News with Nuance Feb. 24, 2023

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

We’re just now starting to try digging out of a snowstorm here in Minnesota, and my kids have been home from school all week due to pre-scheduled days off (Monday-Tuesday) and e-learning due to the snowstorm (but also maybe due to the district’s technology being hacked?), so we aren’t really sure when they can go back to school and we’re kind of just hanging on at this point in the house (and super grateful for heat and the ability to mostly work from home).

That said, I was sad that the blizzard meant the widespread cancellations of Ash Wednesday services this week, including one where I was planning to guest preach. I think we’re going to try and include Ash Wednesday elements next week - and I know my pastoral colleagues and church leaders have been working really hard to figure out how to best keep their churches and themselves safe while still honoring this sacred day. Honestly - it’s just tough. We had a blizzard Christmas Eve, too, and sometimes you just get tired of calling so many audibles.

All that being said - reading the News is always important to give a dose of perspective. My family and I are safe. Our home is still standing and still warm, even if our trash cans might be overflowing. So if you too are experiencing extreme weather, or maybe just the late February itchiness to get to spring, I offer you this newsletter to get outside your own head and read some incredibly compelling and important stories about what’s happening around the world.

The two main stories this week come from Ukraine and Russia. While I haven’t written in News with Nuance as much recently about Putin’s war in Ukraine, Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s onslaught and invasion of Ukraine, and I thought it was important to focus on this story yet again.

My goal in this News with Nuance newsletter is always to tell the stories that might otherwise get lost in a crowded news cycle, and to lift up the voices of people at the center of those stories, who too often otherwise go unheard because they aren’t famous enough or connected enough.

My goal in this newsletter is to bring humanity and human stories back to our broader news stories, and to see how ordinary people are impacted and affected by the headlines we read each day. So that’s what we’ll do this week, with stories from Ukraine, Russia, and Idaho on Christian Nationalism.