Safe Haven

I did some sample RCIA teaching last night for some friends. I happened to mention in a humorous way that I still had a favorite Bible verse or theme, if you will, and that that was still OK even though we are Catholic. My theme verse is Romans 5:8: "But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." The way this is worded in the main teaches me that Christ didn't wait around for us to clean ourselves up, or to be religiously acceptable, or appear to have it all together. Rather, he saw us in our very worst moments, and said, "I will die for that person." It's quite dense theologically, the entire chapter, but it is a meditation on the willingness of Christ to do his redeeming work in the face of the worst we could do to him, and the worst we can do to each other, and to ourselves. In any case, a lot of good Christian people get around to knocking popular worship songs for being too individualistic, or too much "Jesus...

In simple terms, Biden is winning. The swing states favored any Democrat not named Hillary Clinton anyway, and Biden has a personal demographic ability to play on the newly-minted Trump turf of PA, WI, and MI. Again, Trump barely won these, up against the most unpopular candidate in US history. Unless Team Trump has a parade of surprises planned until election day, I don't see anything to dent Biden's baseline favorability. You'll notice Biden is near 48 percent in the poll average; that's where a sitting president ought to be. On the other hand, Trump kind of sneaks up. If Team Biden got complacent, they might lose a tight race. But my gut feeling is, they aren't the complacent types. Biden has been overlooked many times; he knows the Trump move. I'm sure many people expected Biden to accept his laurels as Obama's VP, and go away. But he's done his bit for the party; he's done stepping aside. The political scientist Rachel Bitecofer has gained m...