What's going on everybody got Kyle and Sean here relating sports cards and we are ripping this is one box of tops MLS It's gonna be a new release. This one's gonna be for mr. Greg it Good luck Greg. Let's see what got looking for three autos or relics Yeah, I agree Joe. I really like the product man. It reminds me like dynasty baseball. I really like it But yeah, I was pretty much the same way as Greg once I saw there's no Orlando City on it wasn't Wasn't really much of a chase for me as I was pretty much only looking for Orlando City players, so Yeah, I should have messy next year in renaissance Should be pretty sick Maybe boost gets a sign. Good luck. Good luck We got prodigies rookie of Buddha There's a rookie is her Vada. She's our ito team at New York City. No, let's see something here Say rookie. Um, I think it was a defensive touchdown And Ginko or something Is a Martin native rookie for Orlando City? Kit Kaur is Kara rookie for a lend us I guess all the Orlando City players are gonna be rookies now They didn't happen last year. Yappy and Cesar.  Got you That's what I say in Cara. Like that's what made me say that. I'll say I guess all the That's all the Orlando City players are rookies There's Niko. There's a Kermashi rookie. That one's gonna be the soccer ball relic or soccer ball refractor Ninja Kermashi prodigies steep a Rahu and Alvarez Orlando Otto. Yes, come on. Let's do it Notice of Martinez. There's a rookie Brian Gutierrez to 99 22 under 22 rookie Morris Say rookie Otto gonna be Dylan Barreiro and I'll be rookie for the New England Revolution Start us off on our hits Dylan Barreiro rookie for the ref Shaqiri Shaqiri Wolf there's a gyro Torres Toronto, there's De Petro. There's another soccer ball refractor Columbus crew Team card there. They kicked us out of the Tournament. There's a Killcore Caleb Wiley pitch prodigies Ferrera Pellegrini rail Salt Lake Yeah, I wasn't why I was here working. I didn't see it. I didn't even get to see it Kick horror, honey Muktar And rookie is gonna be Thor Thor for Orlando City It's your boy They knew and got me $600,000 getting people paid right there and you and got me $600,000 Jason Hopkins This one is blue 99 gonna be Luis Arrajo Luis Arrajo Oh, you were there at Exploria. Oh man. Yeah, I'm sure it wasn't the greatest Thomas Williams rookie And Marshall Ruthie Yeah, we were there for the the inter Miami game We grabbed tickets. We didn't know messy wasn't gonna be there, but it's still a really fun game II Dolphin yeah, he was a dolphin doubt say pitch prodigies on the soccer ball relic obed Vargas lucky for Seattle mascara Wagner Kikor Lindley. There's a Darren yappy prodigies rookie Kevin O'Toole What's up Larry? How's things my man? How's things Larry? I hope you're doing well, sir Kikor Ricky Pueg and Rookie, Oh, Neda. There's a avarice. There's a Thor rookie And Goma and can't complain can't complain Larry Chill day Pitch prodigies rookie kustias kut kutias There's a soccer ball of Minnesota United the team card Walker Zimmerman pitch prodigies Jason Russell row Kansas City another team card Sam's having tough day Elendick on the rookie prodigies Sakaris and Jersey is gonna be Raul Rui Diaz on the player-worn Jersey there for Seattle the relic card Sounders Rui Diaz Got a pitch prodigies rookie Thor old farson and Kermeshi. Hey come from 1910. Oh boy It's not good pitch prodigies Sir Wada. You got a soccer ball Ryan Gould Yappy. Oh, you got a new fortnight. Is there an update? Mako Miljevic Larry would be on that tonight. I'll be ready Mclin There's a Christian Fletcher pitch prodigies rookie Kikor Jesus Ferrera Erkan Cara Cara on the rookie That is pretty funny Larry.  You play with us There's a rookie Obed Vargas on the soccer ball relic or refract Jack Mclin rookie me to under 22 Darling to nag me. There's a rookie Gutierrez LAFC team card. There's Torres and Pitch prodigies rookie a Rahu for Orlando City another relic it is gonna be a Jose Cifuentes player-worn memorabilia for LAFC Jose Cifuentes Player-worn for LAFC pitch prodigies rookie Owen Wolf and rookie Roman Salantano on the back Righty there mr. Greg that'll do it for your one box of tops MLS Nothing too crazy in there some good stuff though my man. We'll get that right out to you. Thank you. Thank you, sir


Everybody Matt here for late in sports cards are up in two boxes of 2022 Donner's optic football blasters. These are for Tony Y Good luck Tony My house TJ Watt Bryant that is purple And he's purple shock purple shock rated rookies a mere white. I was pulling in ages Sam Williams Yeah, it shows it on here. It is purple shock. Thanks. Oh Mike white and Traylon Burks rated rookie. There's a purple shock rated rookie Carson strong Devon Lloyd James Cook This rated rookie purple shocks Kwanoo the Kwanoo CD lamb silver and easy E rated rookie All right second blaster Edward up after this and then Terrence followed by Gary John Jason Peter Ben and Clayton March ace legendary logos Kenneth Walker rated rookie Purple shock Cam Taylor Britt rated rookie Hey, you don't want to Adams and Calvin Austin Reese Hall rated rookie purple Bryce Hall rated rookie purple shock My mouth is just protesting that Garrett Wilson and George Carloftus rated rookie purple shock All right last pack St. Kwan Silver Cortland Sutton and Andrew Booth Jr rated rookie that'll do it for your box of sony appreciate it We'll get these right out to you


Hello. Hello. Looks like there might be folks. Let's see. There are a couple of people in the. Or attendees, but none of the other panelists have arrived.  So it's automatically set to record. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. So. I might be the only committee member here tonight. So. Deborah and I talked briefly because she was stuck at her conference and I thought I would probably just. Do some announcements about upcoming events. Cause I know DI has some stuff going on. And. See if anyone wants to make public comment. Okay. So yeah. You do have. Three attendees. So there might be. And someone who might want to make a public comment. I know that Jennifer had told me. That Lissette and Everold were not able to, to make it. Yeah. And then last minute we got a note from Isabella as well. And then I thought it was going to make it back from my conference, but I'm not. All right. So I don't know. I mean, I guess we can. Do the official recording. Thing. Yeah. So we're recording. Yeah. We're recording now. I generally. Automatically set the. Meetings to record. To the cloud automatically. Otherwise. Forget. Wonderful. Do I still have to read the official thing, even though we're technically not meeting. Yeah. I think I would just, I can do a revised version of it. Just so that for the recording purposes. So. I can do that if you like, I have it right in front of me. So. The community safety and social justice committee was scheduled to meet tonight, Wednesday, January 10th. And then we'll open the floor for announcements and public comment. So there are two. Upcoming. Events. Next week. We'll open the floor for announcements and public comment. So there are two. Upcoming. Events. Next week. As part of MLK and national racial healing day. But let me know if I get the details wrong, but the MLK day. Event is at the bank center at 1pm. And there will be a reading of one of Martin Luther King, junior speeches. I don't remember. The name of it off the top of my head, but it's a nice event. There's a reading. Everybody takes turns reading. And then there's a discussion of the event. Or of this content afterwards. And then the. On Tuesday. The national day of racial healing. Is an event that's now in. It's seventh year sponsored by the Kellogg foundation. The event. Is open to all community members. It's an opportunity for community members. To come and share personal narratives, stories about race and racial healing. That the. Those stories will be done in small groups. And will be facilitated by community members and members from town staff. And the event takes place at Crocker farm. And I believe starting at 6pm. And then Thursday night, Deborah. And I are going to speak with the League of Women Voters as part of the Judy Brooks lecture series. So that is virtually from seven to eight. Their website should have the information about the zoom and everything like that. It's the League of Women Voters gamers. And we're going to present a little bit about CSSJC and crests and. Other recommendations of the CSWG. So that is. Again. I was going to say the final two things that I would mention. I'm going to go ahead and. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to say the final two things that I would mention. Are that the public forums for the resident oversight committee are taking place. Actually one is taking place virtually as we speak. And then there are two more events scheduled. One for January 18th and the second one for January 21st. So I'm not going to go into that. I'm not wanting to come out. When is the lunar new year celebration? So that date, it will be in February and it hasn't. Been finalized yet. I think tentatively we're looking at February 17th, but I'm not sure that that's. I'm set in stone yet. Thank you. I just wasn't sure if it was before or after our next meeting. So I'm going to go ahead and do another update in terms of the committee. I'm sorry, my dog is. Playful. Dr. Frickette has given his resignation. So we do. He started his term as a town counselor. So we do have. An additional vacancy on our committee as of right now. So if anybody. If anybody is interested in the committee work, it would be wonderful to have. Applications for new members. And that's through that. You can go to the CSS JC online and there should be a link to the committee community activity form that you have to fill out. But we are, we are still able to maintain a quorum. Just we weren't able to reach it tonight, which is why we are abbreviating our meeting. So. I can't think of any other announcements at this time. I guess. We. Lisette and I were at the. Multilingual Parents Advisory Committee meeting for through the school's last. I think it was just. It was like the week before Christmas break, I think. And so there were a few people that attended that. So we gave a little presentation and had a discussion with some of the families. And learned a little bit about what they do in the schools and some of the events that they're hoping to put on in the springtime. And they have invited us to potentially come back and chat because we do think that could be a good