A Reformation by stealth, right here in River City...

... or at least sometimes it seems so. While I had the little lummox with me yesterday we walked past a large van in the park that said "Iglesia Evangelica Emmanuel." I see a lot of that around here - a lot of signs in Spanish for what are clearly Protestant churches.

So what is going on? Nearly all of the 6 or 7 thousand Hispanics in the county come from Catholic backgrounds. I can only assume that once they get here they feel neglected or alienated from the Catholic Church, which is stretched very thin up here in Cloud Protestant Land and Anglophone in any case. So -- more and more of them slip out of the Catholic orbit and into other churches.

Which, for the local people, means that they become less 'foreign' in some sense.