Dear Friends,

File this under “Older but not wiser”. The UPI reports: “Marijuana use linked to impaired driving among seniors”. Maybe that explains some of the drivers in the Sun Cities. The article states: “seniors who were longterm marijuana smokers were weaving in and out of their lanes 30 minutes after getting high, Canadian researchers report.” No kidding.

Dear Friends,

It seems almost weekly that new polls, studies, and research are paraded before us regarding religion and the practice of religion or abandonment of practice. Whether it’s from a worldwide or US perspective or a denominational practice census, the numbers indicate that religion is still a constitutive part of the human experience.

Dear Friends,

One of the drivers that has been framing our country’s current discussion on race is Critical Race Theory (CRT). If you’ve noticed that the talk about racial justice doesn't sound much like Dr. King’s teachings on moving towards a race neutral society where the content of one’s character is the measure of judgement and that the power of non-violence best disarms oppression, that’s because CRT frames the issue and the solution very differently.

Dear Friends,

Fiducia Supplicans (Supplicating Trust) is the recent Vatican document which deals with the topic: On the Meaning of Blessings. The letter has generated an ocean full of ink. Despite being a minor document that contains nothing we did not already know but with some “nuances” on the practice of priestly blessings, it still generated an amazing array of news articles and opinion pieces. Here are a few: