In this environment, it has been easy to overlook what in any normal week would be a top story. Since Feb. 22, West Virginia public school teachers and employees have been forcing the state's 55 county boards of education to shut down, citing inadequate pay and climbing health insurance costs. That is every teacher, every public school, in the entire state. Though a strike of this scale is extraordinary, it is not without precedent. In 1990, West Virginia teachers in 47 counties stopped work and earned an across-the-board $5,000 pay increase for teachers throughout the state.
A feat of elegant design wowed elite architects and promised to bring education to poor children in Nigeria. Then it collapsed.
10. Martin Luther King Jr. Mourns Trayvon Martin
I dreamed you whole
and growing into your own
manhood, writing its definitions
with your daily being.
I dreamed you alive, living.
North Dakota alone recorded 125 cases of missing Native American women and girls in 2016, and Sen. Heitkamp has said she suspects the real number is likely higher. The bill is named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, of the Spirit Lake and Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nations, who was found dead in Fargo, N.D., in August 2017. She was murdered by two non-Native residents of Fargo, who forcibly removed her unborn baby from her womb before she died.
The Heretic, a new documentary about controversial author and thinker Rob Bell, offers a new image of Christianity and faith. The film traces Bell’s work since the release of his hair-raising book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, which questioned the damnation of human beings to hell.
Earlier this week, I participated in civil disobedience for the first time. Forty Catholic sisters, priests, and other lay Catholic advocates were arrested in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building in solidarity with young undocumented “Dreamers.” These immigrants, brought to this country as children, are living in fear of deportation after the Trump administration ended an Obama-era program that offered them protection. Congress now has to find a solution. About a third of all House members, including Speaker Paul Ryan, and a quarter of senators are Catholic. More than a 100 Catholics, including Dreamers, showed up for a rally and press conference outside the Senate building, urging lawmakers to act.
A controversial Department of Labor proposal could cost service workers billions of dollars in tips, experts say — and female service workers would be hit the hardest. The proposal has met harsh criticism, and earlier this month, the agency’s inspector general announced his office is reviewing allegations that Labor officials buried unfavorable economic analyses of the plan.
Our children are leading us, and our youth groups can help point the way forward. It’s time to listen and follow their lead.
After each massacre, guns are defended with religious fervor, as though owning a weapon is akin to owning a Bible. We’re told that the problem in our society isn’t unfettered access to weapons, but a failure by godly people to arm themselves and go out and kill the ungodly people. We’re told we need more “good” people buying guns and perfecting their aim so they can shoot all the “bad” people.
Common social biases and their detrimental effects on marginalized people are well-documented phenomena within scientific communities. And lot of this evidence comes from our own professional organizations. And yet the notion persists that scientific principles go hand in hand with objectivity in all areas of a scientist’s life. In the face of a weight of evidence pointing manifestly toward pervasive bias in the sciences, we remain willfully ignorant of our own internal workings.
“Giving legal status to Dreamers is not a political issue. It is a moral issue,” said Father Tom Reese, a Jesuit priest and popular Catholic columnist. “It is time for the people who worked in that building [pointing to the Capitol] to realize this is a moral issue, this is a justice issue. And the political gamesmanship must stop.” He was arrested shortly after.