I think this is really just a Texas sorta thing, so if you aren’t a local reader, just know during homecoming football games boyfriends or parents buy their girls a mum to wear. The mums aren’t made out of flowers, but usually a bunch of ribbons and glitter and stuff. In my hometown small cowbells were actually attached which made the hallways between classes sound like a cattle calls.
They look something like this:
What’s crazy is that they get even bigger and more elaborate.
Anywho, on to the story . . .
The Southlake Journal may not be a big newspaper, but a recent article has caused some Texas-sized controversy.
It started with a Nov. 4 column from Dr. Cindy Ryan, a pastor and writer, who tackled the issue of oversized mums and the exorbitant amount of money people are paying for them.
Ryan suggested instead of paying massive sums for those massive mums, the school kids and their parents put the money toward programs that feed the hungry.
Ryan went on to point out, ”Each outrageous mum represented to me 33 hungry children who could be fed for a month.”
And as if she knew what was coming, Ryan tried to head off those florists and mum business owners by suggesting instead of sending an angry letter or e-mail they “get busy designing the cool ribbon or button everyone could wear instead which says, ‘I banned a mum and fed 33 children.’”
Well that very Christian idea lead to some not very Christian responses from readers printed in a Nov. 18 column.
SANTA ANA – A play depicting Jesus as a gay man played to an appreciative audience in a packed church sanctuary tonight while a handful of protesters outside called it blasphemous.
It was the second showing of “Corpus Christi” in Orange County in about two years. The show sparked protests and bomb threats at its 1998 opening at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York.
The play depicts Jesus as a gay man living in 1950s Corpus Christi, Texas, playwright Terrence McNally’s hometown. The cast of 13 portray Jesus and the 12 Apostles.
Cowboys For Jesus Christian Fellowship is a nondenominational church for country and cowboy folks who want to get out of “religion” and into Jesus. It is for people who want to get out of tradition and into a meaningful relationship with Jesus and other people who are not afraid of trusting each other. Our vision is to do exactly what Jesus told us to do: heal the sick, cast out demons, go into all the earth making disciples and baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We accept everyone, but we are not looking for people who regularly attend other churches. We are looking for the ones that do not go to church and do not have anyone to care about them.
A 22-year veteran kindergarten teacher in the Texas Bible Belt could lose her job for refusing, on religious grounds, to give fingerprints under a state law requiring them.
The evangelical Christian, Pam McLaurin, is fighting a looming suspension, claiming that fingerprinting amounts to the “Mark of the Beast,” and hence is a violation of her First Amendment right to practice her religion. Her case is similar to a lawsuit by a group of Michigan farmers, some of them Amish, challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are also the devil’s mark.
The Rev. Kathryn Ransdell recently left the staff of First United Methodist Church of Dallas and moved to Canada. Her husband had found a new job there.
But before she left, Ransdell preached a sermon on health care, and it won first place in a new “health justice” sermon contest put on by Texas Impact.
The Rev. Mary Spradlin of St. Stephen United Methodist Church in Arlington finished second (with an Austin pastor) in a “health justice” sermon contest put on by Texas Impact. She graciously provided a text of the sermon, which you’ll find here.
For an astounding 10-day period, Houston recorded no murders, although that appears to have come to an end with the discovery of a woman’s body north of downtown this morning.
I’m wayyyy too tired to give a review right now, but here are some random thoughts and some pictures I took to hold you over.
RedZone tickets are the bomb. I never had to wait in a line to enter the stadium and we had our own concession and restroom area just outside of our standing area. Worth. Every. Penny.
Muse was the opening act, and they were OK.
WifeGeeding was too sick to go, which made me very, very sad. And since all my in-town friends already had tickets, I was left scrambling trying to find someone that would appreciate this event.
Bono gave a shout out to Tony Romo, Jason Witten, and George W. Bush. But I don’t think Dubya was in attendance. Heck, Bono even gave a shout out to a lot of the surrounding cities like Plano, but he never made it around to Lewisville or Mineral Wells.
I saw an old college friend, the one that just happen to introduce me to U2 and their greatness.
One dude was dragged away from the area, it took four men to pull him away.
The special effects and use of technology was amazing.
