Talking about cramming two hot button topics into a single headline! It was announced this week (with later Vatican confirmation) that Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to sign marriage licenses for same sex applicants and was subsequently jailed for six days, met privately with Pope Francis this past Thursday when he was in Washington. According to the Washington Post: “The pair reportedly chatted about bravery, then hugged and exchanged promises of prayer.

Young filmmaker Christopher Hudson has pulled off a headline-grabbing feat. Armed with only a $20,000 budget raised through crowd-funding and gifted with remarkable talent for cutting edge camera work and music/script editing, Hudson directs and stars in this 1:26:00 length docudrama, “Leopard Vision.” Since its September 7 release on YouTube, the movie has gone viral (194,000 YouTube views in less than three weeks). Critics are weighing in, including Hyperfresh, an independent pop culture magazine, which gave “Leopard Vision” a five-star movie review.

How do you steel yourself against the heart-rending refugee photographs that now wall-paper cyberspace? The lifeless body of 3 year old Alan Kurdi, lying face down in the wet sand, drowned along with his mother and brother in a desperate effort to cross the sea in a dinghy in order to flee the bloody Syrian mayhem. The emaciated Middle-eastern and North African men, women and children walking for miles and miles only to cling to a razor-edged chain-link fence hastily erected by Hungary to stem the massive overflow of fleeing refugees into their country.

So is she a hero or a villain? Rowan County (Kentucky) clerk Kim Davis was welcomed by adulating throngs this Tuesday, when U.S. District Court Judge David Bunning, who had incarcerated her last week for contempt of court, released her from jail. At issue is Ms. Davis’ contention that as an Apostolic Christian her conscience forbids her from complying with the Supreme Court’s summer decision declaring same sex marriages legal across this nation.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published research this Tuesday that might be of particular interest to those of us planning on some Labor Day biking. If the report had simply stated that biking accidents are on the rise, who’d be surprised, given the increased number of bikers of all ages across the country (the result of what some are calling “the Lance Armstrong effect”).

Ever heard of Pugwash? I hadn’t either, until we ended up there this summer after a very long northeasterly drive from Berrien Springs (1500+ miles). Turns out Pugwash is a small town in Nova Scotia, on the far eastern side of Canada and perched on the red clay shores of the Northumberland Strait.

The meteoric rise of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has flummoxed the talking heads of the news media. How could this brash entrepreneurial business tycoon be attracting such “If the election were held today I’d vote for him” kind of support? After all, politics in America isn’t a television reality show . . . is it?

But for new students at Andrews University, perhaps there are a few lessons tucked away in Trump’s quest for the Whitehouse, lessons for your own pursuit of that “impossible dream”:

Sunday morning while still lying in bed, I decided to do the arithmetic. Perhaps it was the simple pleasure of sleeping in our own bed that triggered the notion. And so I counted the number of summer nights we slept in a bed not our own. I was surprised and so recalculated the number. It’s true. The total nights away from our favorite bed (from the last week of May to the last week of July) added up to forty. Brazil, Collegedale, West Virginia, Austin, San Antonio, Pugwash Nova Scotia, Vermont.

Don’t you love to hear, “Take a number,” when you’re already in a hurry! But have you noticed—it’s as if the headlines bombarding us lately are themselves stepping out of an interminable “take a number” line. Must be why something keeps telling us we have yet to hear from the last of them.

Here are a few of the ones we’ve already heard from this spring turned summer: