Enjoy a new set of links to blogs and news, providing you some fun for Saturday morning coffee and breakfast. Once again Kris found a number of these links and single-handedly at times seems to keep this Saturday offering on its feet.

Quality time? Nope, there’s no substitute for presence, by Frank Bruni:

There’s simply no real substitute for physical presence.

We delude ourselves when we say otherwise, when we invoke and venerate “quality time,” a shopworn phrase with a debatable promise: that we can plan instances of extraordinary candor, plot episodes of exquisite tenderness, engineer intimacy in an appointed hour.

We can try. We can cordon off one meal each day or two afternoons each week and weed them of distractions. We can choose a setting that encourages relaxation and uplift. We can fill it with totems and frippery — a balloon for a child, sparkling wine for a spouse — that signal celebration and create a sense of the sacred.

And there’s no doubt that the degree of attentiveness that we bring to an occasion ennobles or demeans it. Better to spend 15 focused, responsive minutes than 30 utterly distracted ones.

But people tend not to operate on cue. At least our moods and emotions don’t. We reach out for help at odd points; we bloom at unpredictable ones. The surest way to see the brightest colors, or the darkest ones, is to be watching and waiting and ready for them.

Your car, a mobile hotspot, by Brian Fung:

AT&T revealed recently that its biggest source of growth is coming not from new cellphone subscriptions — a crowded and saturated market — but from providing Internet access to next-generation cars.

Now AT&T is taking the next step in its bid to wire the automobile. On Tuesday, the company said it’s starting to sell a 4G LTE hotspot that plugs into a port in your vehicle, effectively converting it into a rolling WiFi router.

To use the palm-sized device, which is manufactured by ZTE and known as the Mobley, drivers have to insert it into a diagnostic outlet that comes standard in many cars. When you start the vehicle, the hotspot also starts up, allowing you to connect up to five mobile devices.

The dongle costs $100 without a contract and is free with a two-year agreement. You can link it to your existing bucket of shared AT&T data or buy a dedicated plan for it.

When should a person’s conscience trump the requirement of a job? Eugene Volokh’s splendid legal commentary on Kim Davis:

Under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act, both public and private employers have a duty to exempt religious employees from generally applicable work rules, so long as this won’t create an “undue hardship,” meaning more than a modest cost, on the employer. If the employees can be accommodated in a way that would let the job still get done without much burden on the employer, coworkers, and customers — for instance by switching the employee’s assignments with another employee or by otherwise slightly changing the job duties — then the employer must accommodate them. (The Muslim flight attendant I mentioned above, for instance, claims that she has always been able to work out arrangements under which the other flight attendant serves the alcohol instead of her.)

Thus, for instance, in all the cases I mentioned in the numbered list above, the religious objectors got an accommodation, whether in court or as a result of the employer’s settling a lawsuit brought by the EEOC. Likewise, the EEOC is currently litigating a case in which it claims that a trucking company must accommodate a Muslim employee’s religious objections to transporting alcohol, and the court has indeed concluded that the employer had a duty to accommodate such objections. But if the accommodation would have been quite difficult or expensive (beyond the inevitable cost that always come when rearranging tasks), then the employer wouldn’t have had to provide it….

The government is barred by the Free Exercise Clause from discriminating based on religion, but the government has no constitutional duty to give religious objectors special exemptions from generally applicable rules. Maybe it (and private employers) shouldn’t have such a statutory duty, either. …

OK, now we’ve seen the big picture, which is that sincere religious objections can indeed legally excuse you from doing part of your job — if the employer can exempt you without undue cost to itself, its other employees, or its clients (recognizing that some cost is inevitable with any exemption request). Now let’s try to see how it can apply to the Kim Davis controversy. [Go to link above to see it worked out.]…

There’s a lot of appeal to the “you take the job, you follow the rules — if you have a religious objection to the rules, quit the job” approach may be. But it’s not the approach that modern American federal employment law has taken, or the approach that the state religious exemption law in Kentucky and many other states has taken.

It happens in Australia, too: Kristina Keneally on faith and political office:

“How much does your faith influence your political decisions?” Journalists asked me this question a couple of a dozen times during my tenure as a parliamentarian. On each occasion I felt like rolling my eyes; by the end of my career, I probably started to do so visibly. Somewhere along the line I decided the best response to a silly question was an equally nonsensical answer: “37%,” I’d confidently reply and enjoy the poor journo’s confusion and momentary silence….

There are those who argue religious belief has no place in civic discourse. Yet from the earliest periods of recorded history we are presented with evidence that human beings possess a spiritual dimension. The people with the longest continuous cultural history on Earth, Aboriginal Australians, tell rich spiritual stories to explain creation and humanity’s relationship to it.

Human beings are physical and they are spiritual. They bring their spiritual selves, however expressed, to their political discussions. This is not a threat to civil society. For thousands of years the spiritual life of human beings has supported and encouraged the extension of human rights, the establishment of civic communities, promulgation of the public good and extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for one’s fellow citizens.

