During my decades-long teaching career, I have found that one of the reasons students shy away from history classes is they are afraid they will be forced to “memorize all those dates.” One pair of dates that they had tp grapple with sought to determine the beginning and end of the civil rights movement. Generally speaking, and for efficiency’s sake, the movement is usually placed in the time frame of 1954, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, through 1968, the year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been proclaimed by the media as the leader of the freedom movement, was assassinated. While I suppose this is close enough for government work, it is at best misleading. Any number of incidents are claimed to be the beginning of the civil rights movement. So while I reflexively bristled at the subtitle of Alabama v King, I am always up for reading another book on the freedom movement.

This essay grows from an informal conversation over coffee with a friend. As I criticized the former mayor, but far more influential chair of the self-appointed and uncontrolled Downtown Development Commission’s unembarrassed promotion of an imaginary non-plan for a fictional downtown in 2040, they looked at me and asked: why can’t this city accept itself and build on what it is?

Columbus, Ohio, is more than 200 years old. But it won’t grow up. Immaturity characterizes every dimension including its illogical obsession with size. Today, this overflows in the pseudo-celebration of a convention center hotel new tower—too tall for the area—making it “the largest hotel in Ohio.”

Despite its age, the city functions like an awkward, sometimes self-destructive child. For clues, watch the mayor sputter and inarticulately blurt out meaningless slogans never associated with proposals, let alone policies. Councilors and department heads chime in. What has happened to speech classes?

This headline in the Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, only tells part of the story: “The Lions’ Den, Other Palestinian Groups are Endless Headache for Israel, PA.”

 It is true that both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority are equally worried about the prospect of a widespread armed revolt in the Occupied West Bank, and that the newly formed Nablus-based brigade, the Lions' Den, is the epicenter of this youth-led movement. 

 However, the growing armed resistance in the West Bank is causing more than a mere 'headache' for Tel Aviv and Ramallah. If this phenomenon continues to grow, it could threaten the very existence of the PA, while placing Israel before its most difficult choice since the invasion of major Palestinian West Bank cities in 2002.

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The national evangelical group Vote Common Good swept through Ohio this week urging fellow Christians to defeat election-denying, insurrection-supporting candidates in November. 

Vote Common Good (VCG) has been trying to educate Christians about the dangers of Christian Nationalism since 2018, and while it is a nonprofit, VCG is focused on opposing Trump’s mastery over many Evangelicals.

“We are in a fight to protect our democracy from election-denying, insurrection-supporting, law and order-attacking, democracy-downgrading candidates and movements,” VCG Executive Director Doug Pagitt said. “Voters of faith can and must choose the common good, not political party, when heading to the polls this November.” 

According to Pew Research Center, 29 percent of Ohio adults identify themselves as Evangelicals. And in the heart of it all, Central Ohio is considered by many a hotbed of Evangelism, home to Rev. Rod Parsley’s World Harvest Church, for example, with a congregation over 10,000 strong.