the details of which would be revealed to the world last weekend during the Sunday, July 30th 11 a.m. service at New Life.

And while that’s definitely one of the strangest sentences I’ve ever written, it is not the strangest, because the strangest is the one I’m about to write: