Speaking as someone who has done my fair share of pranks—way back in the past, of course—I applaud this initiative and follow-through.

Medium is shifting its publication algorithms. It’s a business, and they have the right to do whatever they want, without explanation.

Sometimes businesses find that shifting their algorithms can significantly change their business success and economic health. Amazon found the right place after leaving its original model of a “bookstore” and changed to a customer fulfillment website, identifying that customers want more than just one thing from one place. Sometimes businesses try a new model and it flops — spectacularly. …

that's wonderful! no one could hope for something more than knowing they are someone who lifts someone else higher.

I remember growing up in the 50s and 60s. There was a bully in the neighborhood who delighted in "running" the kids. Somewhere during that time I realized that the only power a bully has over me is the power I give them.

I stopped allowing that to happen, and worked to depower the bully by influencing others. It worked.

I was raised creedally and emotionally by the Evangelical church, and in the late 60s/early 70s there was an enormous influx of change from the Jesus Movement.

But that got absorbed by the Evangelical Machine, and the bullies I saw…

I’ve struggled for a long time with the idea of race / racism being “real”: I’ve said that it isn’t real, yet race / racism is pervasive and influential, the phlogiston of social interactions.

Someone (Sean Carter--and not that Sean Carter) said something that cleared it up for me: Race isn't real. Neither is money. Yet an imaginary construct is so valuable to us that it controls our lives, our societies, our worth, our histories, and our futures.

Race is simply used by one group with the guns to do a brilliant thing: make the power remain to keep one…

I’ve been in Christian circles since the days when my years were numbered in the single digits. I’ve been through spiritual formation guided by the church and by the religious texts (the “Scriptures,” to use our church language) and that has built me up to be the person that I am.

I’ve been through many changes in my religious experiences and understandings, some which have happened through careful meditation and analysis, some as a result of a personal crisis where what I believed turned out to be wrong on certain essential points.

And I’m working through now how a Christ-follower…

RECENTLY WE’VE SEEN yet another example of suppressed white outrage bursting out because — gosh darn it! — we’re spending way too much time on the things that interest Black people and not the things that interest “regular” people. We’re focusing on Breonna Taylor and George Floyd (identified only with a racist slur) and not on the Things That Matter.

This time it was the daughter-in-law of a white pastor of a successful Evangelical church in the suburbs of a growing city in the Southwest. You can go hunt down the video if you want — I won’t link to…

Hey everyone — it’s Black History Month, and we learn about — and celebrate! — the many people who have contributed from themselves to the betterment of all, and who have largely been neglected by us because they are Black. Black history is America’s history, and Black history should be known.

These are all good things. But celebrating Black History Month is not the end goal here. It is a resource in our lives to understand what it is to be Black in America. …