Chef Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins Celebrates the Women Making Mexican Cuisine

Civil Eats

Chef Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins Celebrates the Women Making Mexican Cuisine

Featured on the new season of KCET’s ‘Migrant Kitchen,’ Zepeda-Wilkins’ San Diego restaurant elevates regional Mexican cooking and the hands behind it.

By Annelise Jolley, Business, Food Justice November 19, 2018

Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins grew up as a border kid, splitting her time between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico. Her parents worked in Mexico and raised their family in Imperial Beach, a California town located just a few miles from the border. She spent her childhood summers in Guadalajara and learned to cook in her aunt’s pozole restaurant. From a young age, Zepeda-Wilkins’s female relatives taught her the flavors and dishes that still infuse her cooking. Now a mother of two teenagers, she has opened a restaurant to honor the women who raised her.

It’s been a busy few years for Zepeda-Wilkins, who is featured in this season of KCET’s “Migrant Kitchen.” In addition to competing in Top Chef and Top Chef Mexico, she worked in pastry at San Diego’s El Bizcocho and later as chef de cuisine at Bracero Cocina, Mexican Chef Javier Plascencia’s well-loved San Diego outpost. Her new restaurant, El Jardín, which opened in June in San Diego, pays homage to her Mexican heritage by making use of ingredients and recipes sourced from home cooks across Mexico, including her family members.

At El Jardín, Zepeda-Wilkins not only makes food, she tells stories, too—stories of her mother and aunts and grandmothers, of her travels through Mexico, and of the women who carry on Mexico’s complex, nourishing, diverse cuisine. Dishes like “Jalisco Style Pozole Rojo” and “Seared Fish a la Veracruzana” are nods to her family’s history and highlight the distinct regionality of Mexican cooking.

Despite El Jardín’s sophisticated take on Mexican food, Zepeda-Wilkins wants to make the dishes her grandma made—like albondigas or meatballs—and she wants to top them with greens grown in the restaurant’s namesake on-site garden, plate them on ceramics sourced from Mexican artisans, and serve them with a story. El Jardín employees are eager to share the history behind each dish, which region it comes from, and the people who inspired it. “Food is the one language we all speak,” Zepeda-Wilkins says, and it’s a language she speaks fluently.

Civil Eats recently spoke to the chef about cooking on the border, the women who inspired El Jardín, and what it means to celebrate immigrant cuisine.

You were taught to cook by female relatives. What story does your cooking tell about the women who carry on Mexico’s culinary heritage?

A lot of the style and the story that resonates with me is the ability to do something out of nothing. I’m pretty sure it’s a mom-talent in general, but the ability to make—with no money—a nutritious, full meal for your family is something that I’ve seen more and more throughout my travels in Mexico. The adaptability of these women is really something that I admire.

What happens to a lot of these women is that their stories go untold if they don’t have daughters. A lot of women die alone in tiny villages because the husbands emigrated to make money and send [it] back to their family. Half the time [the money] stops abruptly, and they never hear from them again. If there’s not a female to carry on the recipes of their family history, everything dies with them.

How do you meet the women who inspire El Jardín’s menu and aesthetic?

I have a really beautiful network of chef friends and photographers and food historians in Mexico who help me get in contact with them, and then I take care of the relationship from there. Because they have to also trust me. When I purchased my plates in Mexico, [for example] I couldn’t just pick up the phone and make an order. [I had to] actually do the work and go to Mexico and shake the person’s hand who makes them. The amount of work that goes into it is unimaginable, but it’s so worth it. For me to be able to help an artisan in Mexico—that’s the point of this whole thing.

Did you always imagine opening a restaurant that focused on regional Mexican cuisine?

Mexican food, yes. But the idea of regionality really manifested two years ago. Going [to Mexico] and meeting all these women to get the foundation and inspiration behind [El Jardín] came to fruition two years ago, and now I’m starting to go back, because I need to get another insurgence of creative juice. My feet need to touch that ground. I need to meet these people and eat at their homes again. Even if it’s the same meal, I come back a different person after every conversation, after every story they tell.

How has the changing immigration landscape impacted food communities in the San Diego/Tijuana border region?

