Pope Francis Quote
We are free, with the freedom of Christ. Still, he asks us to examine what is within us – our desires, anxieties, fears and questions – and what takes place all around us – “the signs of the times” – and thus to recognize the paths that lead to complete freedom. “Test everything; hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess 5:21).

Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate (On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World) #168

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Catholic Ecology Center
Come visit the new Catholic Ecology Center! Our new center sits on an amazingly diverse and beautiful 60 acres and is part of a 225 preserve. Enjoy our miles of hiking trails, boardwalk, pond, creeks and the Rubicon River. Come for a retreat, rent our facilities for your next event or join us for some of our great programs happening this winter.

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Housing
There is not a single state, metropolitan area or county in which a full-time minimum wage worker can afford the “fair market rent” for a two-bedroom home, as designated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Opinion: Why building more homes can’t solve the housing affordability problem for the millions who need it most
 
Public Safety and Policing
Many communities across the United States are considering new approaches to public safety that go beyond traditional policing; American Rescue Plan’s federal relief funds can be used to invest in non-police approaches to public safety. 
 
Racial Disparity and Immigration
The proposed Build Back Better legislation would reduce racial disparities. The House Build Back Better (BBB) legislation takes important steps to address racial disparities rooted in this nation’s long history of racism and discrimination, which has created large gaps in both opportunities and outcomes in education, employment, health, and housing. The bill includes a provision to reduce the threat of deportation of immigrants who have been in the U.S. for over a decade.
 
Financial Costs of the proposed Build Back Better Legislation
On the federal budget, Build Back Better’s investments are fiscally sustainable.

The legislation is on track to be fully offset, unlike some other recent pieces of major legislation. The Build Back Better legislation contains revenue increases and spending reductions that fully offset its costs over ten years, according to recent White House estimates. In contrast, both the 2001 and 2017 tax-cut packages significantly increased deficits. The budget resolutions guiding these measures allowed them to increase the deficit, and there was no subsequent effort to pay for these tax-cut packages. More recently, the bipartisan infrastructure package was not fully offset, though it did include some savings.

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What do we really want for Christmas?
In case you haven’t noticed, the culture is on a shopping spree. Various explanations are given to us, one of them being the pent-up demand for stuff because of the pandemic. I don’t know about you, but I am annually offended by the structural economic connection that has been made between the Advent-Christmas cycle and the retail orgy.

Of course, in recent years, we have also become keenly and irreversibly (because once you know, you can’t unknow) aware of the connection among shopping, consumerism, our voracious appetite for stuff, for those packages that show up magically on our porches, and the planetary, existential crises of climate change, destruction of ecosystems, mass extinctions, and more.
         
The pandemic has brought this into sharp relief. We have now become so addicted to online shopping that we have added massive amounts of packaging waste to this already trashed planet – bubble wrap, packaging tape, cardboard boxes (oh, the poor trees), and carbon burned for each mile of transportation from mines to factories to the global supply chain to distribution centers and to our doors. And, speaking of that supply chain, could there be a better image of the scale of consumerism than those tens of thousands of containers piled up on ships and in ports filled with all those consumer goods?!

Read Margaret Swedish's full article here.

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