A friend sent along a weird story from my alma mater the other day. (Not the usual alma mater, which no longer exists, but my first alma mater, the Columbus Dispatch.) It’s about the spread of evangelical Christianity among the Ohio State football team. The top:
Like the Great Awakenings of years gone by, a religious revival is emanating from Ohio State’s campus.
The mouthpieces of revival aren’t buttoned-up pastors yelling about fire and brimstone. And they aren’t speaking under tents or at church pulpits.
They are Ohio State football players. Often, their platform is on the field and on social media. And it stays the same, even when they falter on the field, as they did in the College Football Playoff. Their message?
“JESUS WON.”
Ai-yi-yi. This is not a sports story. It’s not even really a religion story, or rather, it’s a religion story with quotes like this:
“It was the most surreal feeling. The second I hit the water and came back up, I felt weightless. Like the feeling of all the burdens on me that felt like they were physically weighing me down were taken away in that just outward profession of my faith,” he said.
And this:
“What has taken place in my life and the lives of other people on this team — and I know I’m here to talk about football — but it’s a true testament of the Lord that I serve.”
Is this journalism or a tent revival? I was encouraged to check out the byline’s short bio on the website, and learned the writer’s beat: “Kindness/Religion Reporter.” What’s more, “She is currently supported by the Center for HumanKindness at The Columbus Foundation.” Say what?
(I should mention, these fellowship-funded reporting jobs are pretty common, usually so that a small-but-poor news outlet can have a reporter with a dedicated beat like criminal justice, the environment, health care, etc. But I’ve never heard of one dedicated to…kindness.)
But to be sure, the Center for HumanKindness, one word, exists. Mission statement:
The Center for HumanKindness is on a mission to inspire acts of kindness and strengthen social connections in our community. Every kind act—big or small, seen or unseen—makes a positive difference for individuals and the broader community.
As nasty as I can be, I am often a very kind person. Please, thank you, big tipper, give a sandwich to the hobo, help a stranger who slips on the ice, all that. But my nasty side says I am sick of Be Kind bumper stickers, the dumb Day of Kindness social-media static, all of it. In Nance’s world, the Center for HumanKindness would be called the Don’t Be An Asshole Center.
Because all this Be Kind propaganda comes at a time when we are being absolutely manhandled by people for whom “unkind” is the mildest possible description. This doesn’t feel like a time to respond with kindness, but rather, with a right cross to the nose, a kick to the ribs and a HOW DO YOU FEEL NOOOOOW, STEPHEN MILLER. At some point, “be kind” starts to feel like wallpaper, like peace signs in the ’60s.
Oh well. At least the day got off to a good start:
That’s for Bob (not Greene), a swimmer who appreciates a fresh workout. And the country playlist was perfect for this morning. One of the second-hour guys ambled out from the locker room and said, “So this is why Charlie was singing ‘Jambalaya’ in the shower.”
Time to clean a bathroom and feel productive. My closet-cleaning is way behind schedule.
Bob (not Greene) said on January 7, 2026 at 9:40 am
Thanks for the workout, Nancy! I screenshotted it when it came up in my Instagram stories this morning!
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Jeff Borden said on January 7, 2026 at 9:49 am
“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” — Gandhi
I suppose athletes extolling the role Christianity plays in their lives is relatively harmless, but it still rankles me. Do these jocks look at the world beyond theirs? Do they not see the bottomless horrors all around us? The wars, poverty, disease, political unrest? These people come off as self-absorbed ninnies displaying their faith like it’s a hold Rolex.
Ugh.
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Deborah said on January 7, 2026 at 9:50 am
You’re so right about Stephen Miller. What makes some people be so unkind? I know when I’m not physically well it makes a difference in my behavior towards others. If I’m overly hungry I get hangry, or not getting enough sleep makes the simplest thing like finding my reading glasses, I want to blame someone, or if I have a cold forget it, just stay away from me. Is there something physically unwell with Miller like irritable bowel syndrome? I watched a video of him as a high schooler running for some school office, he’s screeching into the camera how unfair it is that he is expected to pick up his trash when there are janitors getting paid to do that. Was it his upbringing? His own family is flummoxed. Some people turn into curmudgeons when they get old but Miller is fairly young (younger than he actually looks). He must get some kind of inner reward (dopamine?) when he insults or hurts people (same with Trump). I can’t even imagine what Miller is like around his kids. Hegseth, Bondi and Noem too, they always seem like they’re about to jump out of their skins and tackle someone for having the unmitigated gall to exist. These people seem damaged in a profound way.
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Suzanne said on January 7, 2026 at 9:51 am
Happy 2026, the year of dictator pissing contests. We are apparently now in the process of seizing Russian oil tankers.