resource for DEI and for crest to have as, you know, reaching out into other communities that might not. Be the traditional communities that the town has. Reached out to in the past. So. There are four attendees. I would like to extend the opportunity to give public comment to anybody who. Would like to give public comment. I have to read the thing. During the public comment period, the chair will recognize members of the public when called on please identify yourself by stating your full name, preferred pronouns and residential address or connection to town. Residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes. At the discretion of the chair based upon the number of people who wish to speak no speaker can see their time. To another speaker, the CSS JC will not engage in dialogue or comment on a matter raised during public comment period. So I have promoted one person in. For public comment. Thank you. Hi there. Hello. Hi. So here's my public comment. I watched your December 13th meeting and I was disturbed and dismayed at something Tim Nelson said. In the meeting in a discussion about whether it should be Amherst police or crest responders who would be sent for a noise complaint. He wondered aloud if college kids quote would listen to an unarmed civilian. The answer was I don't know. But the fact of the question is what bothered me. Questioning whether town residents would comply with the requests of an unarmed civilian implies the assumption that arms are required in order to ensure compliance. And it implies that the police rely on fear and the presence of weapons to get people to comply. It implies that police believe that it's the fact that they have guns, which is the reason people listen to them. It implies that police believe that the police build fear while crest responders build relationships. So Tim said they were starting small by having crests respond to only a small number of categories of calls. And then he heard from CSSGC members that you would like to see this broadened to include noise complaints. And Tim then said they would need to look at the data and see how these calls play out. So I wanted to urge the CSSGC to request or insist or demand that the crest interim leadership established goals on what it would take for them to feel comfortable having crests respond to noise complaints. And if those goals and metrics are achieved in a specific timeframe to go ahead and make that change. Because I feel like if goals and metrics are not established ahead of time, then I fear we'll continue to hear the platitudes and generalities about noise complaints instead of the actual change that CSSGC members have asked for. So I understand you're not having a full meeting tonight and you have many members missing. So I might just attend your next meeting and give the same comment just so that other committee members can hear it. Thank you, Jennifer.  And if you have it written down, you can forward it along. Okay, thank you. See if there are any other hands raised. I do not see any other hands raised at this time. Give it a minute or two. Thank you. Well, I am just percolating on that for a second. Pamela, I know we had asked for some information. I don't know if there's any, anything that you had prepared for tonight or anything that you think would answer some of the questions last night. I can't remember off the top of my head. I think there was some data questions that we'd asked about. So I don't know if that was something that you. I don't. I don't know if that was something that we, the responders are just in week three of, of being on dispatch. So we don't have a lot of data to present at this point. I do see somebody else just joined. Just for the members of the public. We do not have a quorum for our meeting tonight. I am the only committee member who was able to make it due to various emergencies that have come up. We have a period of public comment. So if you have any questions or concerns you want to raise, you can raise your hand and we'll call on you otherwise. Let me look at our calendar. Our next meeting will be on February 14th, which is Valentine's Day. I can send a poll to people if they think that that's not going to work. I don't have any plans in the foreseeable future, but that doesn't mean other people don't. So I can, I can set up. I can send out an email and just see, you know, get the pulse of people. And if we need to decide on a different date that week. Or following date. I see Michael has his hand up. Right. And I, um, I made an effort to promote. I don't know. I don't know. I don't want to give him to a panelist, but it was declined, but I'll try again. Okay. My audible. Yes. I may not be visible. Oh, I am. I didn't decline being a panelist. Just. It was mostly out of modesty and shyness, but, uh, I didn't know quite what that meant. My responsibilities. But anyway. I hear that you do not have a quorum. But I'm sure you have. A quorum. I would like to question my other questions and, um, information questions. And is it possible to ask them? Uh, mostly a semila without a, without a quorum. Uh, so I would say ask away. And if I can answer, if I have the answer, I'm happy to share. It's generally that, um, prohibition is for, uh, members of the.  It doesn't sound like you have covered. I just was wondering a couple of things like how the executive director search is going on, the search for the new Crest members, and if there have been any hires. And I think you already answered how dispatch is working. It's too soon to tell. And then so there were those questions and then I just wanted to see if there was some information I read in the paper about a visit to North Carolina's park program. I think it was called. So I'll take them in turn. So the Crest Responder search has been completed and offers have been extended. And so we anticipate that we'll have three new folks joining the department very soon. I am not a member of the search committee for the director search, but I am aware that they have started their interviewing process. But I don't think they've completed interviewing all of their first round applicants. So I think they're in the midst of that search. And then the final question was about a trip to North Carolina. Yeah, I read that there were some members who were going down to a a similar program. Okay, so the Crest Department applied for and received a small additional grant from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. And that grant will fund three trips so that the new director and responders can travel to do site visits at sites that are fully operational on dispatch. So it will be an opportunity for them to learn firsthand from the from the other organizations. So that's terrific. So when there is a new director, the new director would go on one of these trips with some responders. Right. And it would be like three different sites or three different sites that that have programs that are similar to the program in Amherst. So I believe that it's Raleigh Durham. The other one is the Kahootz program, which I want to say is in Washington, Oregon. Yeah. And then I can't think of the third site. But I think that the the plan will be that those trips will not begin until a new director is appointed. So that's really excellent. I guess that's it. Maybe this was asked once before. Is it a policy of the town or the department or anybody to do? I know I was on the school committee for many years and I think it was always just sort of voluntary. But exit interviews, I know that might have been discussed before. So it's the HR generally handles exit interviews with individuals. I think they extend an invitation. It's and some folks choose to and, you know, some do not. Yeah. All right. Thank you. That's that's all I've got for questions, informational questions. Is there a likelihood you're going to get a quorum tonight, Allegra? No. Oh, it's me. So I think we were just going to have, you know, we made some brief announcements and we were allowing for public comment and then I think that will round out the evening. Yeah. Let's see if I have anything else here. Pamela, were you involved at all in picking these sites or how, how were they picked just out of curiosity? So the sites were chosen based on their similarity to the program here. So in each of those sites, the the responders are part of public safety. So in some communities, responders are part of like mental health or the public health and these sites, they're part of public safety. So that's the what that was a rationale for the choosing those locations to go to places that are that are doing the work, similar to the way that it's supposed to be done in Amherst. Right. Makes sense. I've been in touch with some of the folks over in Northampton and I know they're under the Department of Public Health. Otherwise, there's a lot of similarities in terms of what stage they're at and numbers of responders and so forth. I would just comment that it's really interesting to be talking to the folks in Northampton. So they're in a very similar place in some ways in terms of how far they are along with dispatch. They may not even be as far along as we are with dispatch and they have the same number of responders that one responder leave, they're looking for another one. And what was the other similarity? You know, they're also not not with dispatch much yet, you know, they're and they're not doing disorderly conduct or noise complaints either yet. So they're all similar to where Amherst is at, which I thought was interesting and maybe helpful and maybe helpful to know that we're not out of line. You're not out of line. I say we, but I'm not a we. So just to pass that on was instructive. I mean, it is different, but with some similarities. Thank you for sharing. So I think I'm gonna tentatively say our next meeting will be scheduled for February 14 at 6 30 pending confirmation from other committee members that they would be able to make it. Perhaps I could suggest the week before, which is February 7 as an alternative date. A it's a week earlier since we missed a meeting tonight and be the 14th would be like in the week before vacation week. And sometimes that might get hectic for people. So I would I would offer those two dates as so I'll So Jennifer and I will send out an email tomorrow and see if we can get a response for a quorum on the seven. That would be great. All right. Well, with that said, I guess we'll bid everyone to do. Yes, it's 652 and we're adjourned. Have a great night, everyone. Thank you.


