Inflation in the United States is down significantly from its recent highs, falling from an annual rate of 9.1% in June 2022 to 2.5% in August 2024. But actual prices remain elevated and, absent a recession, are likely to stay that way.

On average, consumer prices in August 2024 were 22.0% above where they were in January 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled the U.S. economy and much of the rest of American life. Today, 74% of Americans say they are very concerned about the price of food and consumer goods, while 69% say the same about housing costs, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Of course, people don’t live on national averages. They live in particular places and buy particular things, and their experiences of inflation depend greatly on those particulars. The cost of apartments in Atlanta, bananas in Boston and sportswear in Seattle all factor into the national average inflation rate but can – and do – vary considerably from it….

Read it all.

NEW from @pewresearch: While *inflation* has eased, consumer *prices* are still much higher than before the pandemic, especially in certain metro areas. That may be why ~7 in 10 Americans are "very concerned" about prices. https://t.co/tI4k5ZyLU7 pic.twitter.com/sgAe9ziZ6c

— John Gramlich (@johngramlich) October 7, 2024

“When I came to CHBC,” Dever explained, “I was very clear with them that I was happy for every aspect of my public ministry to fail, if necessary, except for the preaching of God’s Word.” The hyperbole was intentional. Dever wanted the church to understand the primacy of the preached Word in the congregation’s life.

“Preaching is central to the pastoral ministry,” Dever explained at the congregational Q&A in 1993. “A lot of churches in America don’t think that. I think they’re wrong.”

Dever began by preaching expositionally through Mark’s Gospel. From his time studying the Puritans, Dever realized that in a “Christian culture,” the way you preach evangelistically to self-conscious Christians who may not be converted is by constantly repeating the same truth in sermons: This is what a Christian is like. The Gospels provided the perfect lens to do so through Jesus’s words.

Read it all.

What are the marks of a faithful pastor?

Preach
Pray
Love
Stay

On the 30th anniversary of Mark Dever's installation as pastor of @CHBCdc, here are some reflections on how these goals have shaped Mark's ministry on Capitol Hill.https://t.co/rhunQTIFQm

— Caleb Morell (@calebmorell) September 25, 2024

The Man Behind the Red Bandana from Drew Gallagher on Vimeo.

On Sept. 11, Mr. Colasanti kissed his wife, Kelly, and children, Cara, 4, and Lauren, 1, before catching an early train to arrive by 7:30 a.m. at Cantor Fitzgerald, where he worked as a bond trader on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

His plan was to get in early so he could return early to his family in Hoboken. Every night, he gave his girls a bath, then tucked them in.

“He put us first always,” Kelly Colasanti said. “He was a great father. He had such a great relationship with both the girls.”

Read it all.

9/11

A day of reflection.
A day of community.
A day of remembrance.

Today marks 23 years since our immeasurable loss.

As an extension of Tribute in Light, for the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we have partnered with the @Sept11Memorial and will be… pic.twitter.com/IvHEq0Pprr

— Luna Park in Coney Island (@LunaParkNYC) September 11, 2024

From there:

I got up and turned on the TV, and there was just this big black hole in the World Trade Center. And there was just smoke billowing out of it. I called my sister Cathy I said, “You might wanna wake up, turn in your TV and take a look at what they’re showing.” The commentator’s saying that it’s an American Airlines plane. And I casually asked Cathy, I said, “Do you know where Betty is?” And she says, “Betty’s supposed to be flying out of Boston.” And I said, “Do you think Betty is on that plane?” We just didn’t know. So I left a phone call on her cellphone, just asking her when she’s landed or anywhere you’re on the ground, to just give us a call and tell us you’re okay. And there was no call from Betty. I called American Airlines, and it was only then that it was confirmed that Betty was on the flight.

I just want to add, through your passing, Betty, our family’s gotten very very close. Dad, who’s quite stoic, doesn’t really say a whole lot, man of the family, one day told us that he cries himself to sleep. Even to this day, he just keeps staying up watching TV, hoping somehow that you’ll reappear. And we’re all still waiting for that phone call from you to tell us that you’re okay. We just miss you a whole lot.

You may find the transcript of Betty Ong’s conversation reporting the hijacking from the American airlines plane here.

Today, we honor the memory of those lost on 9/11, and remember all the heroes who responded that day.#NeverForget pic.twitter.com/YyMGdyaH6U

— City of New York (@nycgov) September 11, 2024

“The cloudless sky filled with coiling black smoke and a blizzard of paper—memos, photographs, stock transactions, insurance policies—which fluttered for miles on a gentle southeasterly breeze, across the East River into Brooklyn. Debris spewed onto the streets of lower Manhattan, which were already covered with bodies. Some of them had been exploded out of the building when the planes hit. A man walked out of the towers carrying someone else’s leg. Jumpers landed on several firemen, killing them instantly.

“The air pulsed with sirens as firehouses and police stations all over the city emptied, sending the rescuers, many of them to their deaths. [FBI agent] Steve Bongardt was running toward the towers, against a stream of people racing in the opposite direction. He heard the boom of the second collision. “There’s a second plane,” someone cried.”

–Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Random House [Vintage Books], 2006), pp.404-405

Never forget.

NYC
DC
Shanksville
USA#NeverForget911 pic.twitter.com/UiWtEffc1R

— Rich Eisen (@richeisen) September 11, 2024

This site is intended as a place to remember and celebrate the lives of those lost on September 11, 2001. It includes Guest Books and profiles for each of those lost.

It is well worth your time to explore it thoroughly today.

The sun rises behind lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center seen from the Empty Sky 9/11 Memorial in Jersey City on the 23rd anniversary of the attacks on the WTC in New York City, Wednesday morning #newyorkcity #nyc #newyork #sunrise #sept11 #NeverForget pic.twitter.com/1q9RhuEWIt

— Gary Hershorn (@GaryHershorn) September 11, 2024

Every weekday in New York City, close to one million bus riders — roughly one out of every two passengers — board without paying. The skipped fares are a crucial and growing loss of revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is under severe financial pressure.

New York’s long-running fare evasion problem, among the worst of any major city in the world, has intensified recently; before the pandemic, only about one in five bus riders skipped the fare.

Yet public officials have done relatively little to collect the lost revenue from bus riders. Instead, they have focused almost exclusively on the subway system, where waves of police officers and private security guards have been deployed to enforce payment, even as fare evasion rates on trains are dwarfed by those on buses.

During the first three months of this year, 48 percent of bus riders did not pay, according to the latest available statistics from the transit authority, while 14 percent of subway riders evaded fares. Roughly twice the number of people ride the city’s subways as ride its buses.

Read it all.

Fare Evasion Surges on N.Y.C. Buses, Where 48% of Riders Fail to Pay – The New York Times https://t.co/VLrgiS8i7o

— Bernadette Hogan (@bern_hogan) August 27, 2024

The 6th Street Bridge in Los Angeles is wired to glow with colorful lights celebrating the city’s spirit. But the bridge, known as the “Ribbon of Light,” goes dark at night now. So do stretches of the busy 405 freeway and dozens of street blocks across the city.

In St. Paul, Minn., a man was recently hit by a car and killed while crossing a street near his home where streetlights had gone out.

And in Las Vegas and surrounding communities, more than 970,000 feet of electrical wiring, the equivalent of 184 miles, have gone missing from streetlights over the past two years.

The lights are going out across American cities, as a result of a brazen and opportunistic type of crime. 

Read it all.

Metal Thieves Are Stripping America’s Cities
Across the country, copper and other valuable materials have been stolen from streetlights, statues and even gravesites, costing millions to repair. https://t.co/vJh8sUvbzp

— Stuart Falk (@stufalk) July 10, 2024

What’s been most interesting to me about Shuttlesworth is how he personified the mixture of Christian orthodoxy and freedom fighting that characterized the primary stream of the Black church’s social action tradition. As a pastor and leader, he called himself a biblicist and an actionist, meaning he had a devout faith in the authority of Scripture while believing right doctrine compelled the Christian into social action.

In February, I preached one of the Black History Month sermons at Zion Baptist Church, a traditional Black church in Cincinnati. After the service, Judge Cheryl Grant, a longtime congregant, thanked me for delving into the legacy of civil rights advocate Fred Shuttlesworth.

Grant had been very close with the Shuttlesworth family after they moved from Birmingham to Cincinnati in 1961, and she was working on a documentary about him with filmmaker Mark Vikram Purushotham and biographer Andrew M. Manis. Her personal testimony about Shuttlesworth and his story of redemptive action has been more than inspiring for me, and now I’d like to share his story with a wider audience.

Shuttlesworth is an unsung hero of the civil rights movement. A cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he faced and ultimately outwitted Birmingham’s infamous commissioner of public safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, to advance racial justice in one of America’s most obstinately segregated environments.

What’s been most interesting to me about Shuttlesworth is how he personified the mixture of Christian orthodoxy and freedom fighting that characterized the primary stream of the Black church’s social action tradition. As a pastor and leader, he called himself a biblicist and an actionist, meaning he had a devout faith in the authority of Scripture while believing right doctrine compelled the Christian into social action.

Read it all.

“The American church’s sins regarding race are a product of its failure to follow the Bible’s mandates, not the consequence of following them too closely.”@JustinEGiboney this Juneteenth: https://t.co/2qk8JhX4QW

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) June 19, 2024

Raquel Campos’ water issues started in January, when her condo building’s manager sent residents a message saying that the city hadn’t delivered water to its cistern. Four days later, taps in the upscale residence went dry.

Campos has lived in the wealthy Polanco neighborhood for 18 years and said she has never experienced water issues like this. Her husband paid to shower at a nearby hotel and she called water delivery companies that were overwhelmed with a sudden deluge of requests from the neighborhood. The water in Campos’ building came back within a few days, but with much lower pressure. Water is now delivered about every two weeks. Each unit has paid to cover the cost, increasing their monthly condo expenses by 30 percent.

Water scarcity has long been an issue in Mexico City, with the brunt of the shortages happening in lower-income neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city center. But recently, residents in some of the city’s wealthier neighborhoods have also been running out of water as hot temperatures, low rainfall and poor infrastructure have converged to create a crisis across the sprawling metropolis.

We’ll always have water, just not enough of it.

Mexico City and millions of its residents could run out of water in weeks

– metropolitan area of 22 million gets @ 1/4 of water from system that’s running dry….
could be unable to provide water by 6/26https://t.co/PXeC4OT0kY

— Jan SMH Harper (@SmhJan) May 29, 2024

The Dean of Ripon, the Very Revd John Dobson, is urging people in the diocese of Leeds to respond to an extended consultation on plans to build an annexe to the cathedral, which is said to be “bursting at the seams”…

Building plans for the renovation — Ripon Cathedral Renewed — have already been approved by Historic England and all the cathedral’s regulators, including the Fabric Advisory Commission. But about 2000 people have signed a petition opposing the annexe.

Ripon Cathedral was the first minster church since the Reformation to be given cathedral status, in 1836. Unlike those that came later, it was never adapted or extended in any way; consequently, it has no lavatories — the cathedral pays the council to keep open the public lavatories across the road in Minster Gardens — no safe space for choristers to change and rehearse, no refectory, no communal meeting space, and no storage space.

Read it all.

The Dean of Ripon, the Very Revd John Dobson, is urging people in the diocese of Leeds to respond to an extended consultation on plans to build an annexe to the cathedral, which is said to be “bursting at the seams” https://t.co/ner0Tgxd03

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 7, 2024

A new study of sea-level rise using detailed data on changes to land elevation found that current scientific models may not accurately capture vulnerabilities in 32 coastal cities in the United States.

The analysis, published Wednesday in Nature, uses satellite imagery to detect sinking and rising land to help paint a more precise picture of exposure to flooding both today and in the future.

Nearly 40 percent of Americans live along the coasts, where subsidence, or sinking land, can add significantly to the threat of sea-level rise. While the Gulf Coast experiences many of the most severe cases of subsidence — parts of Galveston, Texas, and Grand Isle, La., are slumping into the ocean faster than global average sea levels are rising — the trend can be found all along the United States shoreline.

Read it all.

