Politics

An article by Jana Riess in Religion News Service points to trouble for Republicans in the upcoming election and beyond. Republicans are losing ground as four demographic groups—nonreligious voters, nonwhite voters, people born after the end of World War II, and college graduates—are all growing the expense of the Republicans' base of white Evangelical blue collar retirees.

On November 10, 1979, Cindi Lamb was driving to the grocery store with her infant daughter Laura when her car was hit head-on by another vehicle. The baby girl was paralyzed for the rest of her life, and died at age six.

On May 3, 1980, Candy Lightner's 13-year-old daughter Cari was walking to a church carnival with a friend when she was struck by a car. The driver never even stopped. Cari was taken to the hospital, where she died.

This might actually work.

Shortly after Donald Trump's inauguration, Emma Green reported in The Atlantic about people who had been fired from evangelical ministries for voicing their political views.

According to Mark Galli's editorial Tuesday in Christianity Today, the biggest loser in Alabama's special election is not Roy Moore and the Republicans, but the Christian faith. The election, says Galli, shines a spotlight on an issue that has been "festering for a year and a half", ever since evangelicals flocked en masse to the Trump campaign.

Regarding support for Trump, Galli says:

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is in hot water over his controversial claims Monday about the Civil War. The specific phrase that upset most people was his assertion that the Civil War was caused by a "lack of an ability to compromise."

The writers of the Salt Collective blog seem to be a nice bunch of people, a group of "diverse writers who are shaped by and grounded in the spirituality and ethics of the Beatitudes." But the recent post The Biblical Case for Saving DACA treads on dangerous ground.

After last weekend's horrific violence in Charlottesville, civilized people of all political stripes joined in unison to condemn the cowardly attack.

But the President of the United States couldn't find the courage to condemn terrorism committed in the name of white supremacy.

By Monday morning, Trump's defenders were ready with their talking point: The Nazis aren't so bad; we should worry about a group named Antifa.

By now most people have heard about this weekend's violence in Charlottesville. A protest by "alt right" white supremacists was in turn the subject of a counter-protest. One of the white supremacists drove his car into the crowd of counter-protestors, killing one and injuring 19 others.

This horrific act of terrorism was roundly condemned by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

The current environment in Washington reminds me of the story of the two Russian farmers who were each farming their small one-acre plots of potatoes. Over time they'd grown to hate each other. They hated each other for so long they no longer even remembered why. One year, one of the farmers saved up enough money to buy a cow to provide milk for his family. The other farmer was envious and angry. He was walking on his land, kicking everything in sight out of anger—a rock, the dirt—eventually he kicked an old lamp and out came a genie.