Hey, there, polycasters. Rob here. Welcome back to the show. So today, we're going to complete our three-part series on building accessible components by talking about labeling. Labeling is super important for accessibility because it allows us to tell the user what a control is for. And let me show you an example to explain what I mean by that. So over here, I've got JS bin set up. And I'm just going to start creating a bit of a form element. So I'll drop in an input tag. And you can see, all right, cool, I've got a text input. What am I going to ask the user for, though? Well, I'll add a label. And I'm just going to wrap that label around the input. And I will say, hey, I would like to know the user's shipping address, right? So anyone filling out a form who is a sighted user will be able to go through and see, OK, there's a text input field. There's a label here. I'm assuming these two are associated. And because I have used nice semantic HTML and I've built this relationship between the label element and the input, check out what happens to my screen reader when I interact with this thing. Voice over on Chrome. Jet shipping address, edit text. Nice. So we've created that alternative interface for our users who rely on screen readers because we've built this nice semantic relationship. Now, the tricky bit here is that the label element only works with a handful of tags. So if we're building a custom element, we're going to have to come up with our own way of labeling it and providing that sort of accessible name to our users. So let's go check out the ARIA authoring best practices guide to maybe get some hints on how we could do this. So switching over to that document, I'm going to go to the checkbox section. And if I scroll down to the bottom, the second bullet point here says that the checkbox should have an accessible label preferably provided by a visible label associated using ARIA labeled by. Now, we haven't really talked about ARIA labeled by yet, but now seems like a really great time to cover that topic. So in the world of ARIA, there's really kind of like three ways that we can label something. There's ARIA label, sort of the singular, which is for basically applying a text alternative directly to an element. There's ARIA labeled by where we can actually have another element and sort of reference that element and use that as our label. And then in some instances, we can actually kind of generate a label or a name for an element just based on its content. And we're going to cover all three of those today. So let me start by talking about ARIA label, because that one's pretty easy and straightforward to explain. I'm going to switch over to my code editor. And here is our dash checkbox from the previous episode. And I'm just going to give it an ARIA label attribute. And we'll say the value is going to be sign up. So we're assuming the user checks this checkbox and they're signing up for something. So we switch over to Chrome. We refresh the page. Now, if we look at this checkbox now in the DevTools, we can see that ARIA label has been applied here. And let's check out what happens when I interact with this using my screen reader. Sign up. Uncheck the checkbox. So you heard the screen reader say sign up, uncheck checkbox. It has generated a name based on that ARIA label attribute. But we don't have a visible label on screen. So we could add a visible label on screen using something like a span, but now we're kind of duplicating our work there. Maybe a better approach would be to use something like ARIA labeled by. So let me show you how that works. We'll go back to our code editor. We'll get rid of this ARIA label attribute. I'm going to add a span here. I'll say sign up in that span. And the way ARIA label works is it takes an ID reference to another element to use that as its label. So I'll give span here an ID of like sign up label, something like that. And we'll take our dash checkbox and we'll say ARIA labeled by equals sign up label. So now we've linked these two together by that ID reference. We go back. We refresh the page. You can see the CSS, the height is a little off, right? This thing is not quite centered. That's easy enough to fix. But we do have a visible label on screen now, which is good. And let's look at what happens when we activate our screen reader. Voice over on Chrome, dash check sign up, uncheck checkbox. So you heard there that now it's saying sign up, uncheck checkbox. OK, this is great. This is basically what we want, but it is a little burdensome to have to ask everyone who's using our checkbox to also include a span and create this sort of label linkage between the two. One final approach that we could take is to actually have the checkbox's name generated by its content. Now, this works for smaller elements, a checkbox, a radio button, something like that. It wouldn't work so well for really large elements like an article or some big landmarks like that. But for something really small, a little control, this technique could work. So going back to my code editor, I'm going to get rid of that span. I'm going to get rid of the ARIA labeled by here. So we'll nuke these. And we'll go to our dash checkbox definition. And right now, we're using the host selector to draw a rectangle around our element. And then when it is ARIA checked true, we're putting a little check mark inside of it. And so we're going to need to add a little bit of additional markup. We're going to need to actually have that rectangle and that checkbox kind of over in a container. And then we're going to need to have another element which will act as our label. So I'm going to add a little bit of HTML here. Let's see. So I'll drop in a div. I'll call this firstDiv. Let's see. We'll call it checkboxContainer. That's going to hold our actual check mark. I'm going to make another div here. And we'll call this one, let's see. We'll do checkboxLabel. And then I'm just going to replace the CSS that I have here with some updated CSS, some updated styles. And let's walk through these really quick. So what I've done is I've kept the host style of just making sure this whole element is inline block. The checkboxContainer now has the styles for drawing our rectangle. When the host has already checked applied, the checkboxContainer will actually get the check mark inside of it. And then the checkboxLabel, we're just differentiating it by bumping the font size up a little bit and making sure that both of these are set to vertical align middle so that way the text and the checkbox look nice and centered. All right. The last thing I want to do is inside of this checkbox label, I'm going to add a content element. And what this is going to let me do is, in my index file, inside of dash checkbox, now I can just write my label right inside the element like that. It's going to project that into that element's shadow DOM. And then the browser should be able to compute the element's name or its label based on that content. So let's check that out. We'll go back to Chrome. We'll refresh the page. You can see that the text is a little bit bigger. It's centered now. We turn on our screen reader and let's see what happens. Voice over on Chrome. Sign up. Uncheck checkbox. So there we go. We've got a slightly nicer, easier way to give our user a label. Another really cool thing about this is that since the label is now inside of the element itself, when I click on the label, it also focuses and activates the element. And this is something that you see with sort of native elements, native input, native checkbox, when you associate them with a native label element. So now we've created a very similar association with our custom element here, which is really nice. So that about covers it for today. There's always more to talk about when we touch on accessibility. But hopefully now you have a better sort of foundational understanding of how these things work in the platform. If you have any more questions, though, I'm always happy to answer them. So please leave them for me down below in the comments. Or you can reach me on a social network of your choosing at hashtag ask polymer. As always, thank you so much for watching. And I'll see you next time.


In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the appointment of the Electoral Chief Dennis Kadima has attracted opposition, mainly from religious groups and other opposition parties. Congo's Constitutional Court swore in the Electoral Commission Chief on Tuesday amid controversy over his nomination. The new appointment was confirmed by President Felix Cheshire, but contested by the Catholic Church and Protestants who have a large voting bloc. Opponents fear that Kadima's appointment could strengthen Cheshire's hand in the next election.


