u/vagueboy2

>In the case of First Universalist, documents describe an undercover agent attending a “How to Stop ICE and Build a Revolution” event in December 2025. Held at the church, the event was led by Sunrise Movement, a liberal activist organization that, as the federal filing notes, was described by leaders at the meeting as a “nonviolent, direct-action group.”

>The documents also describe an undercover agent attending an April meeting of the activist group Direct Action Minnesota that was held at St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal Church in St. Paul, and collecting license plate information of vehicles parked in a nearby parking lot — seemingly irrespective of whether the owners of the cars were confirmed to be attendees of the meeting.

>In addition, two churches affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — one in Minnesota and another in Ann Arbor, Michigan — were listed in the documents as subject to surveillance. 

Wonder if the Religious Liberty Commission will get involved? /s

>“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Trey Yingst.

>Trump’s comments come as the 60-day window for peace talks between the US and Iran, agreed to in June, closed Monday without any concrete plans announced for the war to end. Meanwhile, Iran said Monday that its talks with Oman regarding the Strait of Hormuz are complex but continuing.

>This isn’t the first time Trump has threatened Oman, which is a US ally. At a Cabinet meeting in May, the president said: “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow ‘em up.”

Will he do so? To me, it's doubtful. But what a state we're in where this is just your average Monday with the President threatening to bomb another country.

>...it’s not terrific for AIPAC to play into the antisemitic stereotype of a Jewish cabal dishonestly seeking to bend the world to its will by the application of large amounts of money. What it is is a good way to turn critics of Israel into permanent enemies. Moreover, should the organization decide to help elect Rogers in Michigan, win or lose, it’s an excellent way to destroy what remains of Democratic support for the Jewish state.

Pretty good opinion piece which differentiates the call of the Church to be a witness in the world from the false mandate to have dominion over it, as found in the so-called "Seven Mountain Mandate".

>Of course, I believe in godly leaders in government, business, education and media. We should pray for and work toward righteous leadership in every sphere.

>But we must reject the notion that societal transformation only happens from the top down.

>The early church transformed the Roman Empire without holding political office. They changed culture through acts of mercy, moral courage, sacrificial love and a superior philosophy of life.

>That is the Jesus way.

For a more lengthy discussion of 7MM and the theological concerns attached to it: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/seven-mountain-mandate/

>Ogles has also repeatedly cast aspersions on Muslims. He has called for deporting New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim immigrant, to Uganda and insisted without evidence that the mayor wants to “turn America into an Islamic theocracy.”

>What’s more, in addition to introducing a bill in March that would block immigration to the U.S. from Muslim-majority nations — a proposal he described as a “Muslim ban” — Ogles drew widespread backlash that same month after he posted a statement to X that read: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”
...
Despite the prevalence of right-wing rhetoric infused with Christianity, the defeat of Ogles, Fritts and others comes as political expressions of the faith are increasingly garnering attention among Democrats. Hours before the Associated Press projected Ogles’ loss, Anna Golladay, a former United Methodist minister and self-described progressive, won the Democratic primary in the race for Tennessee’s third congressional district by nearly 60 points.

>During a press conference Friday (July 24), hosted by leaders from the Assemblies of God and the Latino Christian National Network, Nepthali Zozaya Saucedo said he and his wife, who came to the U.S. legally, were repeatedly pressured to sign voluntary departure papers but that they had refused. ...

[Sandy Ovalle, a board member of the Latino Christian National Network] said Zozaya had served Comunidad Cristiana Emanuel for more than a decade and that his wife, Cardona, also preaches. According to Ovalle, while the couple currently hold religious worker visas, they are waiting for their applications for lawful permanent residency, also known as green card status, to be adjudicated.

The article makes an important distinction between foreign interference and foreign influence. The Trump admin seems intent on focusing on election interference based on debunked and disproven theories related to vote tampering at the polls, while neglecting the impact of foreign (as well as domestic) actors to influence public perception and behavior before they even go to the polls.

>Between January and August 2025, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had already slashed more than 500 staff members — roughly 30 percent of its workforce — when then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that the agency would eliminate additional positions and scale back the Foreign Malign Influence Center, responsible for tracking foreign disinformation campaigns. The office had uncovered influence operations in prior elections, including an Iran-backed effort targeting Trump. The national intelligence office has since reassigned many of the center’s duties to other offices, resulting in fragmentation.

>While 72% of Republicans viewed capitalism favorably back in 2019, that’s down to 61% today. And the percentage of Republican who have a “strongly” positive view of capitalism has gone from 54% to 41%.

>Similarly, the percentage of Republicans who say the system is rigged to favor the wealthy has gone from 30% in 2018 to 42% today.

>Just to underscore, fewer than half of Republicans — the party that claims to embrace free markets! — now have a strongly favorable view of capitalism. And 42% of them endorse a pretty Bernie Sanders-sounding sentiment about our “rigged” economy.

A +10 point drop since 2019 is pretty significant.

excerpt:

>Recognizing that the Declaration offers a view of politics from below—that it is a complaint about cruelty from the victims of a hostile sovereign—helps us better understand the text’s famous egalitarianism. “All men are created equal”: the authors of the 1776 Commission report accurately describe this line as “the core assertion” of the Declaration. Egalitarianism is a response, perhaps the only worthy response, to cruelty. Cruelty is predicated on inequality, the stronger injuring the weaker. A reading of the Declaration against cruelty is also a reading in defense of equality, because cruelty craves subordination. Today’s circumstances of cruelty depend on a large and porous class of people in American society who are vulnerable enough that they can be hurt with apparent impunity. How large? There are perhaps fourteen million undocumented immigrants living in America, collectively paying about $100 billion in taxes (enough to fund the latest $70 billion immigration-enforcement bill with some left over for the new White House ballroom). Add journalists, protesters, and bystanders to this group, and the zone of impunity expands wider still.

