Guest Columns

By Michael Jinkins
President of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Back in November, I pulled down from the shelf some favorite books by William Stringfellow and started going through them again. I found I had underlined virtually all of the sentences in one of these books. The book, The Politics of Spirituality, was published by Westminster Press in 1984. And I can open it to almost any page and see my underlining and marginalia.

It was an exciting first week back in Frankfort. On Tuesday, January 3, we officially began the 2017 Session of the Kentucky General Assembly and we hit the ground running. Speaker-elect Jeff Hoover was officially sworn in and became Speaker Hoover and we welcomed the new House majority. Two new members were also sworn into the Senate.

Dear Readers,
I would like to share information with you from the 2016 Kentucky Kids Count County Data Book. This is a project of Kentucky youth Advocates and the University of Louisville Kentucky State Data Center. Each county has been scored and given a child well-being ranking for comparison with other counties. These scores were assigned based upon how they scored on 16 key indicators, 4 each under 4 domains listed below:
l Economic Security
l Education
l Health
l Family and Community

This week, the General Assembly returns to the Capitol to begin the 2017 Regular Session. Although the House and Senate are as old as Kentucky, this is only the ninth odd-year legislative session since our current state constitution was adopted in the late 1800s.
We actually were one of the last states to have its legislature meet annually. Now, there are just four that have not made the switch: Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Texas.