Episode 4 came in hot with even more twists, deaths, and reveals, so we'll start with a recap of the major events in this episode, then my review, and then some fan theories regarding the next six episodes of the season. Timestamps are in the pinned comment below, so let's begin with the recap. Episode 4 kicks off with a flashback to Montana leading a midnight aerobics class. Richard Ramirez stops by and kills an aerobic student who was rude to Montana. Montana is into this and asks if he is willing to kill for her again. She then reveals that the groomsman who was killed at Brooke's wedding that Brooke was accused of sleeping with is actually Montana's brother, and Montana believes Brooke is responsible for his death. While tending to Chet's wounds, Trevor and Xavier realize that Blake's car is a way out of the camp, so they split up to find Margaret and Birdie. Margaret finds the two dead Mr. Jingles impersonators, and Trevor tells Margaret that the real Mr. Jingles killed them. Margaret refuses to go to the car with Trevor because she has a gun and believes that she can protect herself. Xavier finds Birdie who doesn't believe Xavier about Mr. Jingles being back until Jingle steps foot into the mess hall himself. Xavier hides under the table, and Birdie bonds with Jingles until Xavier makes his presence known, which causes Jingles to stab Birdie repeatedly and lock Xavier in an oven set to broil. Brooke awakens in a shed after being sedated by Donna. She breaks out, but then activates a booby trap causing her to be stuck in a net. Montana finds Brooke and reveals that she set the traps, and she reveals to Brooke that she is behind Mr. Jingles' escape and his return to Camp Redwood. Donna then leaves Brooke to be killed by Mr. Jingles, then, clinging to life, Birdie frees a severely burned Xavier from the oven. Birdie asks Xavier to finish her off and put her out of her misery, which Xavier reluctantly and painfully does. Montana finds Brooke and tells her that she'll go get help, and meanwhile Margaret has a flashback to the summer of 1970 where Benjamin carves her a wooden bear, revealing a romantic past between the two characters. Benjamin promises that he'd do anything to protect Margaret. Back in 1984, Montana tells Richard where Brooke is, so he goes there, but he is then confronted by Mr. Jingles. So the night stalker in Mr. Jingles' duel, which ends in Richard Ramirez's head being impaled on a tree. At the same time, Richard Ramirez stands Montana, confronts Mr. Jingles' stand Donna, which ends with Montana slashing Donna with a branch and getting away. Mr. Jingles then heads to Margaret's cabin, and he tells her that he's there to finish what he started, to which Margaret responds with revealing that she committed the Camp Redwood murders in 1970 and let Benjamin take the fall. Flashback to 1970, and Benjamin is beaten, electrocuted, and made to believe that he is guilty and detached from reality. Another flashback to just before the murders reveals that Margaret's fellow campers made fun of her, which sparked her to kill them all and cut off all of their ears, including her own.  Chet, Montana, and Trevor hear the gunshots, and Trevor goes to check on Margaret. Trevor sees that Margaret has seemingly killed Jingles, and Margaret then stabs Trevor and removes his ear. Xavier stumbles upon a living Mr. Jingles, who tells Xavier that it was never him who killed the campers. But suddenly, Brooke finds Xavier and Mr. Jingles vanishes, and they then hear an explosion and find Margaret, Chet, and Montana by Blake's burning car, leaving them with no escape once again. Margaret tells the survivors, Chet, Brooke, Montana, and Xavier that Jingles attacked her and killed Trevor. Meanwhile, Donna awakens on the ground of the forest and sees Richard Ramirez levitating and his wounds healing while his eyes turn black, and he seemingly regains life and credits. Alright, that was the recap, now let's proceed with my review. American Horror Story 1984 has easily had some of the most consistent first four episodes of any American Horror Story season. I'm still on board, I'm still fulfilled, and I'm still intrigued. The thing with this season is that it moves so quickly, especially in terms of reveals and deaths. Very rarely this season have I felt like anything was quite like it seems, and even as we are getting loads of confirmation that this is just the case, there's still just enough left unclear to keep me on my feet. So now we know that Nurse Rita is actually Donna, Montana is the reason Richard Ramirez is trying to kill Brooke, Montana is the sister of the group's men that Brooke's husband murdered at their wedding, Margaret did kill the nine victims of the 1970 murders and framed Mr. Jingles, who was then brainwashed into thinking he was guilty. So if you had told me we would know this much by episode four after seeing episode one, I'd be shocked. We still have six episodes left to go, and the possibilities are wide open and I can't wait to see how it turns out as a whole. We also got some major deaths this episode, most notably Trevor, Birdie, and presumably Mr. Jingles himself. Although I doubt we've seen the last of any of our dead friends, but more on that in the theory section. A highlight of this episode for me was Cody Fern as Xavier. They really put that poor character through hell and back this episode. And I think Cody's portrayal of the torture, desperation, and pain that Xavier was subjected to in this episode was very effective. The scene between Birdie and Xavier is one of the highlights of the season for me and I'm glad we haven't killed Xavier off quite yet. They saved this Margaret reveal for a while and the fact that most fan theories after episode one were spot on makes me wonder if it would have been more effective if the reveal occurred earlier in the season and the more shocking Donna and Montana reveals coming afterwards. Although the reveal didn't really vary from the general fan theory consensus, I still think it was very well done and Leslie Grossman kills it in this role and I'm glad we got a Pamela for his killer monologue in this episode and I hope we get to see some more evil Margaret scenes in the future. Trevor's death was surprisingly sad to me because I wasn't quite sold on his character this whole time, but I'm definitely sad he potentially will be gone now. I think the battle between the Night Stalker and Mr. Jingles was very fun and I definitely wasn't expecting Richard Ramirez to get a branch through his face, even though it was reversed by the end of the episode. The ending scene with Richard Ramirez's resurrection I think is a sign of the new direction that the season will be going in, at least for the next couple episodes. The episode confirmed some of our suspicions, explained some motives, killed some heavy hitters while still allowing some new mysterious plot points to develop. So I give episode four titled True Killers eight and a half Montana Dukes out of ten. Be sure to let me know how you'd rate it in the comments below. Now let's get into the theories. Theory number one, everyone who died will return as a ghost. OK, this one might seem obvious based on what we've seen so far, but I want to possibly put it into the context of the season. I think after this episode, there are very few questions we need answered about what's happening at Camp Redwood in 1984. So as evidenced by the episode synopsis for episode five, the next episode will be the final one depicting the first night at Camp Redwood in 1984. I think the remaining survivors will try to escape while the ghosts of those who have died will start returning. They may or may not be in the time warp state like Jonah. But I think Ramirez's resurrection at the end of this episode may have been his transformation from mortal to ghost. And similarly, Mr. Jingles will come back as a ghost after being shot by Margaret, maybe even Birdie, Trevor, Real Rita and Ray may become ghosts. This could lead to the next episode dealing with immortal killers like Jason and Freddy Krueger, as well as dealing with the survivors having to leave their innocent ghost friends to be tortured by the two ghost serial killers for eternity, since their souls are likely bound to Camp Redwood now. This is possibly one of the conclusions to the storyline with the latter half of the season potentially dealing with trying to save the innocent souls trapped at Camp Redwood while also dealing with Brooke's true involvement with Montana's brother and maybe convicting Margaret for her crimes. But more likely episodes six through 10 are going to be something that no one saw coming. But this is surely something to keep in mind. Theory number two, Brooks Killer Past. This one comes from u slash d e r underscore egg boy on Reddit, who says, part of me wants to believe that there has to be more to Brooke than the classic trope of being the final girl. In the last episode, we hear Brooke tell Montana how her jealous and possessive fiance killed himself, his best man and others at the altar because he suspected that she had cheated. A part of me thinks that's all a little too clean and convenient of a backstory, a little too straightforward. I wouldn't at all be surprised that while they seem to be setting her up to be the pure, completely innocent victim of circumstance, that they will turn things on its head a bit later and reveal that she was possibly jealous and possessive the killer at her wedding. This person made some good points, although it's all one big run on sentence, but this is something definitely to keep in mind. And I do think there is more to Brooks' wedding. And I do think that Brooke is not as innocent as she seems. I'm not sure if I would go as far as to say that she killed those people at her wedding because that would be a little bit too similar of a reveal as Margaret's reveal in this episode, but anything is possible. So this very well could be the case. Theory number three, Brooke will become the new Mr. Jingles. This one comes from you slash retro collection 83 on Reddit, who says, so the way things are going, I can see something possibly happening with everyone having a reason to kill someone else. It's going to be a bloodbath. So far, the season has taken place during one night and it's possible it will continue that way based on previews. A lot of people say they think Brooke will be the final girl and that's still possible, but with a twist.  I can see Brooke fighting off attacks and surviving while everyone kills each other. This comes to an end when the morning comes and the bus full of kids rolls up and they see Brooke standing there covered in blood, possibly with a weapon freaking out. The cops come and everyone thinks she killed everyone. Based on her story so far, she has no friends or family close, so she will have no support when she is blamed for the night's events. It is the anniversary of the original massacre, so it will look even worse. She becomes the new Jingles in a way. So I wanted to talk about this theory because it's been a common theme that they've made sure that we understand the season that no one ever believes Brooke. No one believes her wedding story. No one believes her when she tells them about the phone call. No one believes her when she sees Mr. Jingles and so on and so forth. So it would be really interesting to see that it turns out that she gets blamed for all the events that are happening at Camp Redwood in 1984. This could be very interesting. It could be almost like the reverse Lee Harris where everyone thinks she's guilty but she's really innocent. I think that would be a really ironic way to end Brooke's character arc and it could be a really cool thing for this season to deliver and like I said, anything is possible so these theories are not too outlandish to me. So yeah, those are all my theories for this episode. Be sure to let me know all yours in the comments below. Let me know what you thought of this episode. Make sure you subscribe to give this video a like and I'll see you next week with episode five.