You see Haitians who were left in Tijuana a few years ago working at the fruit stands; you go to the airport and they’re working at the tarmac. You see all these beautiful Haitian chicken spots popping up [in Tijuana now], which is really cool. That’s something people really don’t understand about Mexico. We might have all our own problems, and we might be a hot mess politically, but we are a country that accepts anyone who comes in and really embraces [them].

Really, all our cuisine is a mestiza cuisine [from the Spanish word for someone of mixed ethnic ancestry]. If you were to make [strictly] Mexican cuisine, you’d have to cut onion and garlic out, and you’d be left with just tomatoes and chilis—still delicious, but you’d miss the roundness of the flavors that are notorious for us, our holy trinity: tomatoes, onions, and chilis.

Through the seven regions [of Mexican cuisine], you can see where different cultures landed and meshed with our indigenous ingredients, and all the beautiful dishes [that] came about.

What three ingredients can’t you cook without?

At the moment, it’s definitely dried chilis. Also the pit of the sapote mamey fruit. It has a beautiful almond flavor, and most people just discard it—I think it’s Mexico’s hidden secret. And the third would be kombu—dashi kombu broth. Super random, but that’s kind of me.

What gap in San Diego’s culinary landscape does El Jardín fill?

What we bring to San Diego is a different approach to Mexican food. What [the city has] right now as far as Mexican food is tacos from old-school taco shops, [or] everything drenched in canned enchilada sauce.

It makes business sense to just do tacos and burritos and nachos, but we’re so much more than that as a culture. You go to Mexico state or Mexico City and you have some of the most beautiful food made by chefs who have traveled the world and come home. Why can’t we be that? [Mexicans] learned all these techniques from all these different places, and we made our food.

My cooks are young; I’m young. We’re a contemporary Mexican restaurant with old roots. We’re trying to do our best and also be true to who we are. I want to make the food my grandma made and present it to you on a beautiful plate with greens that come from our garden.

What challenges do you encounter cooking Mexican food in the United States?

Being so close to the border, the theme that I constantly have working against me is the fact that Mexican food is still not perceived as something that you should spend money on. No one values Mexican food this close to the border. But I pay my cooks a living wage. I pay my dishwashers more than minimum wage because they’re taking care of the plates that I handpicked in Mexico.

What do you want people to learn about Mexico when they eat at El Jardín?

We lived in Imperial Beach [less than 10 miles north of the Mexican border with California, but] we were in Tijuana almost every single day growing up. I personally consider myself Mexican more than I do Mexican-American, because my parents always had us in Mexico. My dad worked in Mexico my entire life, and my mother speaks incredibly broken English and never worked in America. I have a very skewed upbringing [in that] we are more proud of our Mexican heritage than the average first-generation [family].

We want customers to come [to the restaurant] with an open mind, regardless of where they’re from. Ask us questions and be inquisitive. Learn about who we are as a culture. We do have a lot of knowledge, and we do have a lot of things to say. I always say that we have to educate people—without being pretentious, obviously. So I empower the front-of-the-house team to be the storytellers. Right now in my rewrite of the menu, I’m making it a lot more approachable for people who don’t read Spanish so they don’t fear not knowing what they’re going to get.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Photos courtesy of KCET.

This article was produced in partnership with KCET’s “The Migrant Kitchen.” Now in its third season, “The Migrant Kitchen” will air an episode profiling Zepeda-Wilkins on November 21. The trailer for the full third season is embedded below.

Harvard Scientists Say These 5 Things Can Prolong Your Life by a Decade

Barrone’s

Harvard Scientists Say These 5 Things Can Prolong Your Life by a Decade

By Alessandra Malito, MarketWatch November 18, 2018

Marc Zimmer

Want to live 10 years longer? You may have to revamp your lifestyle.

There are five habits that, when done together, could add more than a decade to your life expectancy, according to a study released this year by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The good news: 10 years is a lot of extra time. The bad news: You’ll have to cut out junk food and stop being a couch potato.

Here’s what the study recommends you do:

• Eat a healthy diet

• Exercise 30 minutes or more a day

• Maintain a healthy weight (specifically, a body mass index between 18.5 and 24.9 — you can find yours here.)

• Don’t drink too much alcohol (No more than one 5 oz. glass of wine per day for women, and two glasses for men)

• Don’t smoke (ever)

Men and women who followed the healthiest of lifestyles were 82% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 65% less likely to die from cancer compared with people who lived unhealthy lifestyles over the course of 30 years, according to the study, published online in the journal Circulation.