Religious belief has had its dark civic moments too. The Inquisition was hardly a triumph for human generosity. Using the Bible to justify slavery wasn’t exactly in keeping with Paul’s statement that “There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.”…

No mainstream political party or figure argues that religion has no place in civic life. Richard Di Natale’s claims that the Greens will be a more centrist progressive party will not be realised as long as the party remains hostile to organised religion and people of faith. Spirituality and religious belief are central to how human beings make sense of and interpret their existence, and therefore they are central to how human society organises itself.

No sensible solution to some of the most vexed societal questions – whether on national security or marriage equality – can be derived and resolved without understanding and respecting the religious dimensions of human actions. Perhaps this is why I rolled my eyes so often. Asking a politician about their faith is the wrong question. Rather we should ask, “How well do you know the faith of your fellow citizens?”

Jack Levison goes provocative on us with a reminder that deserves conversation — sometimes “right” is not the same as “Christian”:

What then characterizes a spirit-filled church? Not the swaying or swagger of people in motion. Not the pouring out of emotion. Certainly not leaders engaged in self-promotion. Not even people headed in the right direction.  Why? Because the spirit inspires a church with a clear focus: crucifixion.

Architecture. Activities. Adoration. Every last artery of the body of Christ must flow with the full absorption of Jesus Christ crucified. There is only one issue on which the church must be right. Not same-sex marriage. Not climate change. Not evolution. The work of the Spirit that eclipses all of these—regardless of how right a Christian or church may be on these issues—is the full-fledged communication of Jesus Christ crucified.

[SMcK: my aim is seeking truth, not what is right, but what is truth.]

The emigration/immigration (seeming) explosion, Fraser Nelson contends, is a sign of poverty diminishing more than the onset of poverty.

The migration crisis is about more than Syria. A few weeks ago, Theresa May repeated one of the biggest mistakes in politics: thinking that third-world development will somehow mean fewer migrants. In a Daily Telegraph article, she argued that:-

‘We must help African countries to develop economic and social opportunities so that people want to stay.’

Give aid, not shelter, runs the argument – and she’s not the first to make it. ‘As the benefits of economic growth are spread in Mexico,’ Bill Clinton once assured Americans, ‘there will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home.’ When José Manuel Barroso led the European Commission, he made the same argument, saying that third world development would tackle the ‘root causes’ of migration. In fact, the reverse is true, as I argue in my Daily Telegraphcolumn today….

Now, it’s 1,500 a day. Globalisation has kicked in, global poverty has halved over 25 years. The poor world is becoming richer, so people are on the move. War acts as a catalyst; far more of those affected by violence have the means and inclination to flee. But globally, there is less war and less poverty than at any time in our history. The Great Migration should be understood as the flip side of the greatest triumph of our age: the collapse in global poverty.

Study after study shows this to be the case. When aid was given to poor rural  Mexican villages in exchange for occupants attending school and health clinics, it led to them leaving rather than staying.

Will your son make it to professional basketball or baseball?

Those big dreams aren’t all that unusual. According to arecent poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 26 percent of U.S. parents whose children in high school play sports hope their child will become a professional athlete one day. Among families with household incomes of less than $50,000 annually, the number is 39 percent.

According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, only a tiny percentage of high school athletes actually go on to play professionally — roughly 1 in 168 high school baseball players will get drafted by a Major League Baseball team, and just 1 in 2,451 men’s high school basketball players will get drafted by a National Basketball Association team….

Wanting your child to be a college athlete or even play sports professionally is “a great goal to have,” Jones says. “But I think it needs to be tempered with the sense of understanding that, most likely, your kid is not going to be a professional player.”

Pope Francis makes annulment more efficient:

(CNN)Pope Francis on Tuesday reformed the process by which Catholics may annul their marriages, in yet another sign of his desire to make the church more welcoming and responsive to people on the margins.

The three main changes are:

• Eliminating a second review by a cleric before a marriage can be nullified.

• Giving bishops the ability to fast-track and grant the annulments themselves in certain circumstances, for example when spousal abuse or an extramarital affair has occurred.

• The process should be free, except for a nominal fee for administrative costs.

The reforms came Tuesday in the form of two “motu proprio” documents, Latin for “by (the Pope’s) own initiative.” They become part of Catholic canon law on December 8, the beginning of the Pope’s declared “Year of Mercy.”

Not all like his changes. Anthony Faiola:

Papal power, Burke warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to change teaching (or) doctrine.”

Burke’s words belied a growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that governs the Roman Catholic Church.

This month, Francis makes his first trip to the United States at a time when his progressive allies are heralding him as a revolutionary, a man who only last week broadened the power of priests to forgive women who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal sin” of abortion during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in December. On Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum-seekers risking all to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.

Yet as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.

The old story about college tuition hikes continues to concern America’s parents (and grandparents):

To understand the feeling of crisis that many see in higher education right now, it’s useful to start with some figures from 40 years ago. In 1974, the median American family earned just under $13,000 a year. A new home could be had for $36,000, an average new car for $4,400. Attending a four-year private college cost around $2,000 a year: affordable, with some scrimping, to even median earners. As for public university, it was a bargain at $510 a year. To put these figures in 2015 dollars, we’re talking about median household income of $62,000, a house for $174,000 and a sticker price of $21,300 for the car, $10,300 for the private university and $2,500 for the public one.