Ukraine strengthens defences of Bakhmut. Wagner Group is dissatisfied. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky held a meeting of the General Staff. Zelensky asked Commander-in-Chief Valery Zalozhnyi and the head of the operational strategic troop group Alexander Sirsky about future activities in the direction of Bakhmut. Both men expressed their support for the continuation of the defense operation and the further strengthening of Ukraine's positions in Bakhmut. At the meeting a decision was made to strengthen the defense of Bakhmut. At this time the head of Russia's Wagner mercenary force warned that Russia's position around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut was in peril unless his troops got ammunition. Prigozin said Russia's front lines near Bakhmut would or could collapse if his forces did not receive the ammunition promised by Moscow in February. For now we are trying to figure out the reason. Is it just ordinary bureaucracy or a betrayal? Prigozin referring to the absence of ammunition said in his press service telegram channel. The mercenary chief regularly criticizes Russia's defense chiefs and top generals. Last month he accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and others of treason for withholding supplies of munitions to his men. In a nearly four minute video published on the Wagner Orchestra telegram channel on Saturday Prigozin said his troops were worried that the government wanted to set them up as possible scapegoats if Russia lost the war. If Wagner retreats from Bakhmut now the whole front will collapse. Prigozin said the situation will not be sweet for all military formations protecting Russian interests.


Hello everyone and welcome to this virtual author event. I'm Carl Stotzman, Director of Library Services at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. Here with me helping to host the event are Brandon Board, Information Services and Online Learning Librarian and on Tennis Attang Bookstore Manager. Our library and bookstore team has traditionally hosted book signings for new books related to AMBS. Since we couldn't do this in person, we decided to do it on Zoom instead. So you're living with us on an experiment, so we thank you for your patience with us. Before we get started, let's just quickly go over the schedule for today's event. I'll introduce our guests, then we'll have some time for the authors to discuss their work on the book. After that, we'll have some time for questions you might have for our guests and you'll want to stick around until the end of the meeting doing a drawing for some really cool dance books. So one note is that we are recording this, but only the presenters appearing on the screen will be recorded. So that's how we're going to work with that. And yeah, so with that, let's begin. Today, it's our pleasure to have with us Dr. Juan Francisco Martinez and Dr. Jamie Pitts, authors of the new book, What is God's Mission in the World and How Do We Join It? Harold Press, 2020, part of the series, The Jesus Way, Small Books of Radical Faith. Dr. Martinez is president of Centro Hispano de Estudios Teológicos in Compton, California. Previously, he was professor of Hispanic Studies and Pastoral Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary and Rector of the Latin American Anabaptist Seminary or CEMILLA in Guatemala City. Dr. Pitts is associate professor of Anabaptist Studies, director of the Institute of Mennonite Studies and editor of the Anabaptist Witness Journal at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. My first question today is for both Dr. Martinez and Dr. Pitts. Please tell us a bit of the story of how this book came to be and how you got involved with the project. Well, I became involved this when I was invited. I have been a professor of Anabaptist Studies and of Mission Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. After that, I was invited to be president of the Theological Seminary at Ashland Seminary. I got a stroke and that's why I can't talk. And then I ended up back in LA and I had this book I started and I needed to find someone to help me write the book. And with the people at Herald Press, we made contact with Jamie Pitts and he had been a student at Fuller Theological Seminary and I thought he would be a very great person to help me through the book. So that's how I got. I realized that the book was or the series was part of what Herald Press had done in the 1970s and 1980s with Jay C. Wenger's books. He had done a series of small books and we thought this was a very good idea and I thought they were and that's how we ended up here. Yeah, for my part I think that pretty much covers it, but just to say that I was Juan's student at Fuller and so it was an incredible honor to receive the invitation to accompany him in finishing this book project. And what I received from Juan was essentially a well-developed manuscript that I was able to essentially flesh out and then after we had further conversation about the nature and purpose of the book, Juan gave me essentially a freer editorial hand in kind of setting the tone for some of the overall presentation of the book. So what you have as Juan has just said something that he started but that I came on to and we feel like represents us together as co-authors. Wonderful. That's an interesting story. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. My second question is also for both of you. Each of you brings diverse experiences and perspectives to the topic of God's mission in the world and each of you has a distinct passion for Latin American Anabaptism. I'm wondering how did these diverse experiences and perspectives inform your own conversation about this topic and how does the specific context of Latin American Anabaptism influence your understanding of missional theology? Go ahead Jimmy. Well that's a big question. I would say in terms of Latin America, well you know as I mentioned a moment ago Juan was really my first teacher of Anabaptism and he brought a explicitly Latin American perspective to the history and theology of Anabaptism and what he taught me has you know essentially permanently shaped my understanding of the tradition, what it means to be a practicing Anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian and you know I'll just say one of the one aspect of that that really stuck with me was the economic character of Anabaptism historically and in the present that is often downplayed by Mennonites in North America or Europe. We talk about sometimes about peace in a more or less vague way but what I learned from Juan was that Anabaptists throughout the centuries and in Latin America and elsewhere have really seen economic sharing at the heart of the gospel and critique of economic exploitation as a necessary correlate of the gospel and so yeah and I'll say friends of mine in Latin America today continue to challenge me in that way their analysis, their witness, their hopes for a an Anabaptist global Anabaptist community in which we can face our economic divisions as a central part of our witness continues to really challenge me in shape how I understand mission. My Anabaptism formation in Central America came came through Simea and the reality is that in Central America where where Simea is located the the students find it hard to understand Anabaptism without putting peace economic justice and the Holy Spirit and I think the Holy Spirit was very challenging in that here were people that that understood that the Holy Spirit was what gave us the world and in the way we were looking at the world and so they were very they they also spoke of the Anabaptist mission and of how they were they were preaching that so that so that their Anabaptism was economic justice and peace but it also called people to focus on the reality of who the Holy Spirit was in their in their life and so you would be in churches where they would preach strongly an Anabaptist message but they would also call people to Jesus Christ and then they would go out and march for justice or they would go out and work with the poor or they would go out and and work against the government and they all these things were were were linked together and I think that that's this part of what Anabaptism is from the from the 16th century it was preaching teaching and and acting and I think that's what what I was taught by them by those in the carawa by those in in Honduras by those in Guatemala they were they were linking those things and I think they were they were actually doing what our Anabaptist ancestors do did and so that's where that's where from them that I saw wow this would be quite this would be quite the shape of Anabaptism where we don't have to we don't have to separate those where here in the United States we separated the you know the the Anabaptism from the the Holy Spirit or we separated from the reality of the gospel and from calling people to the gospel and so that was that was what I taught in in the class there in in full of theological seminary and that was strongly influenced by those that I saw them living it out that's such a powerful testimony from both of you of the impact of lived reality on academic theology my next question is for Dr. Martinez your work on intercultural understanding is very deep a lot of your books have dealt with that how does an intercultural perspective enhance our ability to participate in God's mission in the world well I think that if we look at that if we think about how we cross those boundaries the the gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to all all people to to a revelation seven nine and ten to be to be those who will work out the reality of being the people of God and again I saw that in in Central America I saw that when the the mosquito people from from the coast of Honduras were working with the the people from the from the from those who were Spanish Spanish oriented who who were not from Africa and how they were walking in peace and how they were working toward economic justice and and the in in Guatemala the indigenous people and the and the Spanish people and how the the how again walking in economic justice peace because that's what we need to deal with and that's why the the issues of multiculturalism is also part of what it is we would we'd be preaching about and we would working toward great thank you so much I really appreciate that deeper view of that my next question is for Dr. Pitts you have indicated a focus on post-colonial mission and new mythology how does your how does undoing colonialism open our eyes to the work of the Holy Spirit in the world thanks Carl I would say that it's the spirit who opens our eyes and the spirit one of the roles of the spirit one of the things the spirit does as we learn from the Bible is to lead us into repentance and so the spirit leads us to tell the truth about the history of Christianity colonialism uh it's certainly a complex story it's there's not a one-to-one identification across the world between the church and colonial powers sometimes there were tension between the church and colonial powers between missionaries and colonial administrators often Christianity was and I'll say in the present tense is an instrument