It’s a good neighborhood here at Freethought Blogs. There’s a lot to read, a lot to learn, a lot to talk about. I’ve barely scratched the surface so far.

This morning I was belatedly reading Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article about Michele Bachmann, and there was, in the section on Bachmann’s inaccurate account of her Iowa history –

In fact, Muskego is a town in Wisconsin, the state where Bachmann’s forebears,  the Munsons, settled in 1857, twelve years after the manifesto was written.  Then, in 1861, they moved west, to the Dakota Territory, near present-day Elk  Point, South Dakota. That is where, according to the family history that  Bachmann relied on, they encountered the awful winter and the flooding and the  drought and what the text calls “grasshoppers.” The Munsons seem to have been  part of the group that established the first Lutheran church in the Dakota  Territory, but there were already Lutheran congregations in Iowa when they  arrived there, in late 1864 or early 1865. As the author and historian Chris  Rodda has pointed out, the story chronicled is not quite one of superhuman  perseverance on the frontier; rather, it’s the story of a family fleeing to the  relative safety and civilization of settled Iowa.

Chris Rodda is right next door, a fellow FTB blogger. See what I mean? Good neighborhood!

She’s the Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and her stuff is fascinating. Don’t expect any posts from me for awhile, I’ll be too busy reading.

Check her blog tomorrow. Srsly.