A new study of sinking and rising land along American coasts offers a more specific understanding of potential flooding in 32 cities. https://t.co/ZNU2vVYeDr

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 7, 2024

In his first six months in office last summer, the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, managed to get more than 1,200 homeless people off the streets and into housing. That seemed like a fitting feat for a city that prides itself on its compassion.

It would turn out to be a footnote compared with the humanitarian crisis that Denver would soon face as thousands of migrants flooded the city, many of them bused from the southern border by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and almost all of them in need of shelter and support.

By last month, Denver, a city of 750,000, had received nearly 40,000 migrants, the most per capita of any city in the nation, even as the flow of migrants slowed in the deep chill of winter. And the city has begun to feel the same sort of strains that have confronted New York and Chicago as they contended with their own migrant influxes.

Read it all.

This is such an astonishing figure: Denver, a city of 750,000 people, has received *40,000* migrants.

In roughly proportionate terms, that's as if Philly received 80,000 or Chicago received 140,000 or LA received 200,000 or NY received half a million.https://t.co/wL7N6LgJw1

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) February 13, 2024

As the younger Kelsey steps up to lead McLean Bible Church, he represents an exceptional case in today’s US evangelical landscape—perhaps the most prominent example of a Black minister rising to the top position at a historically white megachurch. But he’s also lived through a contemporary version of the faith and justice fights chronicled by his forebear.

Over Kelsey’s 16 years preaching and pastoring at McLean, he watched the nondenominational congregation and its leadership grow more diverse as DC did. Across five locations, McLean counts members from over a hundred countries now. There were answered prayers, lessons learned, and moments of unity along the way, but it didn’t come easy. His wife remembers that even just a handful of years ago, people were saying Kelsey could never lead the church.

From the start, Kelsey experienced the culture shock of the megachurch setting. He felt the sting of congregants who dismissed Barack Obama’s election to the White House, the pressure of preaching boldly amid a string of high-profile Black deaths and the Black Lives Matter movement, and the tension from internal church conflict spurred on by debates over race and politics during the pandemic.

Read it all.

New at @CTmagazine: I profile @mikekelsey, who will be installed this weekend as lead pastor at @mcleanbible in DC.

The church has gone through a lot over the past few years, and Mike's commissioning represents a new chapter in multiethnic ministry.https://t.co/R1RyaSqgcO

— kate shellnutt (@kateshellnutt) November 30, 2023

It was a phrase he repeated to himself several times each day when his patience started to wane and he could feel the frustration hardening in his chest: They were all doing their best. The police officers whose active patrol force had shrunk by 20 percent to crisis levels because of attrition, recruiting challenges and the impact of calls to defund the police. The people sleeping on sidewalks as rents soared to record highs and shelters filled to capacity. The addicts who could either wait in line at 6 a.m. for the outside chance of a spot in rehab or numb their pain with another fentanyl pill for the going price of 50 cents. They were all suffering together through the morass of a damaged society.

“Our entire first responder system in this city, according to the people who run it, is 20 years behind the ball and critically understaffed,” the mayor said last year at a City Council meeting. The city itself had increasingly turned to the same Band-Aid fix as everyone else, spending more than $4 million a year on private security guards to help protect parks, water treatment facilities, parking garages and city hall.

The booming industry was nobody’s idea of a perfect or comprehensive solution. More than a dozen security guards in Portland had been accused of assault or harassment, and one was convicted of murder earlier this year after fatally shooting a customer outside of a Lowe’s store. Guards in Oregon were sometimes trained and certified in as little as 16 hours, and more than 100 companies operated in downtown Portland on any given night under different policies and company rules.

Echelon was one of the most proactive, with more than 75 guards who patrolled the city 24 hours a day. At least 400 fed-up local businesses paid Echelon a monthly fee to run interference with homeless people by building relationships, offering resources to people with addictions and mental illness, buying their breakfasts, replacing their shoes, reversing their overdoses and de-escalating their episodes of psychosis.

Bock’s previous security job had been at a company that stationed him outside a grocery store as a deterrent to shoplifting and told him to avoid interacting with customers. “A human scarecrow,” was how Bock described that role, so he chose to move to Echelon in 2021 despite the long hours and middle-class pay, because he wanted to be part of the glue that pieced his hometown back together.

