She leaves her fingerprints everywhere

• Local news: “1st Syrian refugee family arrives in Lancaster County, beginning of wave coming here.”

“If people would go together with five friends and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to be the next welcome group for the next Syrian family,’ or if every church would have one support group,” Kauffman said, “we could take care of the refugees that are coming here.”

People helping people, neighbors helping neighbors. Sounds pretty good — unless you’re Ben Carson, in which case it’s just more “political correctness.”

• This recalls both a Steven Wright joke and story from Jorge Luis Borges.

• The year of our Lord 1310: “I suggest it could either mean an actual attempt at copulation by an inexperienced youth, later reported by a rejected girlfriend, or an equivalent of the word ‘dimwit’ i.e. a man who might think that that was the correct way to go about it.”

Not all insulting nicknames deserve to be remembered 700 years later. That one does.

• Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry is dropping out of the race for the 2016 Republican nomination for president. Now, I guess, he’s doomed to a lucrative retirement serving on multiple corporate boards, or maybe being forced to resort to becoming president of some college or university (if he stays out of prison).

• “The United States has broken up a threat against Pope Francis, who will visit Washington and other US cities this month,” according to Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. McCaul did not provide any further details about the nature of the threat, and there’s no word yet as to whether Homeland Security has Cardinal Burke in custody.

• J.R. Daniel Kirk has gotten a lot more interesting ever since he was officially informed that he would never be able to please the impossible-to-please gatekeepers of conservative white evangelical Official Stances. He’s become someone I think of as part of the vague category including folks like Dave Gushee, Rich Cizik and Rachel Held Evans — an evangelical voice I’m cautious about commending too much lest praise from someone like me be taken as grounds for other evangelicals to stop listening to him altogether.

• “The Black Christ by Countee Cullen with illustrations by Charles Cullen”