Welcome to my world! I’m excited to be blogging at the Patheos community, after about a year and a half of blogging on my own with a simple Blogger blog. Happily, the tech staff was able to move all my old posts over here, so I invite you to plunge into the archives to see what I write about. I am all over the map in terms of the topics I’m interested in. Is Obama a Christian? Does Islam need... Read more
A Facebook friend posted about this yesterday; at various colleges & community colleges across the United States, adjunct professors “walked out” (or protested in other ways, including using class time complaining about the situation) of their classes to protest the lot in life of adjunct professors. Details here, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, or here at Inside Higher Ed, or see the graphic at the blog “How Did We Get into this Mess?” The basic story, for those unfamiliar... Read more
Why is it that, whenever newspapers want to find sad stories to illustrate their political points, they end up with people who are curiously unsympathetic? Case in point: an article from the Washington Post, reprinted in today’s Chicago Tribune, “The 25-cent raise: What life is like after a minimum wage increase,” describes the overall background of the multiple legislative proposals to increase the minimum wages, and cites small business owners concerned about it’s impact on their ability to stay in... Read more
On Cuba, after what was claimed to be intense negotiations, Obama announced as much liberalization of policy with respect to Cuba as he is able to do without new legislation, in exchange for, well, virtually nothing. Yes, Cuba released a few political prisoners, but didn’t make any fundamental, or even cosmetic, changes in the system that imprisons people for political reasons in the first place. What were these negotiations? From all appearances, Obama didn’t actually wring any concessions from Cuba,... Read more
Do you remember back in Sunday School, when the teacher would impress on you how important it is to stay true to your faith, even if someone were to demand that you renounce it to save your life? And you thought to yourself, “that’s foolish to make such a big deal out of it — stuff like this just doesn’t happen any more.” Remember at the Columbine shooting, when one of the victims was claimed to have been martyred, that... Read more
I’ve been writing (too?) frequently on this topic (e.g., yesterday’s post on an interview with Obama on religion, a prior post on Obama’s National Prayer Breakfast confused statements on religion) but I’ll try to articulate why I think this matters (still a work in progress), and then move on to other pressing (or not-so-pressing) issues. Some say that it matters whether Obama is a Christian because, in fact, he’s not just “not a Christian” but a Muslim, and that his... Read more
(For quite some time, I was a new enough blogger that I could find anything I had previously written by doing a google search: “Jane the actuary” plus the topic. That doesn’t work any longer. So I have a feeling I’ve written about the previously, but I can’t find the blog post without scrolling through all 1 1/2 years of blogging.) Is Obama a Christian? That’s the question being tossed around, with the media’s current take that it’s unjust to... Read more
(Some backstory here.) I didn’t grow up Catholic, but Lutheran. Well, mostly. Mom is Lutheran and Dad Catholic, and we mostly went to her Lutheran church, except for sporadic Sundays, maybe once a month or so, when we went to the nearby Catholic church, though my dad never was a registered parishoner there. I don’t know if they had a pattern or how they decided when to go where, but anyway, I never liked the fact that it always seemed... Read more
If you have no connection to Detroit, this piece, “Does your Detroit suburb suck? An investigation” won’t mean much to you. But if you are, you’ll enjoy at least portions of the wit/snark. My own hometown is labelled “soul-suck” and I’m not going to argue with it. Come to think of it: if you’re not from the Detroit area, I invite you to play the game of asking yourself what the characterizations would be like for the ‘burbs in your... Read more
Yeah, so this is a film, not a book. It’s about firefighters in Detroit, and it’s probably available at your local library, so go check it out. The film is a documentary, shot from December 2010 to October 2011. It’s labelled as being produced by “General Motors Entertainment Marketing” and I wondered if GM was getting into the film business, but that just means that when PBS, which initially was going to fund the project, pulled out, GM stepped in... Read more
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