“The US is carrying out an operation to seize a tanker linked to Venezuelan oil, an official tells CBS, the BBC’s US partner.
Previously named Bella 1, its name has been changed to Marinera and it has also reportedly been reflagged from a Guyanese to a Russian vessel.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v0deypjl4o
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Mark P said on January 7, 2026 at 10:04 am
If you can figure out why the top Nazis were the way they were, I think you’ll have a good start on figuring out Miller and the rest of Trump’s band of angry thugs.
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Peter said on January 7, 2026 at 10:08 am
People like Stephen Miller are why we need universal free healthcare – poor Stephen is so angry and cranky because he obviously can’t afford to have the pole removed from his ass.
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Julie Robinson said on January 7, 2026 at 12:52 pm
Okay, from a wanna be pysch major in the 70’s: attachment theory would say these men and women didn’t have consistent, loving, and physical interactions with their caregivers in the critical stages where trust and security are learned. In other words, mom and dad, or nanny, didn’t hug them and tell them they loved them, and they missed the window on how to learn love and security.
This was very common in orphanages, and English and German families. Others too, but that’s where my familiarity lies. It’s certainly the way Trump was raised, and raised his own kids. Think of Barron having his own floor in Trump Tower. Think of all the tales about the English aristocracy, where kids were kept in the nursery far away from the rest of the house, and presented each night to their parents for a few minutes. At eight or so they were shipped off to horrible boarding schools.
Two different sets of kids that I know were adopted from Russia in the early 2000’s and have the same issues–they can’t trust anyone, even after many years of having love, attention, therapy and other interventions. They’re adults now and hopeless cases.
Aren’t I cheery? I see we’ve now seized two ships.
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Jeff Borden said on January 7, 2026 at 1:26 pm
I’ve heard Russia dispatched a submarine to protect the tanker our country just seized. That would be very, very bad.
Anyone remember a movie from 1965, “The Bedford Incident” with Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier? Widmark played the captain of a USN destroyer, who becomes obsessed with tracking a Soviet nuclear submarine. His prodding and provoking ends in complete disaster. Something like that could happen with the absolute morons we have running DOD.
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Colleen said on January 7, 2026 at 4:14 pm
The IU quarterback begins every post game tv hit with “well, first of all, to God be the glory”.
I don’t understand why MAGATs are so mean either. Even the followers, with the whole “own the libs” thing….they feel somehow better about themselves when being nasty. They can’t have a rational discourse, they have to pepper their comments with words like “libtard”, which do nothing to move the conversation forward. They are just a bunch of overgrown 11 year old bullies.
I should be cleaning for the upcoming visit from my sister, who lives in that hellhole San Francisco. But I’m just overwhelmed. By the state of the world, that gets more terrifying by the minute. By general life stuff. A mom in the hospital with a wonky heart rhythm. Last night at yoga/meditation, the focus was concentrating on what we need. The only word that kept popping up was “help”.
Ah well. This too shall pass….
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Jeff Borden said on January 7, 2026 at 4:17 pm
The video footage of the ICE/CBP goon murdering the woman in Minneapolis earlier today is hard to watch. He flat out shoots her in the face, even though he is nowhere near being in danger. As usual, DHS is lying its ass off. Noem, Bovino and the other ogres need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law when (if) normalcy returns to this troubled nation.
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Deborah said on January 7, 2026 at 4:18 pm
Not to get too far into the psychology weeds but I think I suffered from lack of affection demonstrated by my parents. My sister is only 16 months older than me and I was a crier as an infant, I got stories about that a lot when I was a kid. Apparently I had colic or whatever and would wake my sister so they wheeled my bassinet into the bathroom and let me cry and apparently I didn’t let up and drove them crazy. Both of my parents were not big on touching or saying they loved us, in fact I don’t remember being told that ever by them. Kind of hard to believe now when I think about it, because they were older when they had us and were desperate to have children, which they didn’t have for 7 years or so after they married later which was highly unusual for that time period. My mother’s family was German and my dad was one of 9, so maybe terms of love and affection must not have been the case in their upbringings. I’ve had therapy and I’ve figured it out over the years but I don’t think I turned out unkind. However my sister has turned out to be quite racist and cruel in things she has said about “others”.
I’ve wondered if Trump suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome when he was born, somewhere I read that his mother was quite the tippler, which would make some sense in regard to his behavior throughout his life. Back then there were no warnings about drinking while pregnant. He was sent to military school because of actions within his family.
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Julie Robinson said on January 7, 2026 at 5:29 pm
Colleen, I’m so sorry. All too frequently help is all I can think too. Full blown dementia and grouchy is default for Mom.
Our daughter just left for an emergency anti-ICE protest. She’s wearing her clerical collar, but I’m under no illusions as to its protective power. I can’t stop seeing that car.
