In the World

In my article on alternatives to the Revised Common Lectionary, I praised the African American Lectionary's extensive resources, but I didn't really describe them in any detail. There is a wealth of good stuff on the AAL website. The AAL is based on weekly themes, many of which do not correspond to the liturgical calendar the RCL follows. This Sunday is Caregivers Day, one of several new AAL observances this year.

Friday's food stamps cut is simply the end of a temporary increase. That’s a small comfort for struggling Americans whose tight grocery budgets just got tighter.

Of the four projects I focused on in my article on alternate lectionaries, Eric Lemonholm's Open Source Lectionary arguably got the least attention—the fewest words, the fourth slot of four. But that's not because I found it to be the least interesting or significant.

It's true: the rollout of the Obamacare federal exchange has been a mess. And while the problems began with technical issues, they're threatening to become a whole lot more. This week's Capitol Hill circus was all about who's to blame. Is it the feds' fault or the contractors'? To those of us who, whatever our political sympathies, don't have an immediate dog in the blame game, the answer seems obvious: regardless of where the specific problems originated, it was the Obama administration's job to get this thing done. And the administration failed.

Here in Chicago, reporter Rob Wilderboer found a compelling story last week: The Chicago Police Department throws out about $2 million every year. It’s money that is forfeited by the city when police destroy the guns they seize rather than sell them to licensed firearms dealers. The decision is made for emotional, political and ideological reasons. Wilderboer sets it up as a simple choice: money for the CPD/other City services? Or the satisfaction of destroying weapons?

Daniel Mayes is a Disciples of Christ pastor. He did his D.Min. at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, where Timothy Slemmons—creator of the Year D project, which I wrote about for the Century—was one of his advisors. Mayes’s church, First Christian Church of Spencer, Iowa, has been using Year D in worship throughout the current liturgical year. I asked him a few questions about how it’s gone.

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.

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.

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.

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.