What We Read This Week

Each week, we bring you interesting stories from around the web. Here’s what caught our eye this week!

FAITH

3 Transgender Canadians Share the Personal Journeys That Shaped Their Faith

When it comes to stories of faith and gender transition, misconceptions abound. In certain religious circles, a transgender person of faith might seem like a contradiction in terms — you can be one or the other but not both. But such an assumption is antiquated. Now more than ever, trans folks are exploring religion in informal groups and at churches, synagogues, mosques and temples across the country. At the same time, religious communities are working to make space for transgender Canadians after years of ignorance and discrimination. Read Full Article

From UC Observer

FAITH

Other People Are Better Than You (and other ideas to promote church unity)

From Relevant Magazine

LANGUAGE

How to Almost Learn Italian

Late one chilly evening last September, I excused myself from a small group huddled around a campfire to peck at and mumble into my phone. No way was a camping trip going to make me miss my Italian lesson. For most of the preceding year, I had religiously attended to my 15-minute-or-so daily encounters with the language-learning app Duolingo. I used it on trains, while walking across town, during previews at the movie theater. I was planning a trip to Rome in the late spring, and I’ve always been of the mind that to properly visit a country, you’ve got to give the language a shot. Read Full Article

From The Atlantic

WORLD

Gratitude and True Welcome

Here we are: Thanksgiving weekend. Most of us sojourners are traveling to be with family all around the country or welcoming their families to come to be with them in Washington. Some of us who have been doing a lot of traveling this busy fall are so grateful to be home with our families, especially with our kids home from college or off from school. Read Full Article

From Sojo

POLITICS

The Government’s Massive New Climate Change Study Challenges Trump’s Policies

President Donald Trump on Wednesday once again disputed the science of climate change, questioning how this week’s Thanksgiving cold spell could occur as the planet warms. “Whatever happened to Global Warming?” he asked on Twitter. On Friday, scientists working for his administration gave Trump a stark answer: climate change is a menace that threatens the well being of the United States. The phenomenon is already disrupting local communities in the U.S., and could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars a year without a significant effort to stop it, researchers found. Read Full Article

From TIME