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Jeff Borden said on January 7, 2026 at 6:02 pm
ICE/CBP hit an Episcopalian priest SEVEN times with pepper balls as he prayed in from of a detention center in Broadview, Ill. These people are straight up thugs. Uncontrolled and unaccountable.
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Jeff Gill said on January 7, 2026 at 6:22 pm
And I just saw the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is closing. 240 years of journalism.
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Deborah said on January 7, 2026 at 6:29 pm
Protests are popping up all over the place over the ICE shooting fiasco in Minneapolis, I don’t know of one here in Santa Fe, but if there is one, I’m going. What a tragedy, and absolutely inevitable that something like this would happen, actually it’s already happened in other places too. Chaos, high emotions, machismo men with deadly weapons and little training in deescalation, in fact very little training at all. This is going to continue to happen, then there will probably be protests that end in violence and then Trump can call in the troops. So so predictable. My niece who lives in Minneapolis has been keeping me abreast all day.
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alex said on January 7, 2026 at 6:31 pm
My mother was a tippler and I got sent to military school and my parents were late in having children as well. Nevertheless I’m an empath (and probably too much of one for my own good) so I’m not sure how much stock I would put in theories regarding nurture versus nature.
What I do know is that Trump is, quite obviously, a deeply insecure individual who overcompensates for it by being a noxious blowhard and he has zero self-awareness, and people who similarly don’t feel good about themselves find him validating. He gives them permission to regress to the same primitive defense mechanisms. That’s the secret to his magnetism. Likes do attract, and these are the kind of people who train themselves into hard-heartedness with the same kind of dedication as that of a body builder.
I remember thinking when he ran in 2016 that if someone showed up to a job interview with his lack of qualifications, extravagant boastfulness and surly attitude, someone would be calling security to have him thrown out of the building, or maybe even shipped off to a psych ward. And yet here we are.
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David C said on January 7, 2026 at 7:22 pm
I always think their parents were Harry Harlow’s wire monkey with food. Jesus H. Christ their lord and savior apparently didn’t have enough cloth monkey to go around.
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Sherri said on January 7, 2026 at 8:47 pm
The Post-Gazette died when the Block family decided following labor law was optional, and fought a three year strike while they lost NLRB and court rulings. The strike was just resolved in November, after the Third Circuit upheld the strikers’ claims. The closure comes after the Supremes declined to take up the case.
Now, I haven’t lived in Pittsburgh in 35 years, but it was still very much a union town back then. The Post-Gazette I subscribed to didn’t have a Business section, it had a Business and Labor section. The Blocks also put a MAGAt in charge of the editorial page, and fired a longtime popular editorial cartoonist.
Private equity and Gannet have been a scourge on the newspaper business, but not every family owned operation has been all the good, either.
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Deborah said on January 7, 2026 at 11:54 pm
Today has been bad but the thing that is keeping me awake is knowing that it is going to get worse, it’s going to get much worse and I have no idea how bad it will actually get. That is not a good way to start this year.
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Brandon said on January 8, 2026 at 12:26 am
Re: being kind and making a big deal out of it. Look at Ellen DeGeneres.
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Jeff Gill said on January 8, 2026 at 8:33 am
For what it’s worth, Bob & Peggy Walter started a fund to allow special grants to people who had experienced a sudden loss, a gap in the Columbus Foundation’s range of gifts, and it started just as “Gifts of Kindness Fund” which the development team parlayed into something I suspect was focus grouped into the current iteration, as they (like the Licking County Foundation, on which I serve next door) try to figure out what it takes to get Gen Z’ers to get interested in philanthrophy.
Bob is an OU alum, and has served as chair of the board of trustees in Athens; he founded what’s now Cardinal Health, going from a small grocery chain to pharmacies, to pharmacy distribution to the medical goods behemoth it now is. I’ve not met Peggy, but a friend of mine who’s retired to our town says she’s the kind one (& into the arts, and the CMA), and no doubt a big part of why they gave to launch the fund which we’ve drawn on here in this county.
https://columbusfoundation.org/at-the-table-blog/a-decade-of-spreading-kindness-through-the-gifts-of-kindness-fund
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Deborah said on January 8, 2026 at 10:56 am
You have to watch this is a gift article from the NYT, it takes you through the scene of the shooting explicitly showing what happened step by step from multiple angles. Listen to it too because the narrator tells what’s happening explaining it clearly. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010631041/minneapolis-ice-shooting-video.html?smid=url-share
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tajalli said on January 8, 2026 at 12:58 pm
Gov. Tim Walz has activated the Minnesota National Guard with the intention of protecting Minneapolis citizens from ICE, including use of weapons against ICE. And the citizenry itself has turned out in force, throwing snowballs at ICE thugees.
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