Election judge report

 This is part 2 of my report on yesterday's primary election.

Election report - Updated

Update July 2, 2022 9:10 AM CDT: David Brooks wrote a good column which touches on the gubernatorial race I describe below, and puts it into a national context. At the bottom of this post (below the break), I'll include a link to his column and some snippets.

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 Illinois held its primary elections yesterday for both Democrats and Republicans (and other parties, for whatever that's worth; we did get one Libertarian voter in our precinct yesterday).  I worked again as an election judge.  In this post, I'll give a recap of the political outcomes from yesterday. Then in a follow-up post I'll make an observation.

Pope's Message Preserved as "Seed of Hope"

There is an interesting article on the NCR site concerning two topics which interest me, but are seemingly unrelated. Among future food supply in the Arctic, pope's message preserved as 'seed of hope' | Earthbeat | National Catholic Reporter (ncronline.org)

Sisters' Jubilee

Some random thoughts after a few hours with a religious order yesterday.

Dobbs

I guess we could apply the much-used descriptor "historic" to today.  Any thoughts?

My pesky day job keeps interfering with blogging, but if/as I run across interesting thoughts in the media, I'll post them here. 

How many major political parties do we need in the US?

When it comes to the question, "Am I a Democrat or a Republican?" the only answer I can readily choose is, "None of the Above".  I wish there were other choices on offer.

We hunger for something better

This is my homily for yesterday, the The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, aka Corpus Christi.  Of course, yesterday also was Father's Day, so it was one of those confluence-of-several-events days which, depending on the circumstances, can be a blessing or a curse for a preacher. 

For me, it was more curse this year.  I struggled to find a way to tie the two topics together.  What I'm pasting here is (more or less) what I preached on Sunday morning.  At the Saturday evening mass, I preached an earlier cut, which I found didn't cohere very well.  This one is marginally better, but I still didn't love it.  Almost no feedback from parishioners afterward, which tells me they didn't love it, either.  I'll try to do better next time.  On a day like Father's Day, people don't want deep and challenging; they want light and sentimental. 

At a third mass this weekend, I did something completely different: I called the little children up to the front of the church, had them sit on the sanctuary steps, and did some Q&A with them about Father's Day, the Body of Christ, and whatever else they wanted to talk about.  I'd ask them questions and put a hand-held microphone in front of whomever wanted to answer.  I've done this once before, a number of years ago, at an Easter mass, and a couple of other clergy at our parish over the years have done it occasionally.  I thought it only went ok this time: I had expected many more kids would be at mass with their dads on Father's Day, but I figured out yesterday that Father's Day is pretty low-key around here - quite different than Mother's Day.  However, based on feedback I heard afterwards, the adults loved having the kids take part.  Our priest commented that he hadn't previously seen that many people in our parish smiling during a homily.  And he got pulled out of the sacristy after mass to help a few visitors register for the parish - not sure whether the homily contributed to that or not, but presumably it didn't hurt.  

The readings for yesterday are here.