A lot has changed since then. Median family income has fallen to about $52,000, while median home prices have increased by about two-thirds. (Car prices have remained steady.) But the real outlier is higher education. Tuition at a private university is now roughly three times as expensive as it was in 1974, costing an average of $31,000 a year; public tuition, at $9,000, has risen by nearly four times. This is a painful bill for all but the very richest. For the average American household that doesn’t receive a lot of financial aid, higher education is simply out of reach.

Meet the musical Kellys! By Dahleen Glanton:

The family’s morning routine begins at 5 a.m. in a vacant lot across the street. Dressed in T-shirts and shorts, the children line up for a CrossFit exercise session, using kettle bells, old tires and ropes. Their father sits on a wooden box nearby, making sure that everyone takes a turn.

They are back by 6 a.m. for music practice. The family gathers downstairs for a spiritual devotional at 7 a.m., followed by breakfast at 8 a.m. In a typical week, they consume 10 loaves of bread, six dozen eggs and 10 gallons of milk.

Then it’s time for chores: taking out the trash, doing the dishes and tidying their rooms.

During the school year, classes start at 9 a.m. The children attend Chicago Virtual Charter School, so the classroom is downstairs in the dining room. They share seven laptops and one desktop computer.

The younger kids are in bed by 8 p.m.; the high school kids by 10.

In the summer, the entire day is devoted to music. The eight youngest participate in a weekday camp at the Chicago West Community Music Center, a program that teaches string instruments, song and dance. After School Matters provides financial assistance.

When school is in session, all the children participate in the center’s more intensive Saturday program. The high school kids also attend an after-school program weekdays at the center.

It requires a strong commitment from the parents, but persistence has its benefits.

“We don’t hear that screeching noise at 6 a.m. anymore,” La Shone Kelly said, referring to the time the kids were just beginning to play. “That was a lot to endure.”

Wonderful story.

Carl Trueman on the Kentucky clerk:

If the ‘I am a Christian’ strategy is to carry any force at all, churches need to start taking marriage seriously. They need to start taking pastoral and, if necessary, disciplinary action against adulterers, against spousal abusers, against trivial divorces. Only then will the statement ‘I am a member of a church so have a high view of marriage’ start to appear plausible to the outside world. And in a week where an evangelical superstar is back in a role of ecclesiastical influence within weeks of being defrocked for adultery and filing for divorce, and others have fallen after playing with fire on the Ashley Madison site, it is clear that churches find it a lot easier to talk about the importance of marriage and fidelity than to uphold them in practice.

We already have nothing to say to secular people on this issue because they are not listening anyway. If we continue in practice to treat marriage abuses and breakdowns as of little more moral significance than a parking violation or a spot of jay-walking, we will continue to have nothing to show them either. The world is no fool.  It knows cant when it hears it. [HT: JS]

More three-day weekends? Yes, says Melissa Dahl:

A glorious three-day weekend has arrived for (most) “knowledge workers,” that euphemistic term for those of us who spend our days hunched over a keyboard, eyes locked for hours at a time on the screen ahead. But here’s the thing: The bulk of the research in medicine, sleep, cognitive science, and organizational psychology overwhelmingly suggests that a shorter workweek should be the norm rather than the holiday-weekend exception.

Many companies in the U.S. have already picked up on this, according to a recent report from the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, which found that 43 percent of the 1,051 employers surveyed offered compressed workweeks to at least some employees. During your three days of freedom this weekend, Science of Us suggests that you spend part of that time pondering the arguments for why more of us should be working fewer hours.

John Rawls’ theory of justice and political liberalism exposed for what it is by Matthew J. Franck:

Rawls’s bad faith is demonstrated by the exceptions he makes. Although John Finnis, for instance, has offered natural law arguments against homosexual conduct that are perfectly accessible to reason and grounded on no theological presuppositions, these arguments provide Rawls with his one and only example of a secular “comprehensive doctrine” that must be classed with religion as beyond the pale. Because arguments of this kind are expressions of “moral doctrine,” they “fall outside of the domain of the political”—the domain, that is, of public reason. This distinction between the domain of the moral and the domain of the political seems utterly arbitrary, especially since the entire project of Rawlsian public reason is, on its own terms, an attempt to construct a moral framework for political life.

The other notable exception made by Rawls is for the Christian motivations of the abolitionist and civil rights movements. Religious discourse such as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s is permissible, Rawls says, “when a society is not well ordered and there is a profound division about constitutional essentials,” such that “nonpublic reasons” are thought to be “required to give sufficient strength” politically to “the ideal of public reason.” This exception appears to have been introduced to rescue Rawls from the embarrassment of condemning Reverend King. For what did King and his adversaries represent but a deep conflict over deep principles, resolvable only by choosing between two competing comprehensive doctrines?

Rawls disapproves of arguments against homosexual conduct, and approves of arguments in favor of equal civil rights regardless of race. He cannot, it seems, resist the urge to permit one of those arguments despite its being religious, and to exclude the other despite its being non-religious. This is not philosophy, but political base-stealing.

These kinds of calculations are why professors of theology don’t teach economics and shouldn’t run colleges and universities.

Speaking of justice, how about revenge? Tim Suttle:

America is a revenge culture: Revenge the television series, revenge porn, revenge games in sports… vengeance is a mainstay of foreign policy and a thematic obsession for film, television, and female pop-musicians.

