Good job growth news is not always good news for all of us.
Especially if you’re a girl.
A Girl’s Guide to Job Growth
Newtown and video games: The debate rages on
How could this possibly be a risk factor for troubled people?
There’s broad consensus among researchers that violent video games are a risk factor that, in combination with other risk factors (like: violent or absent parents, drug or alcohol abuse, poor performance in school, etc.), can lead to violent behavior. You would not know this from the general interest press, however, which tends to frame the debate as one in which it’s either a 50/50 question or in which there’s not enough research to decide; this is also how many in the press tended to frame climate change, if you’ll recall.
The video game industry, which could be worth over $100 billion worldwide, depending on which estimate you believe, is obviously as keen as any other industry to knock back claims that its products can be harmful, and its lobbying arm, the Entertainment Software Association, has spent more than $18 million in Washington in the last four years. That buys a lot of congressmen!
What have we done?
Watch these time lapse photos of spots around the world to see what we’ve done in the last 30 or so years.
And thanks, Cynical, for the link.
Just be nice
I was heading to an appointment in Hartford recently, and after I parked and started walking, I noticed a woman about my age and about half my size standing on a street corner talking in her Jamaican lilt into a phone.
I eavesdrop. Sue me. Nothing is so entertaining as someone else’s life. She was waiting for a bus. It was late. She couldn’t be late. She was getting nervous.
I went to my appointment, and was done in 5-6 minutes, tops, and when I walked back outside, the woman was still there, looking anxiously down the street for a bus, or so I guessed.
Here’s where the vestige of my religion kicks in, with a twist. I do not pick up hitchhikers, per se, though I will give occasional, out-of-the-blue car rides to small people There’s a method to this: I figure if things go south, and my ride starts to act up, I am bigger than they are, and I can throw them out of my car. I do a quick sizing-up, and if they pass muster as someone I could potentially overpower (and that’s a long list of people because not only am I strong, I am also mean), they get a free ride.
I know this is weird. Sue me for that, too. I haven’t the heart not to give any rides, ever, but I try to be judicious about it.
The face of gender justice in my church
Jennifer Jeanine Thweatt-Bates at Rude Truth wrote this:
What’s the face of gender justice in the church for you?
Like so many things, this topic is intractable when it is framed as a faceless “issue” — a matter of doctrinal dispute or hermeneutical correctness. Sean Palmer’s recent blog post on “speaking the truth in love” as a thinly disguised form of justified meanness gets at this–when we think about things as “issues” we allow ourselves to be indifferent, rude, and mean-spirited. You know, for Jesus.
Time and time again, on the old gal328.org forum where so many different people connected with each other for the first time, the motif emerged: I never thought about this until I became the father/mother of girls; until I saw my daughter called to ministry; until my granddaughters were born.
Suddenly, the issue had a face. A beloved face.
And that changes things.
So these are the faces of gender justice in my church: My granddaughter (who is making her “Granny” face and Lord, I hope it doesn’t freeze that way), and my grandson behind her. I include both because we all benefit when the world is equal. And little boys raised in the patriarchy are every bit as cheated as are little girls. They just don’t know it.
Let the faith groups lead the way on this.
At the BOTS graduation last night
I went to the BOTS Center for Creating Learning‘s graduation last night. That’s half the graduating class in the photo, from left: Robert A.P. Andrews (who goes by Justin Sweetwater when he writes poetry); Joan Artis, Aldene Burton, and Antoinette McCrary. Behind them is Rabbi Donna Berman, the executive director of Charter Oak Cultural Center, and the brains behind the center, and behind the BOTS graduation.
The center (“BOTS” stands for “Beat of the Street,” the name of Hartford’s street newspaper) provides free classes in writing, personal finances, leadership skills, communications, journalism and the like to people who are or have been homeless. Because of Robert’s and Joan’s efforts, the center also provides breakfast and lunch the day of classes.
I taught journalism, but as part of the ceremony all the instructors (there were roughly 20 of us) were asked to light a candle and say what we’d learned from the students. Because I couldn’t get my candle lit (and thanks, Joan, for help with that), I wasn’t as articulate as I wish I had been. I know I said I learned grace and perseverance from the eight students (which included Adrienne Lombardo, Sarah Ratchford, Marilyn Watson, and Sal Pinna, who got a standing ovation when at part of the ceremony he sang “The Rose,”), so here goes:
I learned that the end of the story is often not the end. I learned that no one gets off the street without a lot-lot-lot of help from a variety of people, from people like one of the audience members, Anthony “Joe the Barber” Cymerys, 82, who after 25 years is still giving free haircuts in the park, and people like Rabbi Berman, who has these crazy and beautiful ideas all the time. I learned that you can keep learning from everyone — all people, not just teachers at the front of a class.
And I learned (relearned, really) that you can touch the face of God. It was a great evening and I can’t wait until next semester.
Come for a cemetery tour
Hartford Faith & Values is hosting a cemetery tour of the historic Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven. The cemetery is the eternal resting place of the bones of some of America’s bold-faced names like Roger Sherman, Lyman Beecher, and Mary A. Goodman.
The hour-long tour starts at 2 p.m. on June 15.
Medicare: It’s for the laaaadies.
