LaGuardia Airport's revamped Terminal B (Wikimedia Commons/Eden, Janine and Jim)
Archbishop Dennis Schnurr: Call your office! The Cincinnati Men's Conference, a Catholic event scheduled for April, is advertising at a variety of Catholic websites. Raymond Arroyo, host of EWTN's "The World Over" and a nightly guest on Fox News with Laura Ingraham, is one of the speakers. So is actor Jim Caviezel, who played the part of Jesus in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." That would be the same Jim Caviezel who recently spoke at a QAnon conference and told his audience that they should send their enemies to hell?
At Religion News Service, Mark Silk poses the likelihood that Trumpism is beginning to fragment and finds a historical point of comparison in the Protestant Reformation. Noting the consternation in some parts of MAGA nation over Trump's admission he got the booster, Silk notes:
Luther's Reformation was soon awash in convictions he did not share, and in due course Protestantism broke up into sects and denominations — all opposed to Roman Catholicism but often more in conflict with each other than with the church they dubbed the Whore of Babylon. Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, Mennonites, Pentecostals, etc. etc. etc.
From Silk's pen to God's ears.
In The New York Times, David Axelrod, President Barack Obama's principal strategist, recalls the feeling among Democrats that the Affordable Care Act was doomed when Republican Scott Brown won the Senate vacancy caused by the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy in February 2010. Yet, the Affordable Care Act made it across the finish line and became law. The analogy to Joe Biden's Build Back Better proposal is not exact, but Axelrod's advice is sound, and there are ways for the White House to regain the initiative.
Vice President Kamala Harris was getting a lot of bad press in recent months, but she hit a home run when she was interviewed by Charlamagne tha God. When the host implied that Joe Manchin might be the "real president," Harris was not having it. "Come on, Charlamagne," Harris interjected. "It's Joe Biden. And don't start talking like a Republican, about asking whether or not he's president. It's Joe Biden and I'm vice president and my name is Kamala Harris." Let's hope to see more of the feisty Harris in 2022.
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At Jalopnik, news that LaGuardia Airport, the most maligned on the planet, has won the prestigious Prix Versailles architectural award from UNESCO for the architecture of its revamped Terminal B. I haven't seen it in person, but it looks quite unlike the dump it was before, so "Bravo" to the Port Authority.
Speaking of LaGuardia, in the New York Daily News, Jonathan Cohn, who helped create the AirTrain system at JFK Airport, argues for a different approach to connecting LaGuardia to the city: Bring the subway and the bike trails right to the terminals. Passengers arriving at the airport could be in Times Square in under half an hour and for less than $3. I also like the way Cohn both takes pride in his work at JFK, but recognizes the limits of the system he created.
At CTInsider, two cheese makers in my home state of Connecticut made the Food & Wine magazine list of best cheese makers in the country. One of them, Cato Corner Farm, sells its products at the food co-op next to my church and its cheeses are delicious. There are less expensive cheeses, to be sure, but the "buy local" campaign is part of the broader vision of "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home," which requires us to think less about the economies of scale and more about the human ecology of our economic activity. And congratulations to all the award-winning cheese makers.
ArchDaily reports that plans to remodel the façade of Dytiachyi Svit, a late-Soviet modernist building in Kyiv, Ukraine, have been met with community opposition — and good for them! Their opposition has brought forth some different remodeling proposals, but why anyone would mess with the beautiful original is beyond me.
