It hurts down here on Earth, Lord

It hurts down here on Earth, Lord February 10, 2016

• Are you a novelist looking for character or place names? Are you in an as-yet nameless rock band, or in a band looking for the name of your next album? Maybe you’ve simply grown tired of your current arsenal of insults and you’re looking for some choice new epithets to hurl at those who deserve it. In any case, the British Mycological Society may have just what you’re looking for.

RIP Max Stackhouse.

Eliel Cruz’s “Faithfully LGBT” project is introducing us to our brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s a beautiful collection of beautiful faces — the faces of real people whose existence and reality too much of the church is still failing to acknowledge or comprehend. Part of the reason I started compiling the “Xn QUILTblogs” list in the tab at the top here was just to remind the larger church that, yes, LGBT Christians are real people, committed believers just like the rest of us. Faithfully LGBT shows that. It bears witness. It testifies.

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Anyway, Eliel is more than halfway to his fundraising goal for the project. It’s beautiful, good, and true, and worthy of support from those in a position to offer it.

• “Flint Residents Demand State Do More as Snyder Releases His Budget.” Snyder, there, refers to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who surprisingly has not yet been impeached, indicted, chased out of state by an angry mob, or struck down by lightning in a miraculous sign that we live in a universe ruled over by some kind of just or benevolent deity.

“I’m here for my children.”

That’s why Nakiya Wakes, a mother of two children who stays home to take care of her daughter’s epilepsy, took time out of her life to travel the hour’s drive between her home city of Flint and Michigan’s state capitol in Lansing on Wednesday.

If “pro-life” meant what that term would seem to mean — or if it meant, really, anything at all — then Snyder and the rest of his pals poisoning the people of Flint should have replaced Planned Parenthood as pro-lifers’ Public Enemy No. 1.

John McCain wants to believe that, in 2016, it’s still possible to be a Republican while opposing torture. He notes that torture is illegal, immoral, counter-productive, and disgraceful. He’s right about that. Whether or not he’s right that it’s still possible to be a Republican while believing that is yet to be determined.

• “Evangelical Christians helping Syrian refugees resettle in Georgia” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That’s good news about evangelicals. But the fact that it’s news at all is not so good.

When mainline Protestant churches continue their decades-long efforts to sponsor and resettle refugees through Church World Service, it never makes the paper. That’s a dog-bites-man story — mainline Protestants are expected to be decent people who help others in need, so it’s not “news” when they do. Some white evangelicals have also been doing this for a long time, through organizations like World Relief, but it’s still surprising enough to most of their neighbors that “evangelical Christians helping Syrian refugees” qualifies as a man-bites-dog anomaly that constitutes “news.”

• It’s Ash Wednesday, so I thought about quoting T.S. Eliot. Decided to go with this instead:


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