Steve Thorngate

Well, good for Jan Brewer. Yesterday, the Republican governor of Arizona vetoed a bill allowing business owners to discriminate against customers on religious grounds. The bill wasn't explicitly, exclusively aimed at gays and lesbians, but come on—it was aimed at gays and lesbians, part of a multistate effort to create broad protections for people who don't want to serve same-sex couples.

I don't usually write about preaching or about specific Revised Common Lectionary texts, since that's well covered elsewhere on the site by people more qualified than I. This is just a quick note motivated by the fact that this Sunday's Gospel reading is the subject of one of the more startling RCL factoids that came up when I was reporting my fall article on alternate lectionaries.

People assume a lot about what Christians are like. And often, we left-leaners are quick to explain not what we are but what we are not: not fixated on others’ damnation, not beholden to the Republican party, not antigay. It’s an understandable impulse. It also makes it that much easier for others to define us out of the faith altogether: they are the ones who believe or do x, y, and z important things; we are the ones who do not.

I try not to post TOO many "you forgot about us mainline Protestants!" posts. The idea comes up almost daily when I'm going through the news and the blogs, but I know that kind of thing can get old so I try to set the bar pretty high. If a person wanted to make this the focus of a blog, however, a person could do worse than to keep a close eye on the Barna Group.

Frustrating news out of North Dakota: one of the most viable longer-range Amtrak routes is being plagued by delays, courtesy of a parade of freight trains hauling crude away from oil-boom country. This is the point where passenger-rail skeptics and government haters generally laugh and say, what else is new? Amtrak’s running late! But our shell of a national passenger rail system has been dealt a pretty tough hand.

“If one of us dies of an overdose, probably 10 people who were about to won’t.”

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That Ken Ham guy is pretty slick with words. This was clear before his evolution v. creation debate with Bill Nye last night, including in his preamble at CNN.

It looks like Washington is about to do what recently seemed a far-off dream: actually enact a farm bill. From a farm-reform perspective, the bill that the House passed and the Senate is now debating is uninspiring, but it could be worse. The same goes for nutrition assistance: the bill doesn’t drastically cut SNAP (food stamps) eligibility and benefits as House Republicans sought to do, but it does cut benefits by more than 1 percent over the next decade.

Hey, the Feast of the Presentation falls on a Sunday this year! That's as good a reason as any to post this full-band recording of my setting of Simeon's song.

Pete Seeger’s friend Woody Guthrie wrote “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar. Seeger’s banjo offered a telling variation: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

In general, I agree with Kevin Drum's take on last night's State of the Union address: it was pretty effective for what it was, which wasn't all that much, and it was not at all what the White House sold it as, newspaper headlines and pundit roundtables notwithstanding.

I’ve become a loyal viewer of the ABC drama Nashville. The story sort of comes and goes—here it’s a subtly observed relationship drama, there it’s an off-the-rails primetime soap—but it’s perhaps the first TV musical with consistently great music direction, and some of the performers are pretty good, too. So I wait the silly story lines out and keep watching. Last week’s episode followed young country star Juliette Barnes through the aftermath of her confrontation with a conservative Christian protester.

While this blog has been on paternity leave, other people have continued to say things. To wit:

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This week, the Senate very nearly advanced an extension of unemployment benefits, but it couldn't quite get it done. While some congressional Republican favored an extension if it were offset by spending cuts elsewhere, a popular conservative argument holds that people who have longer access to unemployment benefits will take longer to find a job. The well-worn implication: why work for a living when you can get literally hundreds of dollars a month for free?

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