Circuit Writer

This week’s column (May 2-8) for The Tahlequah Christian.

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The ongoing news of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to be a source of consternation for me. As I listen to the ever-growing reports – 1,000 barrels per day leaking into the ocean has managed to grow to over 5,000 barrels per day – I am greatly concerned for the long term damage that this disaster will cause. The resulting oil slick, now estimated to be over 130 miles by 70 miles (roughly the size of the state of Delaware), could potentially cause an even greater disaster than the Exxon Valdez incident that coated Alaska’s Prince William Sound with roughly 250,000 barrels of crude oil. continue reading…

Here is my column for the Tahlequah Christian for the week of March 14-20.

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As many may recall, this past weekend I attended the annual meeting of the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies. This gathering includes the regional chapters of several academic associations, such as the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the Association for the Scientific Study of Religion. Now that I’ve thoroughly established the religion “nerd” credentials for this gathering, let me establish my own: I have to admit that I really enjoyed the conference. There was a wide variety of papers presented ranging from the history of the Spiritualist movement at Camp Chesterfield in Indiana to a discussion of the various religious positions on abortion as a paradigm for exploring social and cultural worldviews. So if that run-on sentence doesn’t convince you that I learned something, you’ll just have to take my word that I couldn’t help but be engaged during this conference. Even the breaks for food and drink turned into another opportunity to discuss the most intriguing presentations! continue reading…

Here’s a summary of President Obama’s discussion of energy legislation and climate change in the State of the Union address.

Watch the video here and then click over to Repower America to learn more.

This week I’ll be filling in on the news updates at the Xenia Institute while Barbara, our editorial director, is traveling.  Here’s my first crack at the job, for better or for worse!

The “Obama Effect”

This is such a multi-faceted catch phrase that it’s hard to pin it down.  Whether it relates to the effect Barack Obama may have had on African American test scores, the progression of the civil rights movement, or even the current cultural milieu, these words have been tossed around from the moment Obama became a figure on the national stage.  The latest evolution of the “Obama effect” is to speculate on the foreign policy ramifications of the 44^th president.

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And while you’re at it, if you’d like to check out my other daily news updates, you can link to them all right here:

• News for June 17
• News for June 18
• News for June 19

“God’s Politics: a blog by Jim Wallace and friends” is a ministry of Sojourners, publishers of Sojourners magazine and other resources for the Christian walk.

Congress is hard at work on historic energy and climate change legislation. The House of Representatives plans to vote on a bill in the next few weeks, with the Senate to follow in early fall.

The bill is full of worthwhile provisions: investment in green jobs, modernizing our energy systems, and new pollution regulations. It also contains some less than desirable pieces like plans to give away the majority of pollution credits to industry in the initial years instead of auctioning them to create revenue for clean technology and assisting low-income consumers.

In my five years in Washington I’ve learned that supporting large pieces of legislation can be tricky. At Sojourners, we try to filter all of our policy work through the lens of caring for the most vulnerable, both in our country and around the world…

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Originally from the “Wired Science blog” at Wired.com – News For Your Neurons

Green jobs growth outpaced other-colored job classifications by nearly 250 percent over the last decade, growing 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007, versus 3.7 percent for the overall job market.

There are now 770,000 green jobs spread out among 68,200 businesses, according to the new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. While that’s a tiny slice of the overall American jobs pie, it is already approaching the same scale as the traditional energy sector — coal mining, utilities, big oil — which employs 1.27 million people. As a job creator, it stacks up even better against biotechnology, which (despite a longer history and greater investment) employs only 200,000 people…

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