The researchers analyzed 34 years of data from more than 78,000 women and 27 years of data from more than 44,000 men. The researchers estimated the women who adopted these five habits would see 14 more years of life, and men would add 12 years.

The healthy habits that the Harvard researchers pinpointed may sound obvious, but they’re not easy to adopt. For starters, that recommended BMI might be difficult for many Americans. The average BMI for the average American man is 28.6, up from 25.1 in the early 1960’s. Anything over 24.9 is considered overweight and a BMI over 30 is regarded as obese.

There are a few ways to slowly make them a part of your life however, according to the National Institutes of Health. Become aware of your bad habits, whether they’re dipping into the office vending machine at 3 p.m. or staying out late and giving the gym a miss the next morning.

Also, don’t do it alone. Ask friends and family to try these healthy challenges with you. The National Institutes of Health also suggests looking ahead and imagining how you’ll feel when you accomplish your goals. “You’re never too out of shape, too overweight, or too old to make healthy changes,” the organization’s monthly newsletter suggests.

There are other factors to consider if you want to add years to your life or, at the very least, not shorten it. Along with exercising and eating nutritious meals, people need to have active social lives and get enough sleep, studies suggest. More than 40% of adults in the U.S. suffer from loneliness, which is linked to depression, dementia, anxiety and cardiovascular diseases. Insufficient sleep also lead to hypertension, diabetes and obesity.

Take into consideration what happens when you do the opposite of the Harvard study’s recommended habits:

• Poor diet leads to one in five deaths, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington and published by the journal Lancet. A poor diet can also cause high blood pressure and diabetes, which are linked to eating the wrong foods. (The right diet, the study found, is one that incorporates whole grains, fruit, nuts and seeds).

• Not exercising also leads to high blood pressure and diabetes, and people who are physically inactive are more likely to develop anxiety, depression, coronary heart disease and even cancer, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.

• Falling below or above your proper BMI isn’t safe. Being underweight, where your BMI is below average, signals malnutrition and increases the risk of osteoporosis, a decreased immune function and fertility issues, according to Healthline. Having a higher BMI or having obesity causes chronic health conditions, such as asthma and bone problems.

• Overindulging in alcohol can lead to cancer, even a light intake, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

• Smoking has killed more than one in 10 people worldwide, according to a study published in Lancet — 11.5% of global deaths were attributed to smoking.

Given all that, those 5 good habits may not seem so bad, after all.

This article originally appeared on MarketWatch.

An Indigenous Alaskan Chef Shares Traditional Recipes

Civil Eats

An Indigenous Alaskan Chef Shares Traditional Recipes By Way Of YouTube

Chef Rob Kinneen’s web series ‘Fresh Alaska’ promotes fresh, local ingredients from even the remotest parts of his home state.

By Jody Ellis, Indigenous Foodways, Local Eats – November 16, 2018

Rob Kinneen with Athabascan Elder Howard Luke, learning about preparing salmon and foraging wild ingredients as p[art of Kinneen’s web series.

Raised mainly in Anchorage Alaska, where produce can be hard to find and often very expensive, Kinneen wasn’t exposed to much in the way of fresh fruits or vegetables. His connection to food, however, was always there.

“There was still an affinity with the land and with food,” he says. “We harvested a lot of seafood, we hunted, we went clam-digging.” He remembers his mom baking fresh bread and picking fresh rhubarb and eating it raw, dipped in sugar. And when his dad grew potatoes for the first time, Kinneen helped him harvest them. “We boiled them and ate some that same day, and I remember how earthy they tasted,” he recalls.

These memories, coupled with a desire to connect with his Tlingit heritage, led to an interest in cooking with locally sourced, indigenous Alaskan foods.

After attending CIA, and working in restaurants in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and North Carolina, Kinneen made his way back to Anchorage, where he lived and worked for 15 years. To be closer to extended family, he and his family recently relocated to North Carolina, where he serves as executive chef for both Happy Cardinal Catering and the Italian restaurant The Boot. And he travels back to Alaska regularly and still considers it “home.”

“Getting married and having children helped me realize I needed to know more about my own Alaskan heritage,” says Kinneen.