Read it all.

"How can any of this be considered normal?" Another stunning @elisaslow story from the front lines of the urban unraveling, on one of the countless private security guards being hired to patrol American cities: https://t.co/kfYK1qGbNa

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) October 2, 2023

The city of El Paso, a West Texas way station long accustomed to migrants arriving from Mexico, has begun to buckle under the pressure of thousands upon thousands of people coming over the border, day after day.

The usual shelters have been filled. So too have the hundreds of hotel rooms wrangled by the city to house migrants. A new city-run shelter opened over the weekend in a recreational center, and rapidly filled all of its roughly 400 beds. Another shelter is planned in a vacant middle school.

Mayor Oscar Leeser said over the weekend that the city had reached a “breaking point” and was no longer able to help all the migrants on its own. He welcomed the buses, chartered by the administration of Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, that once again began carrying hundreds of migrants out of the city to Denver, Chicago or New York. The mayor said he was seeking millions of dollars in additional aid from the Biden administration.

Read it all.

El Paso, Texas, has begun to buckle under the pressure of thousands upon thousands of people coming over the border. Mayor Oscar Leeser said the city reached a “breaking point,” and is seeking millions of dollars in additional aid from the White House. https://t.co/QfxKxft3us

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 27, 2023

The Man Behind the Red Bandana from Drew Gallagher on Vimeo.

On [a] Monday [in September 2003], the last of the 343 firefighters who died on September 11th was buried. Because no remains of Michael Ragusa, age 29, of Engine Company 279, were found and identified, his family placed in his coffin a very small vial of his blood, donated years ago to a bone-marrow clinic. At the funeral service Michael’s mother Dee read an excerpt from her son’s diary on the occasion of the death of a colleague. “It is always sad and tragic when a fellow firefighter dies,” Michael Ragusa wrote, “especially when he is young and had everything to live for.” Indeed. And what a sobering reminder of how many died and the awful circumstances in which they perished that it took until this week to bury the last one.

So here is to the clergy, the ministers, rabbis, imams and others, who have done all these burials and sought to help all these grieving families. And here is to the families who lost loved ones and had to cope with burials in which sometimes they didn’t even have remains of the one who died. And here, too, is to the remarkable ministry of the Emerald Society Pipes and Drums, who played every single service for all 343 firefighters who lost their lives. The Society chose not to end any service at which they played with an up-tempo march until the last firefighter was buried.

On Monday, in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, the Society therefore played “Garry Owen” and “Atholl Highlander,” for the first time since 9/11 as the last firefighter killed on that day was laid in the earth. On the two year anniversary here is to New York, wounded and more sober, but ever hopeful and still marching.

–First published on this blog September 11, 2003

A total of 343 New York fire service personnel died trying to save lives on 9/11. pic.twitter.com/7ziMiFBLnq

— Prof. Frank McDonough (@FXMC1957) September 11, 2023

For the past two and a half years, Oregon has been trying an unusual experiment to stem soaring rates of addiction and overdose deaths. People caught with small amounts of illicit drugs for “personal use,” including fentanyl and methamphetamine, are fined just $100 — a sanction that can be waived if they participate in a drug screening and health assessment. The aim is to reserve prosecutions for large-scale dealers and address addiction primarily as a public health emergency.

When the proposal, known as Measure 110, was approved by nearly 60 percent of Oregon voters in November 2020, the pandemic had already emptied downtown Portland of workers and tourists. But its street population was growing, especially after the anti-police protests that had spread around the country that summer. Within months of the measure taking effect in February 2021, open-air drug use, long in the shadows, burst into full view, with people sitting in circles in parks or leaning against street signs, smoking fentanyl crushed on tinfoil.

Since then, Oregon’s overdose rates have only grown. Now, tents of unhoused people line many sidewalks in Portland. Monthslong waiting lists for treatment continue to lengthen. Some politicians and community groups are calling for Measure 110 to be replaced with tough fentanyl possession laws. Others are pleading to give it more time and resources.

Read it all.

