News

New and exciting educational activity in Cloverdale Jan. 28

The “Center Literary Café” a long-standing community group that gathers writers together to share work celebrated their final gathering last month unless they can find a new volunteer to run the program.

Some time ago a column entitled “Religion challenges left and right” by E. J. Dionne, Jr. appeared in the Press Democrat. “Whenever I write sympathetically about religion,” he noted, “I get bombarded with tweets and notes from readers who normally agree with me but cannot abide by the idea that religious belief should be seen as intellectually serious.” Having made that caveat he goes on to treat religion seriously in a summary of a study produced by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution. Dionne himself took part in the research for the study. The study divides citizens into four groups: 28 percent religious conservatives, 38 percent religious moderates, 19 percent religious progressives, and 15 percent nonreligious. These groups are correlated to political attitudes and party affiliations.  Not surprisingly, most religious conservatives are politically conservative and gravitate to the Republican Party, and most religious progressives and nonreligious are politically liberal and gravitate to the Democratic party.  Also not surprisingly, religious moderates are in between and just as they are religiously moderate they tend to be moderate Republicans or moderate Democrats in fairly equal numbers. 

This week, in the middle of a calendar encapsulating patriotic 9/11 remembrances, the holiest of Muslim holidays, football players refusing to stand for the National Anthem and a presidential campaign full of racist epithets, our county’s Board of Supervisors passed an official resolution declaring Sonoma County as an “Islamophobia-free community.”