of colonization of exploiting exploiting people and resources land and so telling the truth about that history is I think a gift from the Holy Spirit and only through truth-selling will we be freed as part of the freedom that the spirit gives so when we talk about reconciliation a post-colonial reconciliation that has to come through repentance through seeking repair seeking justice reconciliation is the the kind of long-term goal maybe even in many cases eschatological goal by which I mean we have to trust God's time beyond human reckoning the work that we have through the spirit in the spirit is is doing that work of telling the truth and seeking justice in the wake of the truths that are uncovered and you know I would say the spirit is a healer the spirit is a comforter and so uh for those who have been identified with the perpetrators of colonial violence we also are visited by the healing and comforting spirit so the work that the spirit has for us is liberating and as many have said you know our our liberation is bound up with the liberation of those who have been deeply deeply wounded and have been on the receiving end of colonization so you know as a question of Christian mission I think it's it's along with everything I've been saying it's it's a matter of the church's integrity and the church's moral integrity is deeply called into question by the history of Christian participation and leadership in many cases of uh of colonization so if we're going to have integrity in our witness uh we have to trust the spirit to take us through that history not kind of around it essentially thank you so much that's really helpful my next question is once again for both of you I'm wondering about the the book that you've created together with these different influences who do you hope will read the book um what impact do you hope it will have on the church and beyond well I hope that Mennonite youth here in uh in uh North America and in Europe in other words those people who have been formed by that uh what Jamie uh spoke of and that they they uh also have been uh have asked questions about the mission and I hope that those that we have answered some of those questions so that they will not no longer be uh running away from the mission but it will gladly uh take the mission on and so that's that's who I hope and I think that that the the books the series uh wants to speak to that people to those in Mennonite youth who will be who will ask the questions about them about the church's mission and teaching at the seminary in Elkhart for almost a decade now I have seen these youth Mennonites growing up seeking to understand God's call in their lives in their 20s and 30s or sometimes much later coming to the seminary for studies and holding these questions often a deep suspicion about the language of mission and so part of why I was excited to partner with Juan in this book was to to offer an account of Christian mission that tried to take seriously that suspicion that didn't try to say oh no no no you're you're misled everything is fine uh to say no you're right to be concerned about as I was just discussing the colonial character of much of the history of Christian mission uh the imperial character and your right to think that Mennonites uh descended those Mennonites and other Anabaptists who trace their heritage back to Europe uh are part of that story in in ways that deserve some hard truth telling as well so uh what we were trying to do is is give an account offer a picture of mission uh that would be compelling that would say you know if you if you care about the church if you're asking these questions at all you you care about mission you want to figure out you know uh what is God doing and how do we get involved in to ask that question with integrity uh and so I felt like you know and when I began to read what Juan had already put together and for this book I thought wow you know I really am his student because so much of the emphasis that he had already planned for the book before I even came up came on to the project really resonated with my own sense of what it would mean to uh paint a picture of mission that was compelling that actually had integrity that faced the hard questions without trying to kind of dodge them and say oh you know uh just tell people like Jesus everything's gonna be fine you know there's nothing there's nothing to worry about here but again to really take seriously the complexity and even the the stuff that we need to repent of when we talk about mission great well I'm hoping hoping that this helps spread the word to get some of these people involved in reading this book I'm pretty excited about it myself we have time for one more question before we open it up to the audience to put things in the q&a box so if the audience folks want to start adding questions so the q&a will um take those pretty soon um but I'm wondering um maybe either one of you can address this um what sources have you relied on for your understanding of missional theology and what books have been influential to you real realistically I need to say a lot of what I'm saying now is really uh john driver john driver has uh has really challenged me he taught at similia we published several of his books in in spanish and he really uh focused me toward this this issue and he was the person that uh also challenged the what are called in in latin america the radical evangelicals and so I I liked what he said and as you will notice in the book uh he is he is uh quoted oftenly uh and I would invite the the people that read read our book to read him to read his his uh his uh the way he read the church the way he read mission the way that he read uh uh the um um sorry um the atonement all of these uh he he put some very good things and he really worked with uh anabaptism and I don't see that kind of um is that kind of challenge uh and I would he would say the ones that would read our book I would challenge them to read uh john driver and like I said he he had a lot of influence on what would it be called the radical evangelicals uh rena padilla some ales covar uh some of these people um and so that's that's where I drew uh drew from um myself great that's very interesting thank you so much we have a lot of john drivers work in our library and I think you're asking me that question as well cross so I'll just say quickly uh the um one voice that's been really important for me over the last few years has been Vincent Harding the uh black civil rights leader who was involved with Mennonites as a pastor and Mennonite Central Committee worker for about 10 years in the late 50s and early 60s um his challenge to Mennonites uh related to politics and race um I think it still really needs to be addressed his probably the best access into his thought as it relates to Mennonites especially is a little book uh interview that Joanna Schenck did uh with Vincent Harding that was published called the movement makes us human that came out just a couple years ago and particularly at the end he has some great challenging lines um directly towards Mennonites that have shaped my thought a lot and I'll just say quickly the other another source I so I think part of the reason why I was invited into this project is because I edit Anabaptist Witness which is a journal uh focused on Anabaptist and Mennonite churches and mission and uh as part of that project for the last that I've been working on for the past seven years or so uh one of our book review editors Steve Heinrichs is the director of indigenous relations for Mennonite Church Canada and his influence on the reviews he brings to the journal the kinds of conversations he urges me to participate in and to use a journal to address uh has been extremely helpful in shaping my thought about the need to to think about these matters and face these matters in my teaching and my theology and my life so we do have a couple of questions coming into the chat um a reminder that you can also post your questions in the q and a um section uh to help us keep track of them um the first question coming in here um is can you give some examples of what healthy repentance might look like in the Mennonite church today? I would look towards Central America where people um practice what we what we have uh shaped and where some um Mennonite missionaries have been shaped by how they preached and so that some of the some of those missionaries have been shaped by what they saw so they preached and they they acted out uh the Mennonite preach the Mennonite preaching that they did and so there would be some some good um a shaping of of how we we would do that uh I think in in uh Guatemala in Honduras in in and even in place like uh Nicaragua where some of the um Mennonite conservatives had even lived out what they were what they were you know the conservative Mennonites worked in Guatemala and they were really shaped by what they by in Nicaragua sorry and they were really shaped by what they saw and so that it wasn't just the the the uh more uh radical evangelical uh Mennonites it was even the those who shaped uh they were they were shaped by what they saw in like said in Nicaragua in Belize and I was going wow you know here were people that were shaped by the conservative a uh Anabaptism or the conservative Mennonite uh Ism but here they they they were uh shaped by doing what they were what they were preaching and I was going wow uh and so I would I would look toward those kinds of people and there were others I mean there were some of these people who work in places like Africa and places that they weren't it was I just used Central America because I was shaped by it but I would I would uh look toward those places yeah and I would say quickly um I'm thinking of examples uh like the Doctrine and Discovery Working Group uh here in the US thinking about that question very hard includes indigenous Mennonites um speaking into the the process uh and I'm seeing my father has asked a similar question here so I'm kind of as I think about that question I'm sort of bleeding over into uh like this question that Doug Doug raised but um so I guess if I can take up that question Carl if you'll permit me yeah first of all say hello to my father it's great to have you on here um and you know what is what's the next step for the church you know after colonialism or once at least the I would say ongoing reality of colonialism is recognized um you know one for those again as I put it earlier for those who have been kind of benefited from the colonial system or participated in that um in a more intense way uh people such as myself I would say you know one of the first steps is to to try to listen to people have been deeply affected by negatively by by the their experience of colonization and to try to um hear what it means to accompany them in ways that they find appropriate and this is this is a aspect we emphasize in the book um and this is something that I learned from a post-colonial biblical scholar um whose name is escaping me now but if I think of it I'll I'll say it but uh who who challenged me in thinking about how we how we how we read the book of acts and the way that the spirit led the early Christians to cross boundaries and this scholar said