Oscar winning director Quentin Tarantino has made a career of capitalizing on our lust for revenge. Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained, these are all formulaic revenge films.

• Step 1: show an innocent (or beautiful) person being horribly wronged.
• Step 2: build the audience’s self-righteous anger to a fever pitch.
• Step 3: give the victim some kind of weapon (exotic is better).
• Step 4: let the victim kill any and every person who has wronged them.
• Step 5: list to the audience applaud… paycheck.

It’s an effective formula for pop film success. But it’s a tired script, and not a very redemptive story to tell.

Where does the desire to take revenge come from? It stems from an innate desire for justice. When someone has been wronged we want to see the scales tipped back in their favor. An appropriate disincentive given to the offending party seems fine, but the offended party usually takes things too far, and the disincentive turns into full-on revenge.

Splendid short article on Queen Elizabeth and monarchy:

Ice cream that doesn’t melt so easily, by Brandon Griggs:

(CNN)Portable and refreshing, an ice cream cone is a perfect hot-weather treat. Until it starts dripping all over your hand.

Now scientists in Scotland say they’ve licked the problem.

Researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee have discovered a naturally occurring protein that can be used to create ice cream that is more resistant to melting. The protein binds the air, fat and water in ice cream, creating a smooth consistency that stays frozen longer.

And, scientists say, it won’t affect the taste.

The protein, known as BslA, occurs naturally in some foods and works by adhering to fat droplets and air bubbles, making them more stable in a mixture. Researchers at the two universities say they’ve developed a method of producing BsIA in so-called “friendly” bacteria, which have positive health benefits.

Problems on the Appalachian Trail:

BAXTER STATE PARK, Maine (AP) — When Jackson Spencer set out to tackle the Appalachian Trail, he anticipated the solitude that only wilderness can bring — not a rolling, monthslong frat party.

Shelters where he thought he could catch a good night’s sleep while listening to the sounds of nature were instead filled with trash, graffiti and people who seemed more interested in partying all night, said Spencer, who finished the entire trail last month in just 99 days.

“I wanted the solitude. I wanted to experience nature,” he said. “I like to drink and to have a good time, but I didn’t want that to follow me there.”

Spencer, or “Mission” as he is known to fellow thru-hikers, confronted what officials say is an ugly side effect of the increasing traffic on the Georgia-to-Maine footpath every year: More people than ever causing problems.

At Maine’s Baxter State Park, home to the trail’s final summit on Mount Katahdin, officials say thru-hikers are flouting park rules by openly using drugs and drinking alcohol, camping where they aren’t supposed to, and trying to pass their pets off as service dogs. Hundreds of miles away, misbehaving hikers contributed to a small Pennsylvania community’s recent decision to shutter the sleeping quarters it had offered for decades in the basement of its municipal building.

With last year’s release of the movie “Wild,” about a woman’s journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, and what experts call a growing interest in outdoor activities, the number of people on the Appalachian Trail has exploded. And the numbers are only expected to climb further after “A Walk in the Woods” — a movie based on the 1998 Bill Bryson book about the Appalachian Trail— hits theaters this week.

More than 830 people completed the 2,189-mile hike last year, up from just 182 in 1990, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, based in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. At Baxter, the number of registered long-distance hikers grew from 359 in 1991 to more than 2,000 in 2014.

Jonathan Merritt on why Trump is attractive to evangelicals:

As USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers notes, Donald Trump is no dummy. She argues that he is scamming Christians in an effort to win over the critical Republican voting bloc. This seems plausible. But if Trump’s political views and religious commitments are so far from most evangelicals’, why are these Christians going along with it?The answer seems to be the growing anti-establishment sentiments held by many evangelical Christians. (After all, the Tea Party movement draws “disproportionate support” from their ranks.) Not only are conservative Christians solidly Republican, they are also fierce traditionalists who feel that their values are increasingly under assault by modern society.

They like a candidate who will stand up to “the media”—whether Jorge Ramos or Megyn Kelly—because they feel reporters don’t give them a fair shake either. They are drawn to a candidate who hails from outside the Beltway—even if his hometown is the elitist island of Manhattan—because they think the Washington establishment has abandoned them. And they appreciate someone who makes no apology for using politically incorrect rhetoric—even if this includes a bit of profanity or misogyny—because they believe society is increasingly intolerant of many of their sentiments, too.

Behind closed doors, dinner tables are getting less doughy. Grains, still ubiquitous in diets around the globe, are losing favor as a result of a growing fear that they might be adding inches to our guts, or discomfort to our stomachs. And there is, perhaps, no better example of this phenomenon than what’s happened to one of the world’s favorite foods: pasta.

Simply, people are eating less of it. The data show that the cheap and easy meal hasn’t disappeared from diets, but diners aren’t consuming it with the gusto they once did.

The trend can be seen in the North America, where sales of dried pasta have fallen by 6 percent since 2009, according to data from market research firm Euromonitor. A report published in April by Mintel projects that the U.S. decline will continue through at least 2019 for the pasta category.

Is the decade of the City?

Mexico’s largest mural:

Image

PACHUCA, Mexico (AP) — A community project in central Mexico is bringing art to people’s homes. Literally.