The result is “Fresh Alaska” and “Traditional Foods, Contemporary Chef,” two web series that show him traveling around Alaska, harvesting and cooking traditional native foods. On screen, Kinneen can be seen doing things like collecting sea cucumber in Sitka, eating salmon berry flowers, catching shrimp in Prince William Sound, cooking with reindeer sausage, and picking berries to make Akutaq (the traditional Alaska Native version of ice cream). He partnered with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) to produce both series.

Rob Kinneen cooking with one of the health educators at the Southcentral Foundation as part of his “Fresh Alaska” web series.

Kinneen’s series give his audience the chance to see how local foods can be prepared at minimal cost. “Making these videos helped show what food means in different regions of the community,” he says. “It also inspired me to consider how people are finding answers to food sustainability.”

As part of his work, he visited places like Tyonek, Alaska, southwest of Anchorage; the town’s conservation district recently spent a million dollars to build a culvert over a salmon stream to help the fish migrate. Kinneen saw firsthand how the Tyonek Tribal Conservation District has worked to take back health and wellness in the community through sustainability, with programs such as the “seed start” program at the local school.

“They have a greenhouse and an irrigation system that is set up with a solar generator,” he says. “Solar panels have a life of 30 years, which makes them much more viable than using a regular generator and diesel fuel.”

The solar-powered generator to irrigate Tyonek’s community garden. (Photo courtesy of Rob Kinneen)

He also visited Meyers Farm in Bethel, where owner Tim Meyer has created a successful organic farming community in far western Alaska, producing hundreds of pounds of produce each season.

“Ninety-six percent of the food in Alaska is imported, which leads to questions about food security,” says Kinneen. “Tim Meyer is growing produce on the tundra. He uses cold-climate farming techniques and grows on a nutrient-rich riverbed. The produce is preserved in an underground cellar with a drip oil pan stove that keeps temperatures at about 34 degrees. If you can successfully grow vegetables in a place like Bethel, I think you can do it almost anywhere.”

Grocery stores in the more remote areas are especially poorly stocked. “It’s not unusual to see a $19.00 fermented [i.e., old] pineapple or a $9.00 head of brown iceberg lettuce for,” says Kinneen. For this reason, making fresh and natural food accessible to all people has also become a passion project for Kinneen, and he has partnered with groups like the Food Bank of Alaska to highlight how Alaskans can use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dollars (or “food stamps”) at farmers’ markets.

With one in seven people in the state considered food-insecure, and access to SNAP threatened in negotiations over the current farm bill, helping people eat nutritious, local food whenever possible is more important than ever. And Alaska’s remote geography often means that its communities face additional obstacles in accessing resources, and thus they must rely on wild foods to fill the gaps.

Roasted salmon served on a bed of Tyonek-grown vegetables; only the salt, pepper, and oil came from outside of Alaska. (Photo courtesy of Rob Kinneen)

Kinneen’s work has culminated in his new cookbook, Fresh Alaska. The recipes, such as arctic polenta with razor clams, combine contemporary, upscale cooking with traditional Alaskan food. It’s a big step for Alaska cookbooks, despite the fact that chefs in high-end restaurants around the state have been incorporating indigenous ingredients such as foraged mushrooms, spruce tips, and locally caught seafood in recent years.

“My main beef with Alaskan cookbooks is that they are either very esoteric or they don’t contain Alaskan ingredients,” he says. “I wanted to promote the people and places I came from, with insight into the subsistence side, [while] also being responsible as a chef.”

While Kinneen and his family enjoy their life in North Carolina, his Alaskan roots are never far from his mind. “The experiences I had at places like Meyers Farm and Tyonek were a huge inspiration for my cookbook,” he says. “To see the efforts of a small village to take back food sustainability and prosper is truly humbling. Food is the connection between all of us.”

Minimum Wage Has Become a Starvation Wage.

Revere Press

November 15, 2018

It’s time for a raise.

The Minimum Wage Has Become a Starvation wage

It's time for a raise.

Posted by Revere Press on Thursday, November 15, 2018

Ralph Cramden knows one when he see’s one!

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Posted by Beverley Massay on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Cuomo: Trump’s record on veterans is disgraceful

Cuomo Prime Time

November 16, 2018

Chris Cuomo: Why the GI mess? Why the VA mess? Why no real help for suicide and mental health treatment?