Which metropolis has the most intelligent residents? The Daily Beast crunched the data on the brainpower of America’s 55 largest cities, from first-to-worst.
AUSTIN — The Texas Rangers are investigating the shooting death of a cousin of Gov. Rick Perry in a mysterious exchange of gunfire with sheriff’s deputies.
An attorney for Larry Don Wheeler’s estate says the 74-year-old North Texas man was sitting on his backyard deck after dinner Saturday night at his home at a Montague County country club. David Gossom says that’s when sheriff’s deputies responded to a disturbance call.
Montague County District Attorney Jack McGaughey says Wheeler was holding a shotgun and an officer was shot in the hand. No other details have been released, and an autopsy is pending.
Perry’s office wouldn’t elaborate on his relationship with Wheeler, a retired social worker listed as a member of Perry’s 2006 re-election campaign steering committee.
The question of whether a romantic relationship between a judge and prosecutor is unfair won’t be decided by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
The issue in the capital murder case of Charles Dean Hood roiled the legal community last summer, but the Court ruled Wednesday it would not consider the issue because defense attorneys did not raise it initially.
Defense attorney David Dow called the decision by Texas’ highest criminal court “gutless.”
“Let’s open our Bibles,” the veteran Plano ISD teacher tells students daily at two public high schools in the district. And it’s legal for her to do it. A new state law requires that Texas public schools incorporate Bible literacy into the curriculum.
But the law provides no specific guidelines, funding for materials or teacher training. So high schools are left scrambling to figure out what to teach and how to teach it. A handful of North Texas districts are offering an elective class, but most are choosing instead to embed Old and New Testament teachings into current classes.
Such broad parameters leave one of the most controversial topics in public schools virtually unregulated, say religious scholars and confused educators. They warn that the nebulous law may have thwarted its purpose – to examine the Bible’s influence in history and literature.
“Asking a school district to teach a course or include material in a course without providing them any guidance or resources is like sending a teacher into a minefield without a map,” said Mark Chancey, an associate professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University and author of the report “Teaching the Bible in Texas Public Schools.”
A groundswell of parent opposition to President Barack Obama’s speech next week to students on the importance of education has forced many North Texas school districts to question whether to air it live in classrooms.
Obama announced the speech weeks ago, but opposition and concerns spread rapidly Wednesday morning through conservative social networking Web sites and radio talk shows.
By midday, local school districts say, they were inundated with hundreds of phone calls from parents urging them to not show Obama’s speech at school.
Some parents threatened to keep their children home from school if the video was aired.
AUSTIN – Dallas leads the nation in the percentage of teen births that aren’t the mother’s first delivery, a nonpartisan national research group finds in a new report.
Dallas had the highest percentage of teen births that are repeat births – 28 percent – among 73 major U.S. cities in 2006, the latest year for which city-level data are available.
Texas has the highest repeat rate of any state – 23 percent of teen births. And five of the 15 worst-ranked cities are in Texas, according to the group Child Trends, in a report to be released Wednesday.
LUBBOCK — A former art teacher used his West Texas field to carve out a protest about the Obama administration’s proposed overhaul of the health care system.
Sam Bates recently plowed some weeds and left behind the message “Say no to Obama!” that’s best viewed from the air.
Bates said he had some “free time” and wanted to offer his unhappiness with what’s been going on in Washington.
“This is a sign of frustration,” Bates told KCBD-TV on Monday.
“You know, it’s not so much Obama, but just some of the things he’s done recently with the health bill he’s trying to pass through, and it’s just as much Republican and Democrats fault in the House and the Senate that won’t stand up to some of the things. That’s basically what’s frustrated me,” Bates said.
The Obama administration has been pushing its proposal to reshape the $2.5 trillion health system.
Bates said he dug out his message for the benefit of pilots flying in and out of Lubbock.
“I thought, maybe some pilots flying from here to Dallas would get a good chuckle,” he said.
Bates said his friend who is a crop duster helped him put aerial photos of the field on the Internet.
The sign in the lake bed will disappear when the season changes.
“Once winter hits it will kill these weeds, and who knows, maybe next year I’ll have something else,” said Bates.
LUBBOCK — A former art teacher used his West Texas field to carve out a protest about the Obama administration’s proposed overhaul of the health care system.