The Berry family has lived in these parts for nine generations. While pursuing a prolific writing career, Berry never stopped caring for the land of his ancestors. Now, the 81-year-old writer wants to pass on his family’s farming legacy to a new generation. He decided against teaming up with a large university agricultural program, and instead selected a small Catholic liberal arts college about an hour’s drive from Louisville, run by the Dominican Sisters of Peace.
1. Released Emails Suggest Officials Knew About Legionnaires’ Disease Outbreak a Year Ago
The email, obtained by Progress Michigan, shows that an adviser to Gov. Rick Snyder — Director of Urban Affairs Harvey Hollins — was notified of a significant uptick in the Legionnaires’ disease coinciding with the switch over to the Flint River as a water source.
2. LISTEN: Uncomfortable Is Not the Same as Unsafe. White People Need to Lean in to the Discomfort.
Jim Wallis spoke at Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis, streamed on MPR. Take a listen to the great talk.
Speaking slowly at times as he talked about how he is comforted by Scripture and the faith of others, Obama said he has lately focused on a Bible verse from 2 Timothy: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
He said now is the best period to have that scriptural assurance.
“What better time in these changing and tumultuous times to have Jesus standing beside us, steadying our minds, cleansing our hearts, pointing us towards what matters,” he said.
“We should never talk about ‘therapeutic’ abortion,” the cardinal said in his homily, according to Honduran media reports.
“Therapeutic abortion doesn’t exist,” he said. “Therapeutic means curing, and abortion cures nothing. It takes innocent lives.”
The good, the bad, and the ugly of this campaign season has exposed the depth of some of the United States’ racial and ethnic fault lines. But the fault lines themselves are moving. The 2016 electorate will be the most racially and ethnically diverse ever, due largely to U.S.-born Hispanic youth and naturalizations of Asian immigrants.
After the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, the French government declared a state of emergency, which has now lasted three months and violated the rights of hundreds, according to a new report from Amnesty International. After thousands of house searches, nighttime raids, travel bans, and curfews, hundreds report being traumatized and stigmatized, according to the report which is titled “Upturned Lives: The Disproportionate Impact of France’s State of Emergency.”
The city of Phoenix has decided to replace prayer at its public meetings with a moment of silence. The move comes after a representative from the Satanic Temple was approved to say a prayer, or invocation, before a council meeting scheduled for Feb. 17.
Minutes before the deadline to file for the Democratic primary in Baltimore on February 3, DeRay Mckesson completed the paperwork and entered the race.
With nearly 300,000 followers on Twitter, DeRay, as he's often known on Twitter, has gained widespread notoriety for his role organizing and documenting the Black Lives Matter movement. A former school administrator and Teach for America alum, DeRay first caught the public eye during protests in Ferguson and Baltimore. He is the 13th candidate to enter the Democratic primary in his hometown.
When I began writing my latest book, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, my hope was to help foster that new conversation on race in America — and to point to the action that needs to come from it. Because only when we openly and truthfully speak to the roots of racism and inequality in our country — white supremacy, white privilege, and the dehumanization and devaluation of black lives and bodies — will we able to deal with the modern-day realities of that legacy and solve the obvious problems before us in racialized policing and the blatant racial disparities in our criminal justice, education, and economic systems. So we launched a “town meeting” tour that creates space for the voices of diverse local leaders in each city and allows for the multiracial, truth-telling conversations and actions we so urgently need across this country. I’m happy to say that tour has started, and it has been powerful to see and hear.
Jimmy Kimmel recently hosted Jesus on his late show. Not real Jesus, of course. (Don’t worry, this isn’t the apocalypse. You haven’t been left behind). It’s just pretend white Jesus.
Kimmel’s team took real quotes from various presidential candidates and let an actor pretending to be Jesus read them as if he were running for president. And yes, they did happen to include quotes from Donald Trump.
“We want[ed] to get an idea of what [these statements] would actually sound like from the mouth of Jesus,” said Kimmel.
It’s quite disturbing, really.