Steve Thorngate
The Debt Collective demands more
We learned last week that the Department of Education is taking steps to provide a measure of debt relief for students victimized by the whole Corinthian Colleges debacle. That's ostensibly a good thing, but it comes with a good deal of red tape—which means not everyone will get relief quickly, or at all.
I want my kids to be like Brandon Brooks
I’m a white parent, and I want my white kids to be like Brandon Brooks when they get older.
He’s the teenager who filmed the pool party incident in suburban Dallas, at which a police officer violently restrained 15-year-old Dajerria Becton and pulled his gun on others. That was smart of Brooks, and bold. His remarks to the press since then have been pretty perceptive, too.
"Next time you see me, I won't be wearing this shirt."
It starts off as a standard writeup of a protest and counter-protest of a mosque’s Friday prayers. An accompanying video portrays the two sides as polarized not just in rhetoric but in various cultural markers, starting with the fact that one side is packing the kind of firepower that would have shocked people not so long ago (and would still if the heat-packers weren’t so white).
You know, just a slice of 21st-century American life.
Blogging Toward Sunday is going. Sunday's Coming is coming.
The first Sunday's Coming email will feature a new piece by Justo González, along with past Century work by Nadia Bolz-Weber, John Buchanan, Brian Blount, and Lillian Daniel.
Other people saying things
"For most people who are arrested and charged with a crime, the most serious consequence is the record that’s created."
...Whose comprehensive morality?
Caitlyn Jenner is on the cover of Vanity Fair, people far and wide are admiring her, and social conservatives—even the heterodox ones, from Brendan O’Neill to Rod Dreher—are not impressed.
One liberalish counter-response does an admirable job of taking their concerns seriously, and it comes from an unexpected source—oh I’m just kidding, it’s obviously Damon Linker.
Other people saying things
"No matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer...
Wait, why is Ben Carson a vegetarian?
At the risk of going all Get Religion over nothing: it’s a little weird to read articles about Ben Carson’s vegetarianism that fail to mention that the presidential candidate is a member of a church that promotes vegetarianism.
Still seeking an ecumenical spirit on baptism
The controversy over Rodney Kennedy’s decision to baptize a baby has been fascinating. The prominent American Baptist pastor told RNS that he is “no longer interested whether confession of faith comes before or after baptism,” given the larger issues facing the church.
Many other Baptists, especially Southern Baptists, very much disagree. “The Christian community needs to have a conversation about baptism,” said Kennedy.
We’ve had one, actually.
Other people saying things
"The Gulf situation is a miniature version of the chicken-and-egg question that bedevils Amtrak as a w...
Decline and its complexities
There’s little for us mainliners to celebrate in this new Pew study. We’re losing people, and fast. I appreciate Heidi Haverkamp’s realistic-yet-hopeful words here and Rob Rynders’ there. But, like them, I’m not interested in spinning an argument that the numbers are somehow lying.
The numbers are clearer, however, than the reasons for them.
Why landlords ignore the law on recycling
Weeks ago, the recycling carts disappeared from our alley. We live in a Chicago three-flat, and the City is supposed to provide single-stream blue carts for all residential buildings with four or fewer units. It hasn’t replaced them yet.
Larger buildings are required to provide recycling services themselves, but this doesn’t always happen, either.
Eight Associated Church Press awards for the Century
I’m just back from Toronto, where I attended the annual gathering of the Associated Church Press. The event was capped by an awards ceremony for work published in 2014, at which the Century was given the “award of merit” (i.e., second place) in the best in class category for national and international magazines.
We also won seven additional awards honoring specific work from last year.
Other people saying things
"So why was the first Earth Day effective when the 45th promises to be just another day of feel-good fairs and corporate...
Pro-business as usual
So Obama and the Republicans hope to fast-track a couple of international trade deals, and some Democrats aren’t pleased. This “has scrambled the usual political alignment in Washington,” says NPR’s Scott Horsley, “putting the president at odds with many of his usual allies in organized labor.” It has “all made for dizzying change of tone,” adds Jonathan Weisman of the Times.
I suppose it’s a little unusual, if your lens on politics is pure partisan math, all red votes here and blue votes there. Dizzying it is not.
Why Easter means more to me now
There’s a stereotype that we more progressive Christians tend to downplay this stuff: that our interest in Jesus is mostly about his teaching, that if we do talk about something like the resurrection it’s only to debate whether it’s historically plausible. But I’m a lot less interested in evidence for the resurrection than I am in what the thing means. And I have learned, to my surprise and delight, that it actually means more to me now than it once did—before my faith took a bit of a leftward turn.
The freedom to practice religion without empathy
While I happen to think that refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding that isn’t even happening at your own church is a distortion of what it means to follow Jesus, this is more lament than argument. It makes me sad; and our religious freedom tradition, quite rightly, isn’t particularly concerned about my sadness.
What’s far more frustrating than pro-RFRA sentiment itself is the lack of empathy displayed by some who hold it.
Other people saying things
"Maybe when Feidin Santana says of Dominicans (like the citizens of so many nations), that 'we look for the alternative of the United States, we follow you,' ...