Composite image of August 21, 2017, total solar eclipse, Madras, Oregon. Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani) Monday, April 8, 2024, will be the nearest a total solar eclipse has come to Tulsa in my lifetime. The path of totality stretches from south Texas to northern New England. Oklahoma southeast of...
On Twitter (X), a random reply from a "Progressive Democrat, native born Oklahoman. ELCA Lutheran" condemned my endorsement of KanDee Washington in the Tulsa Public Schools District 2 election, because she didn't attend ACTION Tulsa's "Accountability Session": KanDee Washington is the only candidate not to accept ACTION Tulsa's invitation to...
Earlier this month was the 50th anniversary of the last time Bob Wills recorded with his legendary band, the Texas Playboys. The sessions that became the album known as For the Last Time were recorded at Sumet-Bernet Studios (aka Sumet Sound Studios), 7027 Twin Hills Avenue, Dallas, on December 3...
Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. This Advent (2023) I renewed an earlier attempt to turn the 4-arm, 5-globe reproduction Victorian streetlamp in front of our house into a kind of Advent candelabra. I installed three purple...
What did Tulsans do 100 years ago to escape the summer heat? Some answers can be found in a little clipping I saved during some research on Tulsa's streetcars and electric interurban railroads.
Tulsa is the focus of another recent article from a UK newspaper website: A story in the Guardian Online about the impact of expressway construction on Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood, and the possibility of reviving the neighborhood by removing the north leg of the Inner Dispersal Loop. Twenty-five years before Don...
An apt remark by P. Andrew Sandlin: Church leaders: if your praise band plays songs 90% of your congregation can't sing easily or enthusiastically, you don't have a church music program; you have a musical performance program. Let me urge you to start a church music program. prompted Noah Goedker...
A rain-filled mikveh (ritual immersion pool) at Korazim National Park, Israel. Photo © 2023 by Michael D. Bates, all rights reserved. Here are a couple of useful resources that I recently encountered, one very old, one new, in support of the view that Christian baptism is for those only...
April 4, 2023, is general election day across Oklahoma for school board races and for municipalities that use the default forms of municipal government established by state statute. Many cities with city charters that define a customized government structure still use the default dates for city elections. As is...
Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service...
In a column last week on the role ritual and prohibitions play in group identity for Christians, Rod Dreher recalled a passage in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology by Mary Douglas about Irish resistance to the Roman Catholic Church's decision to abolish the Friday fast and allowing meat on Fridays....
While searching for info on the state of Christianity in America circa 1923, when J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, I found the US Census Bureau's 1916 two-volume survey: Religious bodies : 1916 : United States. Bureau of the Census : Internet Archive This is Volume 1 of a...
If you went looking for BatesLine recently and found nothing, it's because the server was offline from late Tuesday, July 13, 2021, until sometime Wednesday evening, July 14, 2021. According to BatesLine's hosting provider, the downtime was "due to a MAC address conflict after a chassis swap. However, they were...
To journalists, photographers, and visitors, pilgrims this week of the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Welcome to Tulsa. Some context may help you interpret what you see and hear this week.
Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service...
What looked like a sleepy re-election run, for Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum IV as recently as the beginning of May, with one declared opponent and a perennial candidate in jail, turned into a free-for-all. As soon as he had some tough decisions to make, the smiley guy that everyone...
Last Wednesday, BatesLine sent a questionnaire to the six serious candidates for Mayor of Tulsa, using the email addresses provided in their declarations of candidacy or on their websites. We sent two reminders. We received replies from three candidates: Craig Immel, Ken Reddick, and Ty Walker. The survey consists of...
If you're on Twitter you might have concluded that July 4th was Hipster-Pastors-Complaining-About-Flags-in-Churches Day.
Does G. T. Bynum IV know anyone who lives east of Yale, north of 21st, or west of the river? I've been watching the creation of blue ribbon panels for years, and this list is disturbingly familiar. The mayor's picks for his Economic Recovery Advisory Committee are yet another expression...
News and opinion on the coronavirus plague, in reverse chronological order (mostly): Here is a coronavirus COVID-19 dashboard and interactive map showing current numbers of cases from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Here is the spreadsheet that feeds the map. As of 7 a.m....
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to a feed of all future entries matching 'churches'. [What is this?]