And men, too, though because women live longer, they tend to rely more on Medicare, which is, according to this Kaiser Family Foundation study, as a
critical source of retirement security for 22.4 million women ages 65 and over.
Abortion, Enda Kenny, and the future of Boston College as a Catholic institution
A Catholic cardinal? Now I’ve seen it all.
For many years now, Boston College has been a Catholic institution in roughly the same way that Duke is a Methodist school: there’s a history and vague institutional ties, but not much more than that. There was even a controversy when BC put crucifixes on classroom walls in 2009.
But the rupture between the school and the church has perhaps never been more public than it is now, with Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley refusing to appear at the Jesuit school’s commencement exercises on Monday because the featured recipient of an honorary degree will be Enda Kenny, the anti-Catholic Taoiseach (prime minister, basically) of Ireland. The predictable people are saying predictable hand-wringing things about this, and the whole matter is being framed in terms of abortion, because Kenny supports legislation that would loosen Ireland’s restrictions on abortion.
Why don’t we care about New Orleans’ Mother’s Day shooting?
Police have arrested a second suspect in the Mother’s Day shooting that wounded 19. David Dennis at The Guardian has a guess as to why this hasn’t caught our attention as much as other mass shootings:
Now take a moment and imagine a Mother’s Day Parade in the suburbs of Denver, a neighborhood in Edina or a plaza in Austin where bullets rain down on civilians and even hit children. I can’t help but imagine the around-the-clock news coverage. And I can’t help but think it’s because most of America can identify with the fear of being bombarded with gunfire while just enjoying a parade in the middle of town. But America can’t identify with being at a parade in the “inner city” where “gang violence” erupts. The “oh my God, that could happen to me” factor isn’t present with a story about New Orleans or the Chicago southside.
But no matter where the incident occurred, the victims are still there. Victims like 10-year-old Ka’Nard Allen whose father was stabbed to death in October. Whose five-year-old cousin was shot to death at Ka’Nard’s birthday party last May (Ka’Nard was also shot in the neck that day). He was also grazed with a bullet in his cheek at the Mother’s Day parade. No matter what part of the country Ka’Nard is from, his story should linger in your heart.
And thanks, Mary.
If you think education is expensive…
Try prison. And do feel free to click on the link, where the image is much bigger and easier to read.
And thanks, DickG., for the link.
When the end doesn’t come: Harold Camping, two years after the Rapture that wasn’t
Greensboro, May 21, 2011. I admit it; I laughed.
It’s hard to imagine now, only two years later, but back in May 2011 there were a fair few people around the world who thought the end of time had arrived; specifically, they believed the predictions of a retired civil engineer named Harold Camping that the (relatively recently developed) doctrine of the Rapture would be fulfilled on May 21, with the elect being taken bodily into heaven, and everyone else suffering various tribulations on earth.
I only cry at the pretty
I’m not a big crier, unless something’s pretty.
Last night, I spoke at the Muslim and Christian Women of Hope and Faith’s Solidarity Over Diversity event in Hartford, a community conversation about reaching across the divide to one another.
The event was the brainchild of Carole Fay and Fatma Antar, a wonderfully combustible duo if ever there was one. My role was to tell a story or two in the beginning, and get people warmed up. I don’t know if I did that. I certainly stayed within my allotted time.
But then three other women spoke. One was a Muslim woman living in Glastonbury, who found out her son had been treated shabbily by a teacher when her neighbors copied emails they sent in protest to the school. The son hadn’t told his mother, but his friends had witnessed the treatment, and told their parents, who reacted immediately.
We all draw tribal lines. It’s how we know our place in the world, and it always chokes me up when we draw them in unexpected places. I figured out why in last night’s discussion group.
Jesus saves. And endorses candidates, evidently.
A Florida candidate who insisted she was endorsed by Jesus Christ nevertheless pulled up last.
And thanks, Jay, for the link.
The IRS went after tea partiers and … liberal Episcopalians
Wrestling fans will appreciate this.
Although at this point, isn’t “liberal Episcopalian” something of a tautology? It’s like saying “disappointed Maple Leafs fan,” am I right? (ZING)
Anyway, back to the scandal du jour: As Ken Layne writes over at Gawker, only about a quarter of the 300 groups singled out for IRS scrutiny were affiliated with right-wing causes. What were the other 75 percent involved in? We don’t know, because the IRS hasn’t made the full list public yet (hint to IRS: do that).
But we do know that in 2004, under the Bush administration, the IRS targeted liberal Christian churches because of the sermons of their pastors, and some conservative churches in 2006 (again, under Bush; also, lost in the fun, frantic blame session is the fact that the official in charge of the IRS during the 2012 campaign season was – you guessed it! – a Bush administration holdover).
“That the IRS under a Republican administration deliberately targeted liberal California churches has been forgotten in the manufactured outrage of the Republican Party’s Tea Party-IRS scandal,” says Ken Layne, whose writing on religious topics sadly often comes across like it’s being penned by a smug 19-year-old. “That the IRS was still under the control of a Bush appointee during the 2012 scrutiny of new non-profits that self-identified with the Republican Party’s Tea Party movement is also little mentioned, because the president is a popular Democrat.”