A group of artists known as the Germ Collective have spent 14 months turning the hillside neighborhood of Las Palmitas into a giant, colorful mural in an effort to bring the working-class “barrio” together and change its gritty image.

Working hand-in-hand with residents, muralists have painted the facades of 200 homes bright lavender, lime green, incandescent orange — hues more commonly found in a bag of Skittles than in the drab, cement-and-cinderblock neighborhoods where many of Mexico’s poor live.

Seen from afar, the individually painted houses combine to form a cohesive, if abstract, swirly rainbow design. Bright stripes that begin on one wall run across several homes before swooping into graceful curlicues.

It’s an homage to the wind: the city of Pachuca is nicknamed “la bella airosa,” a Spanish phrase that loosely translates as “the beautiful breezy city.”

Project director Enrique Gomez said the goal is to promote community integration and change the negative image of the neighborhood.

“I never thought we would have such a big impact,” said Gomez, a tattooed and goateed former gang member who turned his life around when he rededicated himself to graffiti art and muralism.

Check out those homes in Mexico with this story from Emily Badger:

The single-family home in America has evolved in one particularly remarkable way: It has gotten bigger, and bigger, and bigger. New homes built today are about a thousand square feet larger than single-family homes completed just 40 years ago (that’s about the size of an additional modest rowhouse in Washington, D.C.).

All that space is a sign of our times — of the relative wealth to afford it, thegovernment policies that incentivize it, the tastes we now have for third bathrooms and fourth bedrooms (even though the size of the typical American household has actually been shrinking).

In fact, in many ways — most of them more subtle — the American single-family home has changed with time in ways that say much about us and how we live. Vertical town houses built in the 1800s gave way a century later to horizontal homes, 3,000 square feet on a single floor. Compact ways of living that made sense when we got around on foot faded with time in favor of the spacious homes made possible by ubiquitous cars. And the popularity of cars changed the very design of our homes, too, as we created places to park them indoors.

We’ve gone over time from the row house to the ranch home to the McMansion, with myriad variations along the way determined by the climate (a New Orleans shotgun house demands a front porch for cooling off) and the culture (prairie-style homes mimic a favorite Midwestern son, Frank Lloyd Wright). Our homes have been reshaped, reformatted, and reimagined depending on the availability of land and the materials on offer and the earlier styles that have come back in vogue.

Speaking of big ol’ houses, what about the grass to mow? Christopher Ingraham is a bit cranky about mowing the grass, something I enjoy immensely:

The average American spends about 70 hours a year on lawn and garden care, according to the American Time Use Survey. Considering that this is an average figure that also includes people who don’t spend *any* time mowing, the number for people who actually have a lawn, and actually mow it, is going to be considerably higher than that.

Some people take pride in their lawns, and get a lot of fulfillment by keeping them immaculately-manicured. So for these folks, this is time well-spent. But for many of the rest of us, mowing a lawn is nothing more than a chore, and a despised one at that. A November 2011 CBS news poll found that for 1 in 5 Americans, mowing the lawn was their least-liked chore — ranked lower than raking leaves and shoveling snow. Interesting aside: Democrats (25 percent) were considerably more likely than Republicans (16 percent) to say mowing the lawn was their least-favorite chore.

Again, in some cases the time investment may be worthwhile — some families use their lawns all the time. But think of your own neighborhood, and of the number of houses where the only time you see somebody out on the lawn is when it’s getting mowed.

It doesn’t need to be this way — there are plenty of low-maintenance alternatives to turf grass out there. But some homeowners associationsrequire residents to keep a lawn. And plenty of municipalities, like Sarah Baker’s, have strict guidelines on how a lawn should be maintained.

But in the end, much of the pressure to keep and maintain a lawn is self-imposed. Freeing yourself from all those hours on the lawnmower might simply be a matter of realizing that there are alternatives.

Pope Francis on the divorced and remarried, by Rachel Zoll:

NEW YORK (AP) — Pope Francis’ call Wednesday for a church of “open doors” that welcomes divorced Catholics prompted speculation over whether he was signaling support for easing the ban on Communion for couples who remarry without a church annulment.

The issue is at the center of an extraordinarily public debate among cardinals from around the world who will gather this October at the Vatican for a synod, or meeting, on the family, where treatment of such couples will be a key topic.

“He wants the church to get over a psychology that if you’re divorced and remarried that you’re a lesser Catholic,” said Phillip Thompson, executive director of the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. “But it doesn’t address the real issue of what is the path forward for Catholics who want to enter into full communion with the church.”

Under Catholic teaching, unless a marriage is annulled, or declared null and void by a church tribunal, those who remarry cannot receive Communion or other sacraments because they are essentially living in sin and committing adultery. Such annulments can take years to process — if they are granted at all — a problem that has left generations of Catholics feeling shunned by their church.

Catholics who divorce after a church marriage, but don’t remarry can receive Communion.

The pope, speaking at his weekly general audience at the Vatican, underscored Catholic teaching on divorced Catholics who remarry without an annulment, saying, “the church knows well that such a situation contradicts the Christian sacrament.” But he emphasized, “these people are not at all excommunicated.”

