Lynn > Recent Status Updates

Fanny has received an engagement proposal from someone she does not love. She turns it down because she does not love the proposer. This almost a requirement in a Jane Austen novel.

This won't rank as one of my favorite Jane Austen novels, but it has its moments especially when the young people of the story decide to put on a play.

I begin reading today.

So far I am reading the effect that anti-Trans laws have had on the families of trans sons and daughters.

Kamala has been elected a California Senator, but Trump is now president. Most of this chapter deals with her work on behalf of immigrants

Kamala gets elected Attorney General of California and wins a victory over banks who engaged in predatory lending threatening thousands of homeowners to lose their homes.

Kamala describes how she became a lawyer and a district attorney.

Reading this for my Wednesday Evening Book Study

This is a very complicated book, but I am starting to see the pattern of all its parts.

So far the book has been scary and depressing. In the next section, I believe the author will lay out a plan of action.

Like many of the essay writers I have read so far, I too grew up in a Nazarene home. My father and mother ministered for more than a half century in the Church of the Nazarene. As a Nazarene preachers' kid, I attended church 3 times a week, was in Caravan, went to Nazarene summer camp and camp meetings, and attended a Nazarene college. I left more for theological and political reasons.

Dr. Gary Morsch begins by explaining how he and others of Heart to Heart International have responded to crises in Liberia and Haiti. His purpose for this book is to inspire his readers to transform their lives by serving others.

I borrowed this book from my pastor, Rev. Dr. Lori Kiely. Our church supports women's right to have an abortion as well as anything to do with a woman's right to make decisions regarding her body.

In chapters 5 & 6, Erdozain traces the rise of the NRA as a lobbying forces that has blocked all meaningful gun control legislation in Congress. The NRA has managed to frame the debate for gun control as an attempt to punish law-abiding citizen from having the means for self-protection from thugs and criminals usually depicted as people of color or foreign.

A novel that switches settings between Paris in 1941 and Paris in 2020. In 1941, a bookstore owner and his wife have to deal with the Nazi occupation of Paris where they get involved in the Resistance. In 2020 a woman visiting Paris from where her grandmother came and opens a bookstore in the same building the previous owners had their bookstore Danger and Romance ahead.

In Chapters 3 & 4, Dominic Erdozain traces the roots of the gun culture in the United States to slave owners who felt they needed guns along with their whips to keep their slaves in order and productive. Erdozain points out that slavery is negation of the idea of government through consent of the governed.
After the Civil War, gun culture was further advanced by 3 men: Teddy Roosevelt, Jackson Turner and Owen Wister.

So far Erdozain has pointed out that the problem is not with "bad guys with a gun", but with good guys who feel a gun is a means to settle perceived wrongs. One statistic has really stood out of me so far is a study in the 1980s "398 gun-related deaths in King County, Washington, only two were justifiable killings of intruders. The other killings were done by "law abiding citizens...."

I am reading this because I go to a church named "Mayflower," and we are thinking about changing the name of our church. I thought it a good idea to read a bit about the people responsible for our name.