Matt Yglesias is surprised to find that there are five Mormons in the U.S Senate, with the possibility of another come this fall. (One less presidential candidate, though, which I'm sure the LDS regrets.)

As Matt says, there are a disproportionate number of Jews in the Senate too. But then as his commentors point out, the real overrepresentation is by the population of places like Utah and Wyoming.

Anyway, there are 4 members of the UCC and 1 Congregationalist in the Senate. Not bad when you consider we make up .007 per cent of the population, far smaller than either the Mormons or the various Jewish denominations.

I recently wrote a Question of the Day about dreams, in which I noted that I can decode the meanings of some of my own dreams, if I spend time thinking about them. Today I'd share one of those dreams with you.

It wasn't the sort of dream that was immediately riveting, or obviously profound at first glance.  It was the sort of dream I might have easily overlooked. It was like--have you ever walked along the beach looking for interesting stones? This dream was like a stone that you might have walked right past without noticing it. It wasn't bright and dazzling in a way that would immediately grab your attention. But if you were walking slowly and were looking carefully, you might notice little golden flecks that caught the sun, and sparkled a bit as you walked by. Then you might pick it up and turn it over in your hand, realizing that there was more to this particular beach pebble than immediately meets the eye.

That's how this dream was for me. I mean, the plotline--what I can remember of it--was pretty limited. Kind of lame, actually. But for some reason it caught my attention.

I'm guessing that most of my readers would say no. As sexually healthy adults, we affirm our own sexual orientation as well as those of others.

On a New York Times blog on Tuesday, John Tierney writes about intriguing new research that shows that the sexual orientation of fruit flies can be manipulated with drugs. He wonders if such a drug was available for humans, what would be the ethical considerations for its use?

Paul Soupiset from the emerging church world recently posted "19 Theses" from the Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann. Here's the first few:

1.     Everybody lives by a script. The script may be implicit or explicit. It may be recognized or unrecognized, but everybody has a script.

2.     We get scripted. All of us get scripted through the process of nurture and formation and socialization, and it happens to us without our knowing it.

3.      The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism that socializes us all, liberal and conservative.

4.     That script (technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism) enacted through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and to make us happy.

5.     That script has failed. That script of military consumerism cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy. We may be the unhappiest society in the world.

6.     Health for our society depends upon disengagement from and relinquishment of that script of military consumerism. This is a disengagement and relinquishment that we mostly resist and about which we are profoundly ambiguous.

7.     It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us. That is, too enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.

It occurs to me that William S. Burroughs was thinking along these lines forty years ago, especially in the Nova Trilogy, albeit in distinctly gloomier and altogether trippier terms. Burroughs understood the complexities of language and its ability to simultaneously connect and separate us as we try to rewrite the operative scripts. But oddly, he would have wholeheartedly endorsed Brueggemann's ideas, even as he made fun of the project of redemption through the church.

When two studies on diversity showed results that sociologist did not expect, the right-wing was ecstatic. Diversity, it seems, does not help foster interaction among people of different races. In fact, the studies concluded quite the opposite.

"With stunning regularity, he found Americans in more diverse locales tending to "hunker down and pull in like a turtle," suspicious not just of the new or different, but of everybody." Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam said in his massive nationwide study. (Source)