I think [Borland's middle-class background] definitely plays into this because, first of all, you don’t have somebody in Chris Borland who’s got an entire family or entire community looking at him as if he’s the person who got his lottery ticket punched and now has a responsibility to drag everybody out of poverty. He didn’t have that burden. The other side, too, is that he’s somebody who got his degree from the University of Wisconsin; he’s very serious about politics and history and about trying to apply what he’s learned.
For somebody who has a history degree, I could see why it would be very difficult to stay in the NFL. If you know the history of this league, you know that, yeah, in the present tense you’re going to be famous and you’re going to make bank but the future, odds are, will not be bright for you. It’s the remarkable fact about this league. The way he put it to me is that when you play in the NFL you sacrifice your right to middle age; you go straight from young to old. That’s what Chris Borland chose to avoid.
You wrote in one of your recent posts that the way class plays into the future of football is what should really worry Goodell and the other folks running the league. How so?
This is going to get more difficult for the NFL. Right now, it’s certainly true that a ton of NFL players come from situations of very dire poverty. There is also a group of NFL players who come from more middle-class backgrounds. But if the Chris Borlands and the Russell Wilsons of the world choose not to play, or if their parents choose not to have them play, you’re going to have a league drawn more and more from people who feel a sense of desperation about playing football.
As the sport becomes more and more exclusive, with billion-dollar stadiums and higher ticket prices, you run the risk of this thing becoming — if it’s not there already — just straight-up gladiators. People who have a lot of disposable income can go to the games to watch people who grew up with no disposable income bashing their brains together because they’re the only group in society that’s going to be willing to put themselves in that situation.
She is a very devout Catholic and just laughed off the idea that she would not touch a contraceptive. Bruni is saying that’s always been the real Catholic life in America, and it’s about time that the hierarchy got in touch with that. [Santorum] hardly speaks for the ordinary Catholic. He speaks for the ordinary bishop. Or he did. I don’t think the bishops are going to come flocking around him any more.
Is it realistic to have a universal church — in other words, to have an institution that’s this gigantic, but still trying to be centralized?
The universal church should be all believers in Jesus. In the Gospel of Luke, when the first disciples go out on their own and they come back, Jesus says, Well, how did you do? John says, Terrifically, we were casting out devils and people were listening to the good news, and then we came across someone who was casting out devils in your name. But he wasn’t one of us, so we told him to stop. Jesus said, Why did you do that? If he did it in my name, he’s not against me.
That should be the universal church. Lutherans, Episcopalians, Easterns, are all doing it in the name of Jesus. How can the Catholics say stop, you’re not one of us?
Do you think the Catholic church is getting more Protestant? The Kentucky senator, who said last year that he feels a “deep responsibility” to thwarts the implementation of the agency’s Clean Power Plan, is now reaching “far beyond….[his] official reach and authority” to do so, directly appealing to state governors to refuse to comply with them.
In a letter sent Thursday to the National Governors Association, McConnell wrote that he has “serious legal and policy concerns” regarding the proposed rule, which aims to cut emissions from new coal-fired power plants 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Building off the argument he first laid out in an editorial earlier this month, he claims that the EPA is going far beyond its legal authority, and that the rule is likely to be struck down by the courts.
States that refuse to comply, he asserts, won’t face legal consequences. He does note, though, that if they take that route, “the only recourse for the EPA is to develop and impose its own federal plan for that state,” which doesn’t sound like the best deal for them — but it will, he argues, buy time for the courts and Congress to fight the rule.
McConnell’s highly unusual plan is already attracting a ton of controversy: the New York Times’ editorial board, earlier this month, called it “reckless” and “shocking,” argued that the senator is unfairly blaming President Obama for what in actuality has been a decades-long decline in coal mining jobs in his state, and directly called him out for undermining climate action:
Mr. McConnell’s call to governors to sit on their hands is a travesty of responsible leadership. What he calls “extremism” is the administration’s eminently reasonable goal to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. That pledge is the centerpiece of the climate strategy Mr. Obama hopes to present to the world in Paris in December, at the next climate summit. In that sense, Mr. McConnell’s defiance is more than the usual states’ rights rhetoric that Republicans have used to challenge other initiatives. It is an attack on this country’s credibility as a leader in the fight against climate change.
The White House, in response to McConnell’s letter, didn’t pull any punches, either. “Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges that we face, and instead of offering solutions, Sen. McConnell’s alternative is an inappropriate and unfounded attempt to dictate state decisions,” said White House spokesman Frank Benenati.
“While Sen. McConnell and the other climate deniers in Congress will do everything they can to block or hinder the administration’s progress on climate change, the administration is committed to moving forward to tackle climate change head on because science, history, and the American people are on our side.”
I hope so.
Why?
I’ve had Catholics say to me, “You’re no better than a Protestant.” I say, “Wow, you got me. Good job.” Of course, we’re becoming more Protestant, rather than becoming more Catholic. The abuses that Luther attacked — indulgences, papal wealth, all those things — those were all true. So it was a bad turn for everybody involved to break up in that way, and we should try to heal it. Lots of people are trying.
So, what do you think the Church will look like in a hundred years?