Steve Thorngate

It's easy for liberals to enthuse about "winning" the government shutdown. It's predictable for conservatives to act like the whole episode isn't a big deal. It's appropriate for all of us to celebrate the fact that furloughed federal workers will get back pay. But don't forget all the other workers affected by the shutdown.

The Century just published a longer piece of mine on lectionaries, which traces some of the Revised Common Lectionary's history but focuses mostly on recent alternatives to the RCL. The article draws from interviews with the people behind these lectionary projects, and I had hoped to also include feedback from pastors and other worship leaders who have actually tried them. But my draft crossed the 5,000-word mark before I even got to the latter, so I let it go. I will, however, post some such view-from-the-ministry-trenches items over the next week or so.

The RCL includes a few "optional" readings, to be subbed in as needed. Of course, it's all optional.

Week before last, I wrote this: I've always supported the health-care reform law, and I remain mostly optimistic about it (despite this week's tech glitches). But the point I take from [Obamacare convert Butch] Matthews isn't that people will agree with me about stuff once they have the facts. It's that if Obamacare's coverage expansions don't work out as well as we supporters expect them to, we should acknowledge this—rather than going down the endless path of confirmation bias and doubling down on existing loyalties. In that spirit: I was wrong when I dismissed the problems with the Obamacare exchange rollout as mere "glitches" confined to a parenthetical aside.

"I intend to honor Bartolomé de las Casas, and proclaim Columbus Day to hereby be known as Bartolomé Day."

...

When I'm home on a Sunday afternoon, I like to make sure some simple household task coincides with On the Media so I can listen to it. Inevitably the task takes more than an hour and I end up also hearing Marketplace Money. Nothing against the personal-finance show, but my low tolerance for hearing other people's awkward conversations makes me kind of hate call-in shows generally. (See also: why I can't handle a lot of what passes for comedy anymore.) Anyway, this past week I was doing the dishes and half-listening when a caller suddenly brought me almost to tears.

When I posted on the government shutdown last week, I grabbed a photo from the closed-down Statue of Liberty. It was an enticing editorial choice: Give me your tired, your poor, your furloughed federal employees yearning to just do their damn jobs again. But it was also probably an unhelpful choice.

Federal programs have ground to a halt, and workers have been sent home. The debt ceiling looms. And it's all somehow related to Obamacare.

Bloomberg’s magazine piece on the drug trade in Chicago is insightful and well reported as far as it goes. Here’s how far it goes: it more or less blames the city’s high murder rate on one man, the head of a Mexican cartel.

Officials at Duquesne University are disputing some of the facts of the story of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a longtime adjunct professor there who recently died sick, uninsured and impoverished. But they don't dispute labor lawyer Daniel Kovalik's original account of her poor pay and lack of benefits.

"You may not be special, but you are beloved."

...

On Tuesday, we learned that the economy's modest improvements last year didn't help the poverty rate any or prevent income inequality from being as bad as ever. Thursday the House zeroed in on these social ills and did its damnedest to make them worse, passing massive cuts to the food stamps program that does so much to keep Americans above the poverty line. Then this morning House Republicans moved forward on their "Defund Obamacare or the whole government gets it!" plan. Quite a week.

A couple weeks ago, President Obama introduced a plan to try to contain the cost of going to college. This was soon buried by a series of stories on Syria policy, with its high-intrigue mix of exceptionalist saber-rattling and Mr. Magoo diplomacy. So in case you missed it, the administration's higher-ed plan has some good stuff in it.

In a major hymnal, an unauthorized edit is an embarrassing oversight. In the local church, it's pretty routine.

President Obama's speech last night was a strange one. The administration's strategy of speaking out of both sides of its mouth on Syria continues. (This is a narrow, punitive mission...motivated by broad, humanitarian concerns such a mission won't really address.) Stranger still was the fact that Obama gave the speech at all.

From RNS: Too much religion can harm a society’s economy by undermining the drive for financial success, according to a new study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. . . . The study found that religious people in religious cultures reported better psychological adjustment when their income was low.