Why are Trump’s mystery friends from Mar-a-Lago report…

Cuomo: Trump's record on veterans is disgraceful

Chris Cuomo: Why the GI mess? Why the VA mess? Why no real help for suicide and mental health treatment? Why are Trump's mystery friends from Mar-a-Lago reportedly calling shots at the VA with no oversight? We have not covered this enough and as I told you on Veterans' Day, we will do better. https://cnn.it/2z7rVXa

Posted by Cuomo Prime Time on Thursday, November 15, 2018

Democrats Can’t ‘Work With’ Republicans Until Republicans Return to Reality

Esquire

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire November 15, 2018

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla - Getty Images

The Hill has turned from a reliable Capitol Hill tip-sheet into a clickbait farm of the highest order, but it’s also still well-wired into what’s going on in the national legislature. So, on Thursday, it was no surprise to find that it was The Hill that sent the feline screeching from the burlap:

[Rep. Tom] Reed, co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, said the growing frustration with gridlock, polarization and a top-heavy leadership approach in Congress are the reasons why several members in his party are willing to supply Pelosi with some Speaker votes in exchange for extracting an overhaul of the House rules.

“I would be willing, as a Republican on the floor of the House, to support a Speaker candidate, including Nancy Pelosi, who supports these rule reforms,” Reed said at an event for The Hill sponsored by American University’s School of Public Affairs and the Kennedy Political Union.

“There are other members that are as committed as I am to this on the Republican side that are willing to do that. But I’ll let them address it individually,” he added.

Photo credit: Bill Clark - Getty Images Nancy Pelosi, who did not arrive at the Capitol Thursday morning on a turnip truck, was ready for this shell game.

But at a jam-packed press conference at the Capitol on Thursday, Pelosi said she has the votes, right now, to win the gavel on the floor with only Democratic support. And she said she would refuse any offers of help from the Republicans.

“Oh, please,” she said. “No, never.”

“I intend to win the Speakership with Democratic votes,” she said.

There are two things to remember as we go forward. First, there is absolutely no reason for Democratic congresscritters to assume good faith on any subject on the part of their Republican colleagues. Second, the most notable thing about the Problem Solvers Caucus is that it never has solved a single problem.

Now, as the results of their catastrophic midterm elections continue to roll in-for Democrats, this has been like a political advent calendar, every day a new treat-we hear from PSC Republicans (and their feckless Democratic allies) about how imperative it is to “reform” the processes of the House. But Pelosi remains smarter than they are, and she has a formidable ally in Congressman James McGovern-Worcester, represent!-the incoming chairman of the House Rules Committee. They will determine what reforms, if any, go into effect, and they don’t need any help from Republicans who are currently swimming away from a listing, burning hulk.

Photo credit: Tom Williams - Getty Images In addition, the PSC is hand-in-glove with the #FiveWhiteGuys in their attempt to oust Pelosi as Speaker. Again, from The Hill:

Ten Democrats in the bipartisan, 48-member group are vowing to withhold their support for Pelosi – or any other Speaker nominee – unless the candidate commits, in writing, to certain changes in House rules designed to empower rank-and-file lawmakers and break partisan gridlock. “Our position is … we would only support a Speaker who is willing to support our ‘Break the Gridlock’ package,” Gottheimer said Tuesday by phone. “That’s what we’ve committed to, and where we continue to be.” Gottheimer noted that several House leaders – including Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) – have both issued statements backing the Problem Solvers rules overhaul.

Well, if Steve Scalise, a fire-eating partisan who used to hang with the worst of Louisiana’s white supremacists, is on board, what can possibly go wrong there?

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla - Getty Images To their eternal credit, at least so far, the progressives in the House, including the ones elected only last week, have seen through this charade which is aimed primarily at making sure a progressive equivalent of the Freedom Caucus never rises to true influence. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can see a church by daylight. From Politico:

“I don’t want to see Miami underwater, I don’t want to see my own district underwater, and I know that Leader Pelosi doesn’t, either,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters Tuesday as she joined protesters at the leader’s office. “What we need to show her is that we’re here to back her up in pushing for 100 percent renewable energy and we’re here to support that kind of bold, progressive leadership.”

