Elizabeth Glass Turner 🦃

There are some good Madeleine L'Engle poems set in pretty evocative urban spaces that I've enjoyed. She's a mix, but strong sense of both place and metaphysical. "The Right Ordering of Love" collection.

A Jarring Montage of Dissonance: Glimpses of the Years that Shaped the Women Pastors of World War II What [in the world] was going on?

I compiled some interesting vintage headlines on that.

open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

So does the Senate voting to keep air traffic controller $ flowing

allow deportation flights to continue unhindered,

like the kind taking a friend of a friend to a country they haven't been to since they were a kid, when they came to the US as a war refugee?

Vintage newspaper ad for pure lead base instead of peeling paint.

Bumped into this while exploring cobwebby digitized newspaper archives the other day. Wasn't what I was looking for, but...got my attention.

Women's "municipal housekeeping" reform efforts tackled huge swathes of that, they started graduating med school and saying "but what if we didn't die all the time, take germ theory seriously, & collect data on some things?"

The nerve of them!

High child mortality rate, formaldehyde in milk, painful deaths from cancer, oceans of laudanum, canned rotten meat, tonics -

even in the 1930s there was mascara that blinded some women & actually killed a lady.

I wish people walked through old cemeteries. Should be a civics class field trip.

It wasn't perfect.
I'd been skeptical of the whole thing.
Then it saved my life.
From the bottom of my heart-

Thanks, Obama.

@barackobama.bsky.social

Gorgeous.

The best response to complaints about so-called misleading edits probably would've been appallingly dry:

"it's true we didn't edit the president to appear as though he were dumping sewage on the American people, but we stand by that decision."

"I'm not trying to be funny, Ian, but" if the heads of the BBC are getting axed for this maybe they should collaborate with the doc makers on a new, thorough, incisive project about the gentleman linking the Mountbatten Windsor formerly known as Prince and the President of the United States.

I'm one of maybe 3 Americans who watched AND enjoyed Twenty-Twelve & W1A which is the only reason I know the BBC functions under royal charter.

And so help me we need allies who are allies of Constitutional liberty & rule of law, not of any one administration. Badly. If tech $ pressured this...

Whaaa....t? How were viewers substantively misled?

Hours & hours of cumulative hearing evidence already built this case.

An aide specifically testified the pres ordered rally metal detectors removed.

If the speech didn't goad what happened - why did they all just get pardoned?

All this is part of why some of my favorite pastors are those who are open about being in recovery. People in recovery don't have the luxury of BSing. They're some of the most honest people I know.

The Eucharist beckons partakers to stand in a breadline & acknowledge their own impoverishment.

Maybe if someone feels smug they feel entitled to be stingy. They may even think they're thankful. But genuine gratitude requires humility, & genuine gratitude & smugness can't occupy the same space, it's one or the other. I've watched people be stingy w/their donations of used clothes. What!?

I grew up as a Christmas charity kid. Kids have a keen radar for when adults are quietly making judgments about their family & family circumstances. Even unspoken attitudes can be loud-much less spoken ones.

I don't understand stinginess; it only makes sense to me as the flip-side of smugness.

I'm so sorry some wounded rather than honored your vulnerability. No one should ever walk away feeling shamed or belittled, ever.

And you're right: we're approaching a season that for Christians marks God Incarnate in an impoverished family that became refugees. To fail to honor it fails the faith.

Place & public space matter.

All that said, not all congregations have...let's say, optimal sensitivity when engaging people who are impoverished, housing or food insecure, etc. For congregations w/office staff, training is one step.

Anyway. It was a joy whenever I got to reflect the beauty of someone's humanity back to them.

Some (often small to midsized) towns funnel the majority of benevolence requests through the local ministerial association, because sometimes folks come into town and go from one church to the next to next requesting cash. For modest budget churches, they don't want limited funds exploited.

I've answered the phone (and parsonage door) fielding spur of the moment requests when I pastored a church. Most of the encounters were very positive. Only had one guy yell at me on the phone when I explained what was available. I'm very glad he didn't record the call, edit it, & blast it.

Not all churches handle benevolence requests well. But almost all churches have some kind of policy for handling benevolence requests, & reputable congregations often have pastors who are part of community clergy associations that coordinate to make sure resources get to those who need them.

Some clergy acquaintances are trying to figure out how to navigate this, because some of the videos online are posted by people who call a church, record the call, edit the audio omitting the resources/info given, then post it online, misrepresenting the interaction.

A lot of cuts generally speaking will I suspect also slow down digitization efforts, which extend access even further. I'm constantly amazed at what I can access- for now-from around the world. But I'm also concerned at what havoc bad-faith machine learning tools could create.

WHAT?!

😂 Ok first, aside from obv freedom issues-

you can't ever stop anyone from praying, people pray silently all the time. Ask old-school Communist regimes, they tried to control it too.

Second, sounds like being around those verbal prayers may have some consciences kicking up.

DOUBLE DOWN.

This.

I love that Mrs. Sinclair Lewis aka Dorothy Thompson, while inclined to be fiscal conservative who critiqued New Deal at times, grabbed the end of that saw w/anyone willing to join her in cutting down fascism.

Also testified at hearing in support of Rep Nourse Rogers' attempt to ⬆️ refugee numbers.

A Wrecking Ball to the Work of Women in America How Gutting Government Agencies Assaults More than 100 Years of Faith, Toil, & Prayer

(You might enjoy this from last spring.)

open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Screenshot of black and white archival photo of Alice C. Evans in early 20th century dress standing in a lab holding up and looking at a specimen or something. Excerpt of caption explains she worked at the Department of Agriculture and in 1918 published findings definitively linking brucellosis, raw milk, and human infection.

Yes.

And capturing open-access digitized archival content may be especially valuable right now-

not only bc content keywords are being scrubbed from some sites but bc I don't want machine learning tools interpreting archival content for me, which seems likely to be attempted.

Love this photo.

I want this to be a low-budget animated series a la quirky 2007 low-key indie project somewhere in the ballpark of a fine vintage Jemaine Clement, Richard Ayoade, and Kristen Schaal.

This is a rollercoaster of a comment. "Yaaaay...aghgh"

Feels like a very Leslie Knope kind of moment. The triumph of the statue, the glance at the dedication program and the realization.