The tendency for patients to become your friends makes hospice visits both easier and more difficult: easier in the sense of occupying space and engaging in meaningful conversation with people you love, and more difficult when you lose them.

“I started to cry,” Emily Leonard said about her reaction hearing why girls could no longer be altar servers. “Before we left, I said, ‘Please let the girls who are being confirmed the chance to serve once. … It’s a different way to connect to God. You are joyful and happy.’ ”

There’s a city that starts with an “S” that has municipal elections this year, where solutions to homelessness – or the lack thereof – have been controversial, where the questions of experience versus new blood are being raised and businesses are spending a boatload of money on their preferred candidates.

What is sometimes a useful tool for jumpstarting change can quickly begin to undermine the very people it presumes to help.

The evening will feature tons of cool videos, fun and revealing live interviews on stage with Gonzaga men’s assistant coach Tommy Lloyd and women’s head coach Lisa Fortier, as well as lots of former players, including beloved Bahamian Bulldog Quentin Hall. Oh, and Big Ed will be there.

The relationship between police chief and ombudsman – always bound to have some inherent tension – has devolved into a chilly estrangement, growing partly from criticisms regarding a still-secret case in which an officer reportedly heaved a police dog into a car with a suspect.

“The Report,” a new film that aims to be in the tradition of 1970s political thrillers like “All the President’s Men,” is set for a theatrical release in November.

When someone lands on the street we have a moral obligation to care for them in whatever way we can. Maybe for some of us that’s through prayer or volunteering or donating money or taking political action.

Even though it means the organizations will lose a source of funding from the contributions they get for short flights over the host cities, the public rides should stop. The takeoffs and landings are getting too risky to use them as passenger planes.

Clergy members of a church that

To believe in the love of God is not to believe he dismisses offenses or does not care about them. No, it is to cling confidently by faith to the wonder that Jesus endured God’s fierce justice for your sin, despite his perfection, so that you might be forgiven and credited with his holiness.

Not all groups fighting climate change are fans of Jay Inslee.

For Veronique Changa Changa and her children, the catastrophe they fled in the Congo was vast, even global, in nature, but they’ve recently experienced a more intimate, personal tragedy: The oldest son, Paul, who had become a family patriarch, died unexpectedly in late August.

The city of Spokane, like many municipalities, has a Code Enforcement office to respond to complaints about problem properties. The process is straightforward, the implementation is complex. One person’s peeling paint may be another’s shabby chic.

Everywhere we look, from majestic mountains or sunsets to the tiniest stamen in a flower, we need to be increasingly aware of how our world is nourished by every living organism around us. Whether we refer to “God’s creation,” the “natural world” or some other term, we are smack-dab in the middle of it. Let’s be aware.

Sometimes things are just meant to be. Like when you work for seven years researching and writing a book that takes a massive deep dive into the complicated and often misunderstood world of whistleblowers only to have one of the largest and most important whistleblower cases in our country’s history begin at almost exactly the same time your book is to be released. That’s exactly what happened to Tom Mueller.

These figures are new, but the phenomenon isn’t. But incomes in the city are not just low compared to booming Seattle – they are hovering near the poverty line, indicating that a large proportion of residents are living below it.

When so many voices are pulling us apart, the center cannot hold. Language is the last refuge of common culture, and we’ve abused and overused it. When everyone is Hitler, no one is Hitler. Or a racist, misogynist, homophobe, Islamophobe, Nazi, fascist, socialist or bigot.

This week’s announcement that the city would again pursue temporary solutions, almost all of which still have yet to be identified, for sheltering the homeless during winter put an exclamation point on a year of fecklessness and fumbling from the Condon administration.