Are they pushing this? Of course, they’re pushing. That’s what legislators do. But at least they’re pushing on an actually serious problem, and not chasing bipartisan rainbows alongside a party that’s still in denial that the climate crisis is real and a party that, on this and so many other issues, remains out of its gourd.

The President* Is in an Outright Frenzy Over the Mueller Probe

Esquire

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire November 15, 2018

Photo credit: JIM WATSON - Getty Images

Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:- ‘Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” –The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902.

The Mueller probe-what he knows and about whom and when in god’s name is he going to tell the rest of us-hangs over everything in our politics now. In many ways, it has entered the realm of legend, since the facts Mueller and his team have accumulated remain their own private property. The investigation now has taken on a talismanic quality; the great Democratic sweep in the recent midterm elections have presented us with an incoming House majority that will take a more active interest in Mueller’s findings than the departing Republican majority would have.

Because of this, and before they even discover where to get a decent takeout lunch in the Capitol, the new members of Congress enter into their jobs knowing that a huge and consequential series of acts already predetermined are about to fall upon them, but nobody knows exactly what those will be, and most of the newcomers are positively nerve-struck at the idea of talking about what those acts might be.

Even worse, down at Camp Runamuck, the target of the investigation is shredding his last nerves and flinging them out onto the electric Twitter machine in what only can be called an outright frenzy. To wit, and just from Thursday morning:

The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t…….care how many lives the ruin….These are Angry People, including the highly conflicted Bob Mueller, who worked for Obama for 8 years. They won’t even look at all of the bad acts and crimes on the other side. A TOTAL WITCH HUNT LIKE NO OTHER IN AMERICAN HISTORY!…Universities will someday study what highly conflicted (and NOT Senate approved) Bob Mueller and his gang of Democrat thugs have done to destroy people. Why is he protecting Crooked Hillary, Comey, McCabe, Lisa Page & her lover, Peter S., and all of his friends on the other side.

I pity the poor staffer who’s tasked every morning with scouring the White House trying to find the president*’s hinges. All of this is simply a farrago of Foxified nonsense. Mueller is a Republican who also worked for the Bush Administration and, oh, why bother?

There is, however, a sense of something big suddenly Closer Than It Appears in the White House side-mirrors. And the new members of the House are going to have to get comfortable with the fact that history is going to be dropped on them in one big and unwieldy lump as soon as they’re all sworn in. They may have come to Washington to work on infrastructure or education or healthcare or the opioid epidemic, but confronting a renegade profiteer (and, very likely, criminal) president* is going to tie up a great deal of their first term in Congress.

Because the president* is losing it bigly, and because Bob Mueller, with no expression on his face, is reaching across his desk for another file.

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Marco Rubio’s Biblical Criticism Of Florida Election Recounts Goes Awry

HuffPost

Lee Moran, HuffPost November 14, 2018

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) went full Old Testament on Wednesday with his latest criticism of vote recounting in the midterm election races for Florida governor and Senate.

Rubio: What is crooked cannot be made straight,and you cannot count what is not there. Ecclesiastes 1:15

Rubio regularly shares biblical passages in an attempt to make his political points, but his latest post riled many people on Twitter more than most:

Marc E. Elias: You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. Exodus 23:1

Stephen Michael Senia: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” Matt 6:5

Molly Jong-Fast: So much bible but not much moral

Janet Shan: I’m thinking more of Psalms 10:7: “His mouth is full of lies and threats. Trouble and evil are under his tongue.”

That includes you, Rick Scott, Donald Trump and the majority of the GOP.#CountEveryVote

Patrick Belcher: Sounds like the Trump administration to me!

Brandon Horan: “Two things you should never trust: The preacher who tells you to vote, and a politician who tells you how to pray”
Politics 101:01.

Kelly Girl: Time to close the Bible and open the Constitution Marco.

Joey’s Mom Has An Edge:

Rubio this week accused Democrats of trying to steal the midterm elections with the recounts, which are mandated under state law because the margins between Andrew Gillum (D) and Ron DeSantis (R) in the governor race and Bill Nelson (D) and Rick Scott (R) in the Senate race are less than 0.5 percent.

At the shrine of first U.S. saint, who came to America as an immigrant

Chicago Suntimes

At the shrine of first U.S. saint, who came to America as an immigrant

By Neil Steinberg November 11, 2018

The National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini is the former chapel of Columbus Hospital, which was closed in 2001. The shrine, which re-opened in 2012 has the upper right arm bone of Cabrini, the first American saint, displayed at the altar. | Neil Steinberg/Sun-Times

The contrast would look trite in fiction.

