Star Tribune
Walz, in coach mode, makes appeal for hard work from Wisconsin voters at Superior rally
Walz stressed the 52 days left until Election Day on Nov. 5 and the work Democrats need to do to secure every vote possible. It’s all gas and no brakes, he said.
“Sleep when you’re dead,” Walz said. “Let’s give it all. And on the 53rd morning, when you wake up, we get to say, ‘Congratulations, Madame President.’”
Gwen Walz spoke ahead of her husband, contrasting Harris’ message of “Turn the page” with what she said was the backward look of Republican Donald Trump’s campaign. She urged the audience to make the gesture of turning the page of a large book, saying it’s a move that also looks like a “buh-bye” to Trump.
Superior, a city of 26,500 across the bay from Duluth, is deeply Democratic. Mayor Jim Paine, who was raised in Superior and attended UW-Superior, said he couldn’t think of a time in recent history when a Republican won the majority of votes in the city — at least not in a partisan race.
Superior is among a small contingent of historically blue islands in the state’s sea of red rural areas. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has fared well among its voters, as did Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In 2020, Joe Biden narrowly won Wisconsin in the presidential race by securing large margins in the northern counties of Douglas, Bayfield and Ashland, as well as Door, Menominee, Portage, Eau Claire, La Crosse and Milwaukee counties, and areas around Milwaukee and Madison. Those same areas favored Clinton in 2016, though Trump carried the state.
Star Tribune
Charges: Teen threatens to shoot in head Gustavus Adolphus student on campus, steals her car
The teenager has been charged just since February with three other crimes in the Twin Cities and beyond that include auto theft and property damage, according to juvenile court records.
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One man was killed and another injured in a shooting at a homeless encampment in south Minneapolis, Police Chief Brian O’Hara said on Wednesday morning.
Police got a ShotSpotter alert of shots fired at 4:40 a.m., O’Hara said a few hours later at a media briefing near the site, which is along 26th Street E. between South 17th and 18th Aves.
The man who was shot in the head died at the scene. He was in his 20s, O’Hara said. The other shooting victim was in his 30s. He was taken to HCMC with what the chief called serious but non-life-threatening injuries. No names have been released.
O’Hara said police have a suspect but that person was not yet in custody as of Wednesday morning. The chief said the shootings once again call attention to the dangers of homeless encampments, for both people living at the sites and nearby residents.
“There is way too much crime and violence associated with the homeless encampments,” O’Hara said.
Star Tribune
Books ‘Undivided’ and ‘Circle of Hope’ show how two churches tried to grapple with racial issues
Han was just as committed. Her reporting on Crossroads, a Protestant megachurch, produced 1,471 hours of audio and video recordings. Her book spotlights another major trend: While small churches struggle, most of the country’s 1,000-plus Protestant megachurches (defined as having 2,000 members) are growing, according to recent surveys.
Han crafts detailed depictions of Crossroads members, among them a Black pastor whose sermon about race angered some white members, and a white woman, raised in an unabashedly racist home, who gradually becomes an integral member of Undivided, Crossroads’ initiative devoted to hard discussions about race. “Philando Castile was my George Floyd,” she says, recounting how she became an outspoken anti-racist after Castile was shot to death by police in Falcon Heights in 2016.
Undivided (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
Evangelical Protestantism, Han notes, has historically “conceptualized racism as a problem of individual sin and prejudice and ignored the way it was tied to questions of power.” The fraught conversations captured in this book depict the “blowback,” as one member put it, that can follow when churchgoers confront institutional racism.
Both authors understand that, as Griswold writes, “churches are messy places where people seek many things, among them a common understanding of something larger than they are.” These excellent books demonstrate how hard that can be to achieve.
Kevin Canfield is a regular contributor to the Minnesota Star Tribune’s books coverage.
Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