to me well given the history of colonization do we want to always just be emphasizing crossing boundaries and it occurred to me reading the book of acts that there's times when the spirit says no and sometimes I think as Christians we we forget that the spirit can say no to us and there's cases you know recently even in the pandemic conditions where missionaries have insisted on trying to visit communities uh relatively isolated indigenous communities um knowing well maybe denying that there's any danger of COVID or other diseases uh but insisting well the spirit is leading me across this boundary uh incapable of hearing the spirits no and so this is where I think we really need to listen to people who have been most you know most detrimentally affected by colonization and say what what are your boundaries and you know what does it mean what from your perspective what does it mean to witness to the gospel um whether you're Christian or not uh what what does our what might our witness what shape might our witness take and I I say that with specific reference here in Elkhart um in Potawatomi Potawatomi territory so um in dialoguing with uh the Pockegan band of Potawatomi local Potawatomi group um one of the things that at least some voices from that community have said um is you know what churches can do now the two what uh one of the things I've heard is two you know if churches want to get involved there's two things you can do one is define groups that are really struggling economically and try to give to those groups so the Pockegan band is doing well financially but the citizen band of Potawatomi who are removed uh from this area to Kansas and then Oklahoma um are struggling financially um the Pockegan band has also said uh get involved in land restoration and ecological restoration in your area that's an if you if you care about repair after colonization ecological restoration is one of the most important things you can do so that's just an example in my kind of listening to indigenous peoples some of the some of what I've heard um as a step forward great thank you so much uh to both of you for kind of making this practical um as well um I'm um wondering if uh one of you can um just attend to um or maybe both of you um what is maybe a primary beneficial outcome of the way Christians have conducted mission in the past um we've talked a little bit about some of the dangers of colonialism and so forth um but yeah what are some good fruits that have come out of that work well I I think we we would go back as Jamie said to the people that uh received that word and ask them ask the uh the indigenous people ask the the people in in Guatemala as the people a so that we will it's not ours to say it's not ours to say boy boy look at what we did it's ours to say look at what the spirit did and look at how the spirit worked in these people and those that that testimony is theirs to give and so ask those people and say what what did the spirit do in your in in your community in your uh tribe in all of these peoples and let them answer the question uh in our in in uh in our churches uh Latino churches we give uh testimonies how has the spirit worked in your life and that's what we need to ask them it's not ours to say it's theirs to say and when we give them this we give them the uh the uh the pulpit if you will and let them say this is how the Holy Spirit it worked in our life and this is why we can give this this testimony because it was the Holy Spirit and this is why we can call you and that that's hard for us to hurt to listen to their call to say we we need to this this and this because the Holy Spirit it worked in our in our lives in our culture in our being and so because of that we can give we can give a call to you yeah that's a really profound way to say it um I think I would just in kind of elaborating or adding to that um the this one of the stories we tell in the book is a story comes out of Chapel Hill Mennonite Church just a sanctuary case uh Rosa Carmen Ortes excuse me Rosa del Carmen Ortes Cruz took sanctuary um in Chapel Hill Mennonite Church for um many months and the way that we tried to tell that story was not in the first place look at this great church that responded to the Holy Spirit and offer sanctuary although that's part of the story but we also told it we tried to focus on Rosa's uh agency her her role in the story as someone who um as a you know as a representation of Christ came to the church and asked them if they would be willing to bear witness to Christ um and so this is a this kind of an example of how um if we take this if we take our focus off of the kind of institutional center for as important as that can be to how is the spirit uh working through people like um an undocumented immigrant who uh who needs refuge uh what is her testimony what can we learn from her what can we learn from um indigenous communities this one was saying. Amen there's a lot there uh to inspire us to ask good questions um and hear testimonies that's really really important um we are at about the time when we're going to have our prize drawing and then we do have some other things floating into our q and a here uh so after our prize drawing um we will take some more time for some questions up until we get to the hour mark so we haven't forgotten about your questions and we'll still have a little more time for that after we do our prizes so I'm going to turn it over to Brandon for that portion of our program. Okay thanks Carl um well yeah just as sort of a thank you for everyone uh joining us this afternoon or or morning wherever it is uh whatever time it is for you wherever you are um we're going to do a little uh prize drawing we have three prizes that we're going to give away today so uh each one of the winners will will get a free copy of the book um unless if you already have a copy of the book that that you've purchased for yourself will give you another one from the from the bookstore so um and then uh third prize will be an ambs coffee mug second prize will be a travel tumbler for your coffee and then first prize will be a lightweight zip up hoodie so um I've got let me see I'm gonna share my screen here oh wait before I do that I will pause the okay all right and Carl if I could add one small comment to Juan's comments earlier about where you see repentance in the Mennonite church I just have to say because Sarah Winger Schenck is on here I have to give some uh support to her chapter in the liberating the politics of Jesus William which outlines her leadership of the seminary's response to uh John Howard Yoder's sexual abuse is serial sexual abuse and I say the seminary's response you know 30 years later unfortunately but uh Sarah led a very powerful experience of truth telling and repentance um that I do think uh is a model for many of us to continue learning from and she as I say writes about it in the book liberating the politics of Jesus thank you it's a plug for another good book um so you'll have more than your share of reading cut out for you if you're um on this call um so yeah um we do have another question in the q and a here um and it goes like this uh Lynette and young latinas from our congregation will leave for Central America in a month with the salt mcc program what would you say to her how can she prepare and are there some particular opportunities for a latina you already prepared if you're going back to Central America a look watch listen to the people there one of the one of the things that are uh one one of the problems is that if we for example if we are from Central America and we're here we will think that we have the right questions or that we're going to be the right and the right uh uh answers for the place where we're going if you will go with the uh with uh the saying I will listen to the people there I will watch what they will will do and I will listen to the kinds of questions that we will ask who we are asking here I will listen to their testimony and that will give you a shape of a way that you will be able to bring that back to the to North America and that you will allow the Holy Spirit to help you by by shaping you by shaping you for uh for the questions but but by shaping you by the answers we are not we are not shaped by what happens in North America let us be shaped by what happened in Central America and so I would ask you that uh go with that sense go there to learn from them and learn what they will teach you and uh that's what we that's what I would ask for anyone that would go back to the question to uh their answer to their ancestors country listen for what God has been doing here and so that when you listen to that you will be shaped by it and when you're shaped by it then you will be able to come back to North America and bring that uh that sense to North America and in fact I want a lot of Latino kids to go back to the countries to go back to the countries from where their parents came from to watch and and sense what is going on there and not to go as missionaries as the people that will be uh preaching over there but listen to what God is doing there and then you will have something to preach here amen I'll just add that I think um you know at the seminary we've done a lot of work with the intercultural development inventory tool and that has been a powerful tool for me coming to understand more deeply really the kind of dance that all of us no matter where we're from have to engage in around similarity and difference there you know we have powerful motivation especially when we cross a cultural boundary to uh to minimize the differences that are there um and there's other powerful forces uh that some of us are more susceptible to to really exaggerate the differences and to go into what intercultural theorists call polarization that say there's a kind of absolute difference here and one culture way of doing things is better just inherently better than the other and so the kind of journey or dance beyond these minimization and polarization uh I think is a lifelong journey but someone like it's described in this question who will have kind of both insider and outsider status will have both real gifts of an opportunity to um explore some similarities to learn more about herself and potentially you know I don't know where her ancestors would be from but um to learn more about Latin American culture that she shares to some degree but also as Juan is describing to really to to not just assume similarity but to be being a posture of learning and listening to to learn from the differences and to again not once we learn from those that learn about those differences to romanticize that's another tendency to romanticize and then we do kind of what they call reverse polarization oh the US is US culture is bad this Central American culture is better but to really see the integrity of these different ways of life and to appreciate them in their integrity appreciate how again we can relate in positive ways but also the differences that remain even as we learn more become friends with people in these different contexts uh are changed by these contexts not to erase the difference either um and that's you know we talk a lot in the book about a form of incarnational mission