Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

The Christian World of Agatha Christie | Nick Baldock | First Things

Her bedside reading:

Christie was baptized into the Church of England, although her peripatetic mother dabbled in other religions, including Catholicism, and introduced Agatha to the possibilities of occult spirituality, a theme that recurs in her stories outside the classic detective genre. Nonetheless, it was her mother’s copy of the Imitation of Christ that Christie kept by her bedside, an inspiration she passed onto her detective Jane Marple, a character A. N. Wilson called “a more impressive creation than those old women such as Mrs. Moore in the novels of E. M. Forster, who are somehow meant to carry quasi-mythic weight and hidden wisdom.”

Inscribed on the flyleaf of the Imitation was a quotation from Romans, beginning “who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” At Christie’s memorial service in 1976, her publisher William Collins shared this as “a reflection of the gentle Christian spirit that resided within her.” “Agatha,” Sir William concluded, “knew what true religion meant.”

Not quite, perhaps, says the writer. But it’s a clue to her detective stories, he also says.

Look to Ward 40, says urban studies specialist

The 2nd-most important election to watch?

“Of all the wards, the 40th will serve as a bellwether,” says Connie Mixon, director of urban studies at Elmhurst College and co-author of the book “Twenty-First Century Chicago.”

She’s referring to the seat held by veteran Ald. Pat O’Connor, who’s hanging on for his political life in a race against socialist Andre Vasquez, an AT&T manager who once pursued a career as a rapper. But, even if O’Connor holds on to his seat, “there is a movement for change.”

I would put it this way: If a ward doing as well as the 40th does when it comes to ward services — schools, safety, urbanity without the violence, amenities including green space galore, your choice of coffee shops and restaurants, and regular, timely communications from the ward office — falls to the socialist wave, any ward can.

God save us.

An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden

She tells of his nuzzling her from behind just as she was heading for the stage, finds he has history of such things. This in New York Mag, a sign of disaffiliation for him as 2020 candidate, in that his behavior has been widely ignored when he was Obama’s v.p.

So now he’s to be exposed (rightly) as a creep and menace-2-society, a comment that just now I could not get posted on Facebook.

His me-too moment, with more to come?

Vasquez argument in 40th ward race vs. O’Connor: He’s an organizer . . .

. . . and he has our back, as he says in his flyers and was doing in December, 2017, as in this picture from his web site.

Andre the community organizer doing some organizing, 

 

The alderman of your dreams, right? Standing up at city council meetings, socking it to the miserable capitalists who are stealing shirts off backs.

Like in the 40th Ward, where not too many years back, Amundsen High was a mess, as a class of ’04 graduate recalled in conversation last week — gangs, drugs, metal detectors at the entrance. She and her husband with their child voted with their feet three years later, decamped in 2007 for Du Page County, their present home.

The school later got $28 million for fixing up (on its way to top-notch status), thanks to the incumbent and his contacts and know-how. The unbiased observer would call that having our back.

Or the resident of a block east of Winnemac Park who told me a year or so ago of her  and her neighbors’ regular morning routine in those bad old days of painting over gang graffiti on their garages. Now, she said, the big problem on the block for some is that the brand new street lights are too bright.

On the other hand, according to Vasquez’s publicist, the 40th Ward “is an area that could be the model for the corruption that exists in local government across the United States.”

Oh boy. Woe is us, living in a slough of corruption. No wonder we would want a new alderman who has quite recently devoted himself to bullhorn activism.

Just what the ward needs.

George Soros Spent $408k on Kim Foxx, Prosecutor in Jussie Smollett Case | Breitbart

What a fraud.

Foxx ran in 2016 against incumbent Anita Alvarez, who faced intense public controversy over the 2014 murder of a black teenager, LaQuan McDonald, by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke.

Foxx ran on a platform of criminal justice reform, telling local ABC News affiliate WLS-7 that she wanted to focus on “restoring faith in our criminal justice system” and “bridging the divide between the community and law enforcement.”

As chicagoist.com reported in 2016, Alvarez received donations from the “old-boy” network, but Foxx found other donors, including Soros:

But Kim Foxx has also found two other sources of cash, in the form of twin $300,000 donations to a Super PAC supporting her called Illinois Safety & Justice. The sole donors to the PAC are neoliberal superdonor and conservative-boogeyman George Soros and a “dark-money” group called Civic Participation Action Fund. A Super PAC is a fundraising group, created by the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, that can raise as much money as they want for any candidate or cause—as long as they don’t coordinate on any level with political campaigns, which have much smaller campaign limits.

State campaign finance records show that Soros personally contributed a total of $333,000 to Foxx’s super PAC before the March 15, 2016 primary was over, and an additional $75,000 after she won.

Look. She meant it at the time, about restoring faith etc. But things change now, don’t they? I mean that’s who she was then, you know, now we know her as she is.