>One of the more clarifying, if pessimistic, appraisals of America on the eve of its 250th comes from the historian Nikhil Pal Singh, who argues that Trump has created a “Homeland Empire,” recasting “swathes of the country, and particularly major cities, as ideologically and racially alien, enemy territory to be ruled by force.” “From Caracas to Minneapolis,” Singh writes, “legal authority and institutional power are being redirected toward an overriding end: governing populations as subjects rather than citizens.” 

I'll add that these vulnerable classes have in the past also included the rural poor, the urban working class, women, and of course overt racism towards Jews, Blacks, Asians, Irish, etc. I say this to avoid this becoming an issue only about immigration enforcement. Cruelty from leaders is hardly a new thing.

The pursuit of power and status always involves conflict, and conflict requires an enemy of some kind. Politicians have abused these vulnerable classes as a means to promote conflict and maintain power in many cases. I think the article reminds us that we should be mindful of who leaders are directing focus regarding who "our enemies" should be and why that might be the case.

>The Billy Graham Center Research Institute fielded a survey of 2,365 Gen Z adults (ages 18-28) through NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel between Aug. 9 and Sept. 26, 2024. This effort was supported by the Lilly Endowment, and the lead investigator for this project was Rick Richardson at Wheaton College. Buried in a battery about political de-motivators for church involvement was this statement: “Christians’ support of Trump has made me less likely to go to church.”

>In the full sample of Gen Z, nearly half (48%) agreed with that statement in one way or another. About 1 in 5 young adults said they “strongly agreed” with that sentiment. Basically the same share (21%) were on the other end of the continuum and strongly disagreed that Christians’ support of Trump had made them less likely to go to church.

>So, it’s fair to say young adults are pretty evenly divided on this idea. But these results are confounded by a few variables: Younger adults tend to be more left-leaning in their politics, and a significant share of Gen Z claims no religious affiliation, which means a lot of these respondents wouldn’t be going to church much anyway.
...
But even among Gen Z Christians, there’s a significant share who said Trump made it harder for them to attend at all: 44% of those who identified as a generic Christian, 42% of Catholics and 30% of Protestant young adults said they were turned off by the Christian-Trump alliance.

>...it’s not fair to use this data to make the claim that young Christians would be flocking back into the church if the church would drop politics. However, the other way to interpret this data is that about 40% of young adult Christians see the church’s association with Trump as an impediment to them becoming more involved with their faith community. According to this result, more daylight between the church and the GOP may lead to an uptick in attendance among young Christians at every level of the attendance continuum.

Current Chaplains (and the Chaplain-curious), do you incorporate AI in your work at all?

I've seen a rapid growth in the use of AI in documentation as well as chart reviews in my company, and it seems like this is happening across the country. I personally do not use AI at all in my charting, as I feel it removes me from the process. I'm curious as to others' experiences and opinions.

I thought this was an interesting story, highlighting the competing interests of the church and the community surrounding it. It reminds me of other cases where churches and Christian leaders fall into cycles of offense, where ministers seem to intentionally preach offense because "the Word is offensive" and then consider themselves martyrs because the people they claim they want to reach with the Word are offended.

>Musk has said his critics “cannot cite a single name of someone who died” and “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!” When confronted with the names – including those of children who died because of the cuts – Musk called a journalist “an utter piece of shit and a liar” and “utterly evil”. Musk has claimed, without evidence, that US tax dollars went to arming militants and “corrupt politicians”.

>Musk’s cuts, through the short-lived US “department of government efficiency” (Doge), have come under renewed scrutiny during the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Last year, Musk admitted to “accidentally” cutting Ebola detection and response programs.

>“This is one of the reasons why there was not enough surveillance and preparedness for the outbreak of Ebola,” said Davide Rasella, a research professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and head of the Global Health Impact Assessment and Evaluation Group at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) in Spain.

I'd like to keep my CX-5 going for at least a few years until some significant debts are paid off (it has been paid off for some time btw). I just crossed 200k, and since I bought in in 2023:

• had tie rods and sway bar links replaced
• new ball joints, brakes & pads at 179k
• serpentine belt, plugs and coils replaced at 173k

I likely will need new shocks and struts in the near future (quoted $1500), along with an alignment and tires. Other than starting up a little rough, it runs fine otherwise. If I want to keep this going another 3-4 years, what future maintenance should I plan on: flush and fill fluids? differential fluid change? fuel additives?

Found a draft of the list here: https://tea.texas.gov/curriculum-and-instruction/instructional-materials/house-bill-1605/draft-rule-text-for-agency-recommendations-to-the-sboe-for-literary-works-list-0.pdf

While the focus has been necessarily on the required religious reading in the list, I think it's important to look at those readings in full context. Rather than jump into the "should we have Bible passages as required reading in public schools?" debate, only because that's the end of the pool everyone else is jumping in to:

1. what are your opinions on the choice of biblical readings themselves?
2. what other reading requirements stand out to you, positively or negatively?