Oregon’s experiment to curb overdoses by decriminalizing small amounts of illicit drugs is in its third year, and life has changed for most everyone in the city of Portland: “At four in the afternoon the streets can feel like dealer central” https://t.co/K6ziIxzbBV

— Jim Russell (@ProducerCities) August 1, 2023

After debate on Charleston City Council began to stir over the next steps for a proposed 8-mile sea wall around the peninsula, city officials presented a timeline for the project, as well as opportunities for negotiation.

Dale Morris, the city’s Chief Resiliency Officer, told members of a newly formed citizen commission July 27 that the city should be finalizing a design agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal partner on the project, in the next few months.

The agreement will dictate some broad priorities for the project, as well as the roles the two government agencies will play in the design process.

Read it all.

After debate on Charleston City Council began to stir over the next steps for a proposed 8-mile sea wall around the peninsula, city officials presented a timeline for the project as well as opportunities for negotiation. https://t.co/g8noOioxeI

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) July 27, 2023

Forbes Health recently compiled a study that analyzed various factors to find the U.S. cities where it’s easiest and hardest to breathe.

In the U.S. alone, 40% of the population lives in areas with poor air quality, according to the 2022 State of the Air report from the American Lung Association. So, which South Carolina city made the cut as one of the most breathable in the U.S.? Charleston earned the ranking of third easiest U.S. city to breathe in, the study shows.

The factors that helped Charleston obtain its ranking include: Ranked 13th in number of vehicle miles driven, Ranked 6th in elevation, and Ranked 28th in population density.

Read it all.

A new study from Forbes Health shows cities where it’s easiest and hardest to breathe in the U.S. https://t.co/gUN5hY2YlE

— The State Newspaper (@thestate) July 12, 2023

Hererwith the accompanying blurb–“Across Chicago’s South Side neighborhood, 10 acres of previously vacant lots are now packed to the brim with flowers, kept blossoming through fully sustainable farms. NBC News’ Shaquille Brewster tells us about the program that’s innovating gardening, while giving back the community.”

In Keller’s case, that meant building a church for New Yorkers that addressed their blunt, exhausting and even cynical concerns about life.

In that first sermon after 9/11, Keller noted that everyone had an opinion about New York City and America as a whole. Some were claiming that “God is punishing us” because of rampant immorality. Others said America had been judged because of social injustice and greed. Instead of blaming the victims, Keller said it was time to ask who would stand their ground and love their neighbors.

“Maybe we are going to have to be a little less concerned about our own careers and more concerned about the community,” he said. “So, let’s enter in. Let’s not just ‘fix it.’ Let’s weep with those who weep.”

Keller was more than aware that he was an outsider when he left the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary near Philadelphia to accept a challenge from the Presbyterian Church in America to start a New York congregation. No one else wanted the job. The bookish preacher understood the depth of the “monolithic public philosophy of secularism” that dominated Manhattan culture, said Tony Carnes, who edits A Journey through NYC Religions’ website.

“The church-planter mantra at that time was that you came to New York to die. … Tim came here to stay,” said Carnes, a longtime member of Redeemer.

Read it all.

A Catholic Cardinal’s Appreciation of Pastor Tim Keller @CardinalDolan https://t.co/6fCbwPYOKv

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) May 30, 2023

A second paradox: Keller was a popular pastor who was allergic to the celebrity he attracted. His books, such as “The Prodigal God” and “The Meaning of Marriage,” among many others, have sold millions of copies. But he was enigmatic and avoided the spotlight. An editor of the Christian magazine World once quipped that he could organize an interview with Keller “as easily as I can set one up with Vladimir Putin.”

Keller “was not that great showman preacher,” says Collin Hansen, editor of the Gospel Coalition, a network of Presbyterian and Reformed churches. He was introverted and cerebral in a way that Billy Graham, for all his strengths, never was. But Keller’s “sense of irony,” his “professorial approach,” appealed to New Yorkers.

Keller insisted that Christian evangelism be winsome, which made him polarizing—perhaps the third paradox. “I fear that anxious evangelicals hope that if they can just be grace-centered enough” and “serve the community, and make clear that they are not Republicans, then unbelievers will turn to Christ,” Kevin DeYoung, a fellow Reformed pastor, recently wrote of Keller’s bent.