“They always belong to the church,” Francis said. The church, he said, must be one of “open doors.”

Parents, work time, and their children:

More than three-quarters of mothers and half of fathers in the United States say they’ve passed up work opportunities, switched jobs or quit to tend to their kids, according to a new Washington Post poll.

While it has long been clear that finding affordable, dependable child care is a daily challenge for parents of young children, the new poll provides rare data on the breadth of the problem and how it’s shaping careers for millions of American parents.

The poll also signals that the issue will figure in the 2016 presidential campaign, with about twice as many Americans saying Democrats would more reliably ensure access to child care than Republicans.

For many parents, scaling back at the office has become a necessity when the cost of child care strains even a middle-class salary. Roughly three-quarters of parents with children younger than 18 say care is expensive in their area, The Post’s poll shows, and a little more than half say it’s hard to find.

Have the Dodgers become the new Yankees? Looks like it:

Say it slowly. Savor the syllables. Cue Carl Sagan.

A third of a billion.

That is the amount the Dodgers’ owners are spending on their major league payroll this season.

One-third of a billion dollars. So far.

On the popular scale of measuring the commitment of an ownership group by its willingness to spend, Guggenheim Baseball Management might be the greatest ownership in sports history.

Do these guys even have a financial limit?

“Yeah, absolutely,” General Manager Farhan Zaidi said Friday.

And what might that limit be?

“We don’t have set numbers,” Zaidi said. “Nobody has ever mentioned a number to us.”

We should have seen this coming when Guggenheim blew away all comers in the bidding for the Dodgers — $2.15 billion for the team and half-ownership of the Dodger Stadium parking lots, another $400 million for a real estate development fund run by Frank McCourt.

In the fourth season of ownership — and the first under a front office led by Andrew Friedman, the president of baseball operations, and Zaidi — the numbers continue to astound.

The Dodgers are paying $86 million for players not to play for them this season. In nine seasons running the Tampa Bay Rays, Friedman never had a player payroll higher than $77 million.

Pope Francis is not a socialist — he’s a Peronist:

Francis attended seminary at the Colegio Máximo, the Jesuit college in San Miguel, an hour outside Buenos Aires, and would spend most of his next 25 years there as a student, instructor and eventually as the school’s director.

It was at the Colegio Máximo that he came under the influence of Juan Carlos Scannone and a group of other young priests who advocated a “theology of the people” (teologia del pueblo) as an alternative to Marxist-inspired liberation theology. It was the pastoral approach that Francis would adopt, emphasizing humility, simplicity and intimate contact with society’s poor and most vulnerable. A theology of the people meant living among the poor, not talking about them in the abstract.

Scannone today is 83 and still lives at the Colegio Máximo, where he attended Francis’s ordination. No, he assured a visitor, the pope is not an anti-capitalist.

Living his beliefs

“He doesn’t criticize market economics, but rather the fetishization of money and the free market,” Scannone said. “One thing is market economics. Another is the hegemony of capital over people.”

Francis’s split from Argentina’s more left-leaning clergy would define much of his career as a Jesuit. But at the Colegio Máximo, he lived his beliefs — and set an example for others — by practicing a politics of humility, austerity and actions over words.

“He would wake up early and do the laundry before the staff arrived,” said Mario Rausch, a Jesuit brother who still lives at the college. There were several poor neighborhoods nearby, and Francis would walk across muddy fields to celebrate Mass there on weekends. Then he would return to cook huge meals for the whole college. He slept in a small room with a simple, wood-frame single bed.

Thank God for the worms — Robert Gebelhoff:

Let’s all take a moment and thank the worms. Seriously, without them (and, to be fair, all of their fellow dirt friends), our world would look dramatically different.

The earthworm is just one example of what is called a detritivore — which includes all the bugs, fungi and bacteria tasked with eating up the dead things in the world and turning them into something that plants can use to grow. Scientists are just now solving the mystery on how worms survive the messy job.

The natural defenses of dead plants — which are designed to inhibit enzymes in the gut to prevent digestion — would be toxic for any other animal. But a group of researchers from Imperial College London have discovered new molecules in the worm gut, named drilodefensins, that can counteract the toxins, breaking them down the way that dish liquid breaks apart grease.

“Without drilodefensins, fallen leaves would remain on the surface of the ground for a very long time, building up to a thick layer,” said Jake Bundy, an author of the study and a professor at Imperial College, in a statement. “Our countryside would be unrecognizable, and the whole system of carbon cycling would be disrupted.”

This story deserves to be circulated:

If you’re a woman who works in an office and you’re always freezing, you’re not alone.

It turns out that most office buildings are kept at a temperature that is comfortable to the average man. But women typically produce less body heat than men, meaning they’re more likely to feel chilled in the workplace, a new study finds….

Although research finds that men and women like their skin to be at a warm 92 degrees Fahrenheit, studies suggest that women prefer a far warmer environment (roughly 77 degrees Fahrenheit) than men (72 degrees).

This could be due to the fact that women’s bodies produce less heat than men’s do. On average,women are smaller than men, and they tend to have less muscle and more fat (and muscle produces more heat than fat).

