He is sitting in a Steak n Shake eating fries and opining on the dangers of the measles vaccine. MAHA?

one thing i keep thinking about is how there is simply no way to design a constitutional system that can resist authoritarian incursion if participants in that system do not actually care that much

Look, I fell asleep during the LOTR movies and never read the books, but even I know the eye of Sauron was bad and Frodo trying to evade it was good.

It’s crazy.

Media accounts largely agree about the day's events: At roughly a quarter past noon, an usher standing in the church entrance saw a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside and locked the doors. Wilson was listening to the sermon when his phone rang with an unknown number. When he silenced it, his ankle bracelet-known in Spanish as a grillete, or shackle-began buzzing. His phone rang a second time, and Wilson rose, flustered, slipping out the back of the sanctuary. The usher met him and said there were agents in the parking lot, asking for Wilson by name. Moments later, Kenia's phone flashed with a message from her husband: Come outside.

Running into the daylight, Kenia found him handcuffed in the back of a law enforcement vehicle. "What's happening to my husband?" she asked the agents. Her mind raced to make sense of the scene. Wilson had made all his required check-ins at an Atlanta ICE office. He had the government's permission to work and had an appointment on a court docket. He was deported once nearly 20 years ago-a significant strike on an immigrant's record-but otherwise had no criminal record. The agents told Kenia they were looking for people with ankle bracelets, then they drove Wilson away. Back inside, her pastor, Luis Ortiz, tried to reassure his congregation. He encouraged everyone to be calm, he told local media. "But I could see the fear and tears on their faces."

After the service, Kenia lingered a while in a daze. When she finally went home later that afternoon, she closed herself in her room and prayed through sobs: "God, take control of my husband's life." "It's disrespectful, what they did," Kenia told CT in Spanish. She doesn't know why ICE would arrest her husband at church. "With the bracelet they could find him anywhere."

Just a truly gutting piece from @christianitytoday.com about when ICE agents came to a church to arrest an immigrant last week.

The whole thing is worth reading, but this section asks the big question: why was it necessary to arrest him there? www.christianitytoday.com/2025/01/shou...

Elon Musk’s team has gotten access to the Treasury Department’s payments system.

This seems bad. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02...

So much of the liturgical living Catholic lifestyle stuff is just influencer marketing. Being a tradwife is trendy. We are all better off if we view it in that light, not as some real window into someone else’s life or home.

Just gonna say that the shine really came off Bluesky today with the celebratory and unhinged reactions to the UHC executive’s murder.

Particularly demoralizing to note this when the Catholic Church doesn’t actually teach the sort of marital submission that is more prominent in evangelical Christianity.

I spent years in Catholic mom groups talking to women stuck in this thinking. So many of us have absorbed it.

This is [almost] every Catholic women’s book, ministry, group study, podcast, FB group…

No one talks about how texting your kids is a boon to parenting.

Teens don’t have tone to react to, emojis can defuse tense situations, awkward info can be communicated easily. It’s great for reminders.

Of course verbal conversation is still important, but texting has a valuable place!

Right, and the whole family worked! Meaning that women took in work they could do at home, and children were put to work at young ages. The emoji-laden post romanticizes teaching children skills via work when reality trapped illiterate kids in dangerous unskilled labor.

Yes, absolutely. It was a real marketing success to turn it into a moral ideal for the new middle class.

The single-earner household has largely been an historical aberration subsidized by economic policy, discriminatory laws, and/or social mores.

The default in human history is not the male breadwinner.

A “breadwinner wage” in the past has devalued women’s work—including work done inside the home.

It is more than a little alarming to see folks promoting the idea that we need to discriminate harder against women in the workforce in order to “support the nuclear family.”

(BTW this LinkedIn post is obviously AI-generated.)

On Dec 2 1980 Salvadoran soldiers, acting on official orders, abducted and murdered for North American churchwomen. The youngest—27–was lay missioner Jean Donovan. My reflection in @giveusthisdaylp.bsky.social

Interesting. I thought we just had an inexperienced farmer and blamed the grass finishing.

I can imagine the taste of shoes in raw milk, given how grass fed and finished beef tastes like a pasture.

When my friends began reaching 5-6 kids, I began to lose track of their kids. To make it extra confusing, people we never see never send out Christmas cards or birth announcements. So how am I supposed to keep up with that level of procreation?

So many people I know are having their sixth kid. They're all my age. The thing is, I just don't feel six kids old

Ooh ooh because of a world authority “with teeth” in Caritas in Veritate? Or his favorable appraisal of Balthasar’s daring hope in universal salvation? Or some secret third reason?

#catpics

Totally agree w/ him that it’s too narrow.

Vatican to consider classifying 'spiritual abuse' as new Catholic crime Pope Francis has asked the Vatican to study whether the Catholic Church should classify "spiritual abuse" as a new crime in order to address cases where priests use purported mystical experiences as a pretext for harming others.

It’s a start. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

Wow. That’s really an inspiring response to scandal. God bless you.

That kind of neglect does harm kids and adolescents. It’s how you get complex trauma (in this case, tied to the Church!).

It betrays the sense of “something isn’t right with this,” and teaches kids that they should put up with uncomfortable situations rather than identify them for what they are.

Another reason that boundary violations are serious *on their own* is that non-criminal boundary violations can be seriously harmful/traumatic, even when they aren’t part of intentional grooming or aren’t criminal.

Neglecting to name inappropriate behavior fails to teach how to hold boundaries.

“Boundary violations of a non-sexual nature”

and making excuses for them

are

also

unacceptable.

They lead to boundary violations of a sexual nature. It’s also commonly known as “grooming.”

It’s taken time to figure out that projecting disgust over sexual abuse isn’t a good indicator that someone cares about it as a matter of justice. The disgust and horror can coexist with “it’s a few bad [dusgusting] apples” kinds of beliefs that exempt “good guys” from scrutiny.