Montana Nursing Home Closures, the Merchant of Death, and Cameron Bertuzzi

Nursing homes in Montana are closing this year, and I keep hearing about it from Billings Gazette. The latest one in Miles City makes eleven so far in 2022. And presumably the elderly and otherwise incapable of caring for themselves cannot be taken in by family, or else they wouldn't be in nursing homes. Right? Of course right. Don't ask such triggering questions. You should know better. Also, you must celebrate WNBA player Brittney Griner being traded for the Russian "Merchant of Death." If you object, or question, or express disapproval, you run the risk of being called a bigot of any one or more of several varieties. And you don't want that kind of trouble, do you? Oh, while you're at it. Do make sure to mourn that Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema just announced she's leaving the Democratic party and registering as an Independent instead. Shame on her. I'm not sure why, but this is probably a threat to Democracy. Someone should follow her into a bathroom with cameras again and see if they can persuade her to change her mind. It's worth a shot. Thankfully, "The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty," is both merciful to the penitent, and also just toward the stubborn and stiff-necked.  But that brings us to the rather less comfortable question of whether we Americans have become a stiff-necked people. Enter Thomas F. Booher and Brad Littlejohn, writing for The Tulip Driven Life and Ad Fontes, respectively. Again and again, it seems, we come back to this issue of what to do about so-called "Christian nationalism," including the preliminary, and entirely routine, attempts to define both "Christian" and "nationalism" to exclude the unorthodox, and distance ones self from the heterodox.  But let us do also spend some time on the curious case of Cameron Bretuzzi, of Capturing Christianity. Less than a month ago he sat down with Matt Fradd of Pints With Aquinas to discuss his conversion from de facto Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. Other than the architecture and art, what's the draw? Perhaps this: that some people do just want to be told what to do, think, feel, and believe.