Politico is rounding up the results on GOP primary candidates who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump. With Liz Cheney’s loss on Tuesday night, only two of the 10 brave Republicans who put the Constitution above partisanship will be at the polls in November. The others didn’t run, or ran and lost. It’s not your grandfather’s Republican Party anymore.
The Washington Post has an excellent report on former President Donald Trump’s efforts to find top-notch lawyers to handle his many — and growing — legal challenges, and the chorus of “noes” he’s getting in return. Imagine: Lawyers are the people who care enough about their reputation to say “no” to the former president, but to members of Congress? Not really.
In The New Yorker, the great Jane Mayer examines the redistricting by state legislatures of not only congressional districts, but also state legislative districts, and how that effort undermines democracy. It also takes politics to the extreme, as lawmakers only have to worry about a challenge from their own flank. Of all the mistakes made by the Founding Fathers, leaving redistricting to the political branches is one of the most damaging.
At The New York Times, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren rightly complains about the distorting way religion appears and is made to appear in our media culture. She writes:
…when we primarily talk about God in the context of political or ideological debate, believers’ actual experience of God, worship and faith – not to mention spiritual virtues like humility, gratitude and kindness – is often lost. God simply becomes another pawn in the culture wars, a means to a political end, a meme to possess our adversaries online, or a prop donned as a bond of power.
And it is often the believers who are wrong to reduce God to a pawn in the culture wars. That said, it was ironic that his article appeared on the same day as our Gospel reading featured Jesus telling his disciples, “Do you think I have come to establish peace on earth? No, I say so, but rather division.” Even the irenic cannot reduce God to their cause.
It turns out that the old adage “Roma locuta est, causa fini est” (“Rome has spoken, the matter is closed”) is no longer. The final teaching authority of the Catholic faith apparently resides at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., where Dominican Father Thomas Petri said to the Catholic News Agency that the Church’s teaching against artificial contraception is “irreformable.” This is despite the fact that Pope Paul VI declared in his encyclical Humanae Vitae was not infallible, and one can think of one of the many moral teachings that have changed over the years. For example, does Petri invest the endowment of the House of Studies? I hope so, but for a millennium the church has outlawed the charging of interest.
At Crux, national correspondent John Lavenburg examines the economic crossroads where the island of Puerto Rico sits, with commentary from faith leaders who are close to the people and see the challenges every day. Note to the Biden administration: If you want real success in the fight against climate change, it’s hard to imagine a place with more latent wind and solar power than Puerto Rico, and where the energy grid is also inadequate. and obsolete. With investment and loan guarantees, you could make the island a Laudato Si’ beacon for the hemisphere.
At Architecture Daily, a look at some of the approaches to design in the city of Copenhagen, which regularly tops the list of the most livable cities. I am not a “bucket list” person, with a long list of things I need to do before going to meet my Creator. Life has blessed me a lot. However, I wouldn’t mind going to see this beautiful city which transforms industrial sites into centers of leisure.