that avoids gentrification that's really what we're talking about how do you go how do you accompany people that are different from you in mission learning from them taking on in appropriate ways uh their form of life respecting their form of life their language etc without kind of taking it over and um you know colonizing or gentrifying uh that I think that that those images of kind of avoiding that the poles of minimizing the difference or polarizing the difference and romanticizing um have helped me in thinking about that all right we have time I think for one final question here uh that's come in our Q and A how do you see mission after the pandemic especially in realizing the challenge of the churches globally who impacted economically politically and mentally etc how do you see the discipleship and mission which is trauma sensitive we have to get vaccines to lots of people and we have to um think about that we we have vaccines here and our country has not let them go because our president had wanted our country to get to get uh uh vaccinated and we have to challenge that if if we have this this help for other people this help for Haiti this help for Brazil this help for the Palestinians we have to give it and we have to challenge our country and say hey wait a minute it's not about our country it's about uh the world uh and then we can talk to the people then we can talk to the the Haitians then we can talk to the Brazilians then we can talk to Palestinians when we have uh given our help and when we have challenged our country to give our help um that that's when we then we're not colonizing we're giving then we can then we can say this is our gift and this is for you and this is not with uh our uh culture or our religion with it this is our gift I would say that that would be a challenge to us because we're we're uh we are uh we want our our country to be uh uh vaccinated because we want our our passport to say vaccination on it as other countries have doing that and yes here it is I have one of those um but uh this is we we ought to have every everybody in the in the world have one of these uh and so we uh that would be my my answer I don't know what Jamie yeah that's that's really helpful and I think the endios your one aspect of your good question that I think about in relationship to what Juan is talking about is just some way the the way the American news cycle tends to be so US centric that we really often kind of don't know what's going on we don't know that Indonesia just hit you know for instance to take Andeos' home country just said a really unfortunate milestone um a new peak in cases um how COVID you know it's easy for me to talk about and many others here in the US to talk about oh now that we're done with the pandemic but for most of the world that it's not the case at all and so what does it mean for us for those of us who have been vaccinated and can enjoy the the freedoms of of post vaccine life to to think about and care for directly the majority around the world who are not benefiting from this and Juan has just given some pointers I'll add two things quickly one is the economic impact of the vaccine or the pandemic you know essentially has exacerbated inequalities that have already been growing exponentially over recent years and so part of what we hopefully will use this pandemic experience for is as an impetus to to be involved in reimagining our global economic and political structures how do we want to be involved with one another how do we want to care for one another what kind of institutions will mediate our lives as those who share this planet so those are massive questions that we that have no easy answers but often Christians have shrunk from those or just easily kind of jumped on board whatever the current institutions are but how do we critically engage in those questions since andeos brought up trauma um and the mental character of what pandemic what COVID-19 has wrought in our world I I think he is right on that uh you know trauma trauma information uh is is a must and you know one of the places I learned from this about this from is Colombia um Mennonites in Colombia have been deeply involved in post civil war trauma healing work as part of how they have pursued peace as part of how they have responded to the the peace accords over the last several years and you know sometimes it's easy to think oh trauma that's just kind of the squishy emotional stuff you deal with when all the you know the hard economic and political realities are or military realities are dealt with but part of what they're learning is they try to seek reintegration of of people who have been in the paramilitary or into civilian life is that you know once you're dealing with the trauma at at that stage there there's just so much to deal with the trauma mission trauma informed mission has to be you know built in from the beginning yes well that's a great note here to end our conversation on the possibilities for what's next here so thank you Jamie and Juan for your time it's been wonderful having this conversation with you and we hope that everyone will run out and buy the book um so Brandon just put a link in the chat to the place where you can buy it if you didn't win a copy already um and we'll hope to continue this conversation around books and coffee um and more so um with that we'll wrap up our session thanks to all of you who showed up and we hope that you'll stay tuned for more conversations that we have planned here so yeah this has been been really wonderful so thanks thanks to all of you


Welcome to another Laptop Media Review. My name is Presen, today we have a real beast in our hands, the ASUS Republic of Game of the G752VES. Aside from the hardware changes, the G752VES does not differ from his predecessor the G752VT. The lid is fully covered in aluminum, with an ASUS backlit rock logo in the middle and two orange LED stripes on each side. The rest of the device features plastic imitating brushed aluminum. It would have been a nice finishing touch if the plastic elements in the interior were actual aluminum. You can easily distinguish the opening for the subwoofer, the two grills on the service cover, which is detachable and gives access to two of the RAM slots, the 2.5-inch drive and the two M.2 PCIe SSD slots. The hinges are okay and the lid lifts up easily without using both hands. Matte finish is the dominating surface for the interior on the keyboard and touchpad, so it's prone to smudges and fingerprints, so frequent cleaning would be necessary. It's now hefty as hell, tipping the scale at 4.5kg and at its thickest point the device is 51mm. Once again, we would like to stress on the fact that the G752VES is an excellent built machine. Yes, it might not be the prettiest, but who are we kidding? If you buy this rock, you'll be too broke for a girlfriend to critique your taste anyway. The notebook uses an excellent well-known Full HD IPS panel, the LG LP173W F4 SPF3. Aces are definitely following the motto, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The display measures at 17.3 inches, has a pixel density of 127ppi and a 0199x0199mm pixel pitch. The display covers 90% of the sRTB color gamma, which means that almost all web-based colors can be reproduced. However, there's a really small part of the green, blue and red area that cannot be displayed. We develop unique profiles tailored for each individual display model. If you want color accuracy for working with Photoshop, color draw or just overall usage of the laptop, we'd recommend you the Officework Web Design profile that will maximize the color accuracy as much as the G752VES allows it. We tested the display with 24 commonly used colors and as you can see the difference before and after the profile for yourself. We didn't detect any pulse width modulation or any screen flickering on the Aces ROG G752VT. This means that the display can be used for longer periods of time without affecting users with sensitive eyes. Here is where our hail gal profile comes in handy. It limits the harmful blue light for the display and keeps the colors perceptually accurate. You can learn more about the health impact of the blue light emissions and our solution for it in the article that I have included in the top right corner of this video. Aces has included a subwoofer at the bottom to aid the main loudspeakers to make the multi-media experience fuller. Our test confirmed that the sound is crisp and full in low and mid frequencies with a little distortion in the high frequencies. Despite the large 90 watt hour battery, the Aces ROG 752VES had a subpar performance. For average use in web browsing it withstands for 4 hours and 17 minutes. Without it you start a gaming session without a charger but out of the system you'll get around an hour and 15 minutes of playtime. But the inside of this babe is what it counts. The Core i7-6700 HQ processor has 4 cores taken at 2.6 GHz and can go up to 3.5 GHz for 1 active core and 3.1 GHz for 4 active cores. The CPU is suitable for heavy applications in gaming. We compare the G752VES with other notebooks with the same CPU. You can check the full testing review in the laptop media website. The motherboard can hold up to 64GB of DDR42133 RAM but our unit came with 3 free swaths and only one being taken by a 16GB stick. Two of the slots are easily accessed under the service lid but the other two require almost a full disassembly. The G752VES comes with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070. Due to its performance, thermals and power consummation, which is believed to be 10W more than the GTX 980, the GPU is suitable for large 17-inch laptops with the appropriate cooling solution. We decided to challenge this piece with two of the most played games in the past couple of years. We activated one of our unique profiles, the gaming and movie nights one, that will better our visibility in the dark section of images. It came out with amazing results. We tested the CPU and GPU at 100% for a couple of hours to determine the reliability of the cooling system. The processor was at 3.1GHz solid but temperatures rose to 85°C. The GPU ran at 78°C which is relatively high but still preferable than thermal throttling. We consider the cooling system's performance to be more than excellent. Even under such high load, the chassis remained cool so the user won't feel a thing during the most intense and prolonged gaming sessions. Our final summation for the Asus ROG G752VS is that it's an excellent premium gaming notebook with fast storage solutions, 2M2 PCIe NVMe SSD, ridiculously powerful GTX 1070 on board and a cooling system to support all of this demanding hardware. You can check the price of the laptop and the full review in the description below. In the review you will also find the buy our profile section, where you can acquire all of the profiles for a low price. Thank you for watching Laptop Media, we have many more reviews waiting for you in our channel. Also consider subscribing so you will always be up to date with the latest laptops, test-tops, VR technologies, phones and everything our technological future will provide us. For more extensive information about this model and many more visit laptopmedia.com.