Moriah Balingit, on teaching:

McGranaghan now teaches environmental science at Loudoun Valley High School, and his un­or­tho­dox class gets his teen students into the wild as much as possible. They take field trips in canoes and hike to the woods nearby to study trees and wildlife. Students even suit up in galoshes to wade into a nearby stream to measure its water quality.

McGranaghan was one of 15 winners of the Presidential Innovation Award for Environmental Educators, an honor given jointly by the U.S. Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. The award recognizes teachers who employ innovative approaches to environmental education.

“I often remind my students that they can learn the academic book version of environmental science, but if they don’t recognize the world around them to which it applies, they are still environmentally illiterate,” McGranaghan wrote in his application essay.

McGranaghan, a 26-year veteran of teaching, said he gets his students outside as much as possible.

Camille Paglia, oh my!

You’re an atheist, and yet I don’t ever see you sneer at religion in the way that the very aggressive atheist class right now often will. What do you make of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics who seem not to have respect for religions for faith?

I regard them as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, “Glittering Images”, that “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.”  It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying “I am an atheist,” on my book tours in the early 1990s. I started the fad for it in the U.S, because all of a sudden people, including leftist journalists, started coming out of the closet to publicly claim their atheist identities, which they weren’t bold enough to do before. But the point is that I felt it was perfectly legitimate for me to do that because of my great respect for religion in general–from the iconography to the sacred architecture and so forth. I was arguing that religion should be put at the center of any kind of multicultural curriculum.

I’m speaking here as an atheist. I don’t believe there is a God, but I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system.  They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny.  Politics applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the eternal principles of life and death. The great tragic texts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, no longer have the central status they once had in education, because we have steadily moved away from the heritage of western civilization.

The real problem is a lack of knowledge of religion as well as a lack of respect for religion. I find it completely hypocritical for people in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of Southern conservatives.

[You gotta read the whole thing, amazingly honest and insightful.]

John Smoltz, on the lack of sandlot baseball and over throwing the arms of our youth:

Until, that is, the last five minutes. The loudest and longest ovation Smoltz received was for the most passionate point he made near the end of his time on the podium at Cooperstown on Sunday.

It was when he tried to talk some sense into all the parents who are relentlessly driving their kids through the nonstop treadmill that is travel baseball. He was speaking of all the kids whose arms are worn out and even damaged by their mid-teens. Whose passion for the game has long since been replaced by a hollow expression, whose onetime thrill in competition has dissolved into some vague sense of duty to their parents’ commitment.

Smoltz prefaced his remarks early on when he spoke of an idyllic childhood playing all sorts of sports and games in Lansing:

“Thankfully, we didn’t grow up in Florida or warm weather where you fall prey to playing every day or all year. Two months in Michigan is long enough.”

Olga Khazan, and the number here is 30%!

Infants use about 240 diapers per month. A year’s supply of diapers costs $936. That means a single mother mother working full time at the minimum wage can expect to spend 6 percent of her annual pay on Pampers alone.Meanwhile, the two biggest programs that assist low-income mothers, SNAP (food stamps) and WIC, don’t cover diapers or baby wipes.That might be why, in a study of 877 pregnant and parenting women published inPediatrics in 2013, a team of researchers found that needing diapers and not being able to buy them was a leading cause of mental health problems among new moms.For the study, Megan Smith, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, approached women in New Haven, Connecticut, and asked them one simple question:“If you have children in diapers, do you ever feel that you do not have enough diapers to change them as often as you would like?”

Almost 30 percent of the women responded “yes”—they often lacked sufficient diapers. Their explanations of what they did to “stretch” the diapers reflect the harrowing reasons why so many new moms feel depressed and anxious.Does your church provide diapers for moms and dads in need?

We  are fans of St Roger Abbey:

On a sweltering afternoon this month, a nun in a full habit cut the grass at a convent in rural McHenry County while neighbors mowed their lawns in a subdivision across the street, the roar of their engines blending in the country air.

But lately, something else has been disturbing the peace: The Catholic order that runs the convent wants to embark on a large-scale building expansion on the 95 acres of mostly farmland it owns, prompting a nasty dispute between the nuns and some nearby residents.

The sisters want to expand their monastery to include a school, nursing home, brewery, winery and gift shop. Opponents worry it would ruin the pastoral nature of the area.

Some detractors have raised questions about the background and intentions of the nuns, who in turn have accused residents of religious discrimination and racism.

Ron Sider, a better approach to homosexuality, the Bible, and the church today:

However, simply repeating biblical truth (no matter how strong our exegesis or how sound our theology), listening to two millennia of church history, and dialoguing carefully with other Christians everywhere are not enough. We need a substantially new approach.  

For starters, we must do whatever it takes to nurture a generation of Christian men and women who keep their marriage vows and model healthy family life.  

Second, we need to find ways to love and listen to gay people, especially gay Christians, in a way that most of us have not done.  

In addition to living faithful marriages and engaging in loving conversation, I believe evangelicals must take the lead in a cluster of additional vigorous activities related to gay people.   We ought to take the lead in condemning and combating verbal or physical abuse of gay people.  

We need much better teaching on how evangelical parents should respond if children say they are gay. Christian families should never reject a child, throw her out of their home, or refuse to see him if a child announces that he is gay. One can and should disapprove of unbiblical behavior without refusing to love and cherish a child who engages in it. Christian families should be the most loving places for children—even when they disagree with and act contrary to what parents believe. Please, God, may we never hear another story of evangelical parents rejecting children who “come out of the closet.”  

