Good morning! Summer is now officially in swing as our kids are out of school, family vacations are planned and ready to launch, and baseball is heating up. Go Guardians!
Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash
LAKE COUNTY, IL — Lake County Forest Preserve officials are asking drivers to be on the lookout for turtles crossing the road in the coming weeks. In late May and early June, turtles leave their aquatic habitat near lakes, wetlands and streams and head to drier areas to lay eggs.
The turtles often cross roads and can make return trips during the summer and fall as hatchlings emerge, according to a post on the Lake County Forest Preserve District Facebook page.
Drivers are urged to use caution when near wetlands. And, if they can safely do so, they should brake for turtles that are crossing the roads.
Lake County Forest Preserve officials say those who try to move a turtle should lift it with both hands by the middle or back of its shell and place it on the side of the road that it was headed toward. You can also use a stick, broom or a similar object to gently nudge the turtle to the side of the road.
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — For 60 years, Ted Sams regretted missing his high school graduation.
Now 78, Sams can finally call himself a graduate after donning a cap and gown and receiving his diploma Friday with the class of 2022 at Southern California’s San Gabriel High School.
Back in 1962 when he was a high school senior, Sams got in trouble and was suspended five days before the end of the school year. He said he missed a crucial final exam and had to make it up over the summer.
“When I went back with my grade, they wouldn’t give me my diploma because I owed $4.80 for a book,” Sams told KABC-TV. “And so I just walked away and said forget it.”
The school still had Sams’ original diploma locked away in an old filing cabinet. He beamed as he walked across the graduation stage at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and received the diploma.
“Over the years, I complained to my kids a number of times about how $4.80 kept me from having my diploma,” he said.
Sams said he plans on hanging the diploma on a wall at his home.
Charlie Dates pleads with white churches and Republican powers to be pro-life on guns:
The Black church has heard your requests for unity in fellowship and solidarity on public moral arguments. We have watched you parade the case for the unborn as the single greatest civic concern of our time. Some of us have even lent the credibility of our ministries to urge our politicians toward a more virtuous ethic. Even more of us facilitate organizations that care for women facing unplanned pregnancies. In good faith, we have joined our cause with yours.
Now we ask the same of you.
It is not our senators—those from our city-zoned districts—who reject universal background checks on the purchases of firearms. It is not our congressional leaders—those who attend our churches and speak at our back-to-school events—who are standing in the way of legislation that could prevent the next mass school shooting. It is yours. Your senators, who serve in your districts, sit in your pews, and listen to your preaching—they are the greatest antagonists to a real pro-life, anti-school-shootings agenda.
You have asked us to join in the fight for pro-life legislation, and now we ask you to do the same. Be pro-life by urging your congressional leaders to protect the lives of school kids who die at the force of weapons too easily placed in the wrong hands. Urge your senators to pass morally upright gun legislation. Be true to the same book you preach on Sunday.
We have waited for you to use your influence to lobby Congress for better school funding, access to quality health care, and food security. We have waited for you to denounce the alt-right racism that made a playboy a president. We have waited for you to declare that our lives matter. Now every American child is waiting on you to use your influence to protect them.
I doubt it will bring peace, but it may be interesting:
Following years of delay, restoration and archaeological excavation at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre will begin what experts believe may reveal secrets and churchmen hope will bring peace.
Representatives of three Christian communities were on hand to begin the work of uncovering what lies beneath the tiled floor of the church, while also updating electrical systems, fire suppression, and plumbing of a building that dates back to the 4th century AD.
Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III, Custos of the Holy Land Father Francesco Patton, and the Grand Sacristan of the Armenian Patriarchate Archbishop Sevan Gharibian, were present at the groundbreaking.
If you have not seen this, please look and read and look some more:
On the evening of May 31, 1921, several thousand white citizens and authorities began to violently attack the prosperous Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Karlos K. Hill investigates the disturbing photographic legacy of this massacre and the resilience of Black Wall Street’s residents.
Over the course of my research, I noticed that the word “feminism” had gained entry into more evangelical spaces where it was previously barred. For example, one large majority-white evangelical church in the U.S. hosted an event on faith and feminism at their yearly church retreat, a big gathering which drew evangelicals from across the country. Rather that warn of the perils of feminism, as Christian leaders such as Dobson have done for decades, the event, hosted by two women and one male pastor who were all self-proclaimed feminists, considered how Jesus embodied feminist ideals. At another prominent church, a group of women fed up with what they called the “boys club” of evangelical culture started a feminist group called Women Rise. The group were clear about their aim: to encourage more women to take up leadership roles in and out of the church.
These local occurrences have been part of a much bigger sea change. Since 2017, movements around gender equality in Christianity, such as #ChurchToo, which called out sexual misconduct in Christian communities, combined with events such as Beth Moore’s famous withdrawal from the Southern Baptist Convention on account of their complementarian theology, have coalesced to bring the treatment of women in Christianity more intense scrutiny. This movement has even spilled into conservative white evangelical circles and many women, including the ones in my study, have turned to feminism as a means to redress ongoing sexism and sexual misconduct in Christian churches and organizations. They understand that feminism, as a social movement and a set of convictions, can provide a language and political history with which to rectify gender inequality in the church.
These women pointed toward this sea change as a sign that evangelical churches were becoming more welcoming towards feminism and inclusive of women in general. They sent me screenshots of Bolz-Weber’s Instagram posts, excerpts from Christian feminist books, and news announcements of women taking up church leadership roles. They devoured books like Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne and Chine McDonald’s God is Not a White Man. As a minority faction within mainstream evangelicalism, such books, events, and feminist figures struck a chord with these women. In fact, it was their minority position that increased their fervor, their sense that there was a battle to be won and they, the few but mighty, were the ones to fight it.
Simultaneously, these movements have provoked a heated backlash. Feminism is still seen as threatening to many white evangelical leaders, just as it is to Dobson and Mohler, and a fierce resistance to feminism within white evangelicalism continues perhaps upholding Mary Daly’s pessimistic outlook. Daly doubted that identifying Jesus with feminism could subvert Christianity’s patriarchal nature. “Jesus was a feminist, but so what?” she wrote in her book Beyond God the Father.
Thanks to Charlie Dates. He couldn't say it more plainly. Is the resistance due to rigidity of thinking, to fear or to both? Whatever the reason, I am grateful for his plea. I think there are steps we could take. Heather Cox Richardson has a walk through of the history of the second amendment. It is just one sentence: "A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Her walk though of the history was enlightening and helpful to me, as is the plea of Charlie Dates.