It’s a fair point. Keller warned that Christians shouldn’t be politically monolithic. He worried about American evangelicalism’s association with the political right. But there is also the risk, which Keller realized, that Christian believers become entangled with the obsessions of the political left: sexual identity, racial grievance, Marxian redistributionism and so on. Progressive Christianity is the mirror image of the moral majoritarianism of the 1980s, and it will end no better for the church’s public witness.

Read it all.

Timothy J. Keller, pastor, theologian, student of beauty. A valedictory for the single most formative influence of my early adult life. https://t.co/oeYnzIYT9S

— Kate Bachelder Odell (@katebachwsj) May 24, 2023

Timothy Keller, an evangelical minister who started a thriving church in New York City and cultivated a national following with a theology that separated faith from party politics and centered his vision of conservative Christianity in the hubbub of modern life, died May 19 at his home in New York. He was 72.

His death was announced in an email by Redeemer Churches and Ministries, a network of organizations established by Dr. Keller. He was diagnosed in 2020 with pancreatic cancer and had previously been treated for thyroid cancer.

Dr. Keller spent nearly three decades as pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, a congregation he founded in 1989.

Unlike the leaders of many evangelical megachurches, he did not employ Jumbotrons or pop music in his services. He adhered to traditional liturgy and music while peppering his sermons with references to Saint Augustine and ancient Greek, Flannery O’Connor and Woody Allen, J.R.R. Tolkien and “Star Wars.”

Read it all.

Timothy Keller, an evangelical minister who cultivated a national following with a theology that separated faith from party politics and centered his vision of conservative Christianity in the hubbub of modern life, died May 19 in New York. He was 72.https://t.co/3V1q5gtPfi

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 19, 2023

Beloved, impactful, faithful pastor Tim Keller has died at age 72.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer three years ago and continued to write about the gospel, God, heaven, and suffering throughout his treatment.

From @CTmagazine: https://t.co/kIo8RcjeEH

— kate shellnutt (@kateshellnutt) May 19, 2023

I came to Manhattan in 1990 because I was young and ambitious. To my good fortune, a humming economy and effective policing techniques based on the broken-windows theory made it relatively easy for me to start a family and a business here. Today, however, it feels as if the conditions that made New York a destination for businesses and families in the 1990s are no more.

There may be no greater symbol of decay than the ubiquitous stench of marijuana. I smell it when I leave my apartment building at 6:45 a.m. and when I come home at night. As the health of public finance declines in societies, so does private virtue. This is often because enterprising politicians find it easier to use vice as a source of public funding instead of making sober fiscal choices.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

There may be no greater symbol of decay in New York City than the ubiquitous stench of marijuana, writes Jason De Sena Trennerthttps://t.co/eJT4sJfZ7g

— Wall Street Journal Opinion (@WSJopinion) March 8, 2023

Thirty years ago today, terrorists left a bomb weighing more than a half-ton in a rented van parked beneath the World Trade Center, a workplace for tens of thousands. Its smoldering fuse took about 12 minutes to close the gap between the everyday and the horrific.

The lunchtime blast left a crater several stories deep, sent acrid smoke up the center’s north tower and killed six people. More than 1,000 others were injured that day, including a dark-haired trader just yards from the underground detonation.

Eight years later, that same man, Tim Lang, fled Lower Manhattan as terrorists struck the World Trade Center again, this time with jetliners. He saw the first of its two towers buckle and fall in an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, including those dear to him.

Mr. Lang is 69 now, with shock-white hair and photos of grandchildren stored in his smartphone. He describes himself as an unremarkable man. Yet he is also an everyman through-line between two remarkable events: the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which upended world politics, and the bombing of Feb. 26, 1993, which is less indelibly burned into collective memory but stands as ominous prelude.

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Thirty years ago on Sunday, Tim Lang was injured in the first attack on the World Trade Center — an ominous but often overlooked prelude to 9/11.

"Just about everybody forgets about it," he said. But he does not. https://t.co/dGR8lVXEyr

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 26, 2023