We ought to develop model programs so that our congregations are known as the best place in the world for gay and questioning youth (and adults) to seek God’s will in a context that embraces, loves, and listens rather than shames, denounces, and excludes. Surely, we can ask the Holy Spirit to show us how to teach and nurture biblical sexual practice without ignoring, marginalizing, and driving away from Christ those who struggle with biblical norms.  

Our evangelical churches should be widely known as places where people with a gay orientation can be open about their orientation and feel truly welcomed and embraced. Of course, Christians who engage in unbiblical sexual practices (whether heterosexual or gay Christians) should be discipled (and disciplined) by the church and not allowed to be leaders or members in good standing if they persist in their sin. (The same should be said for those who engage in unbiblical practices of any kind, including greed and racism.) However, Christians who openly acknowledge a gay orientation but commit themselves to celibacy should be eligible for any role in the church that their spiritual gifts suggest. Imagine the impact if evangelical churches were widely known to be the best place in the world to find love, support, and full affirmation of gifts if one is an openly, unabashedly gay, celibate Christian.  

I have no illusions that this approach will be easy. To live this way will be highly countercultural—contrasting both with our society at large and our own past history. Above all, it will require patience. Restoring our compromised witness on the biblical vision for marriage will be a matter of generations, not a few years. But if evangelicals can choose this countercultural, biblical way for several generations, we may regain our credibility to speak to the larger society.

I hope and pray that the Lord of the church and the world will weave love, truth, and fidelity out of the tangled strands of tragedy, tradition, and failure we have inherited—and that the next generation will be wise and faithful leaders in that task. 

What’s wrong with this?

Q: Some American Catholics say they are tired of being scolded by the Pope about doing more for the poor and the disenfranchised. What would you say to them?

A: The project of the Pope is to come back to the Gospel, particularly Christ’s first sermon, the Sermon on the Mount. It is very clear in that speech that Christ expects us to help those who suffer, especially the poor.

So, the best attitude to receive the Pope’s teachings is to understand that he is a religious leader and the essence of his message comes from the Gospel, not from one ideology or another.

And so, if our economic systems are not oriented toward the human person but only concerned with profits, he wants to confront the system and change it. This, by the way, is common to all the popes, it comes directly from the so-called social teachings of the church.

[Does the Sermon on the Mount’s beatitudes tell us to “help those who suffer”? Of course Jesus — with Moses, the Prophets, and the NT — teaches compassion for the poor and a radical justice, but does one anchor helping those who suffer in the beatitudes? Or does that say, unlike the opposites [the rich] — Luke’s version, the poor and those in need of mercy are favored by God? I find this claim by the Pope’s spokesperson fascinating in his appeal to the beatitudes. And I don’t think I’m being picky. In fact, the Sermon on the Mount is understood in the most general of terms as a kind of social manifesto, with all kinds of ideas assumed in what it is doing. In other words, the beatitudes don’t say “Help the poor” they say “The kingdom is made up of the poor.”]

Sad and true.

What children hear:

Think you have your hands full making sure your baby is fed and clean and gets enough sleep? Here’s another thing for the list: developing your child’s social skills by the way you talk.

People used to think that social skills were something kids were born with, not taught. But a growing body of research shows that the environment a child grows up in as an infant and toddler can have a major impact on how they interact with others as they get older. And it turns out that a key factor may be the type of language they hear around them, even at an age when all they can do is babble.

By John H. McWhorter:

At street level and in popular culture, Americans are freer with profanity now than ever before—or so it might seem to judge by how often people throw around the “F-bomb” or use a certain S-word of scatological meaning as a synonym for “stuff.” Or consider the millions of fans who adore the cartoon series “South Park,” with its pint-size, raucously foul-mouthed characters.

But things might look different to an expedition of anthropologists visiting from Mars. They might conclude that Americans today are as uptight about profanity as were our 19th-century forbears in ascots and petticoats. It’s just that what we think of as “bad” words is different. To us, our ancestors’ word taboos look as bizarre as tribal rituals. But the real question is: How different from them, for better or worse, are we?…

In other respects, we’re actually quite a bit like our ancestors. We are hardly beyond taboos; we just observe different ones. Today, what we regard as truly profane isn’t religion or sex but the slandering of groups, especially groups that have historically suffered discrimination or worse. Our profanity consists of the N-word, that C-word once suitable for an anatomy book discussion of women’s bodies, and a word beginning with f referring to gay men (and some would include a word referring to women beginning with b).

It might seem strained to compare our feelings about the N-word with a bygone era’s appalled shuddering over the utterance of “By God!” But do note that I have to euphemize the N-word here in print just as someone would have once have felt compelled to say, “By Jove!”

As late as the early 1960s, an episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” had middle-class Everycouple Rob and Laura Petrie horrified that their son had uttered what the context suggests was the F-word. The Petries were portrayed as rather “hip” for their era, but Rob actually refers to the word as “evil.”

Today, it is the N-word that such a couple would smack down with precisely this indignation. The response is the same; only the issues of concern have changed.