Facing Lincoln Park, the luxurious Lincoln Park 2520, where condo prices soar toward $6 million a unit. The building, opened in 2012, has two pools, a movie theater and a private garden. Designed by Chicago architect Lucien LaGrange, the center 39-story tower is flanked by a pair of 21-story wings, given a distinct Parisian air with its metal mansard roof.

Nestled behind — the building actually wraps around it — and sharing the same address is the National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini. It’s the former chapel of Columbus Hospital, shuttered in 2001; when the 3-acre hospital site was sold to developers, the stipulation was the shrine would be preserved.

And it is, having re-opened in 2012. No pool, but the first American saint’s upper right arm bone displayed at the altar in a glass and bronze reliquary. The bedroom where she died in 1917. Her bed, where prayers for the sick are sometimes tucked under the pillow, and it is not unknown for a sick child to be laid upon the mattress in hope of a cure.

Born in Italy, Cabrini dreamt of working in China, but was sent to the United States instead, arriving in 1889. The contempt held for Italian-American immigrants at that time can hardly be overstated. They were seen as not white, lower than even the hated Irish, sometimes lynched — the largest mass lynching in the United States was of 11 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891.

Cabrini, undeterred by all this, traveled the country, starting convents, schools, orphanages and hospitals. She was made a saint in 1946 — 100,000 people attended the celebratory mass at Soldier Field. In 1950 she became the patron saint of immigrants.

Which makes her particularly significant at the moment. I popped in last week, being in the neighborhood. Director Sister Bridget Zanin was sent for, and we spoke of Mother Cabrini.

Sister Bridget Zanin, of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is director of The National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini in Lincoln Park, celebrating a festival this week honoring the first American saint. | Neil Steinberg/Sun-Times

“During this time we need her help and her intercession more than ever,” Zanin said. “She is a saint. She is in heaven with God, therefore she can intercede with us.”

Well then, I said, she should get right on that. Because immigrants are being demonized wrongly.

“Though they’re immigrants, they’re people like we are,” she agreed. “They’re looking for a way to better their lives and the lives of their families. They’re still our brothers and sisters who are suffering, a lot of them fleeing from suffering, fleeing from violence, fleeing from poverty. They want a better life in a better country. The United States is the first country in the world.”

Or was. Some argue the country is now full, using slurs once reserved for Italians like Mother Cabrini; Zanin pushed back against the calumny coming from Washington.

“We can’t accommodate everybody,” she said. “But we can accommodate some people. There are a lot of good people, who make a big sacrifice, walking so far away. We have to give people a chance; we like people to give us a chance, why can’t we give others a chance? Mother Cabrini herself was an immigrant.”

As was Zanin, who came to the United States in 1964 from Brazil.

“I wasn’t treated so badly,” she said. “There was a roof over my head. I had work. I didn’t know the language.”

But as she continued, her tone darkened.

“I felt I was treated as a second-class citizen,” she said. “I may have an accent, but I picked up English pretty fast.”

Religion is neutral, a tool, like a hammer. You can use it to build a house, or use it to bash strangers. Some use their faith to oppress; some use it to elevate.

“Fear and hatred shouldn’t have any place in our lives,” Zanin said. “These people are people like we are. If we turn away from our brothers and sisters we turn away from ourselves and the values of the United States. Because God said He lives in each one of us. And God will bless us if we are open to receive our brothers and sisters. If we turn away from our brothers and sisters, we turn away from God.”

A Cabrini Festival runs through Tuesday. Sunday is “An Evening of Prayer” with Denise La Giglia; Monday, researcher Ellen Skerrett speaks on “Cabrini & Her Chicago Connection;” Tuesday is Cabrini’s Feast Day, with a celebration led by Bishop Frank Kane. All events start at 6 p.m. at the shrine, 2520 N. Lakeview, behind the big beautiful condo building.

A condo building towers over the National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini. It’s the former chapel of Columbus Hospital, which was closed in 2001. When the hospital site was sold to developers, the stipulation was that the shrine would be preserved. | Neil Steinberg/Sun-Times