Spiritually, I am sort of a mutt. I was born Methodist, before being baptized Catholic when I was 5 or so. I was an altar boy and went to Catholic school, a devout practitioner until college, when I couldn’t reconcile the sudden death of a friend with the God I understood. Along the way, I learned about some aspects of Islam through Five Percenter hip-hop groups like Brand Nubian and Poor Righteous Teachers, and reading Malcolm X. Later, I married a mostly non-practicing Jewish woman who took me to temple occasionally — her stepfather is a rabbi — and Passover regularly, before we divorced. I’ve been to T.D. Jakes’ Potter’s House for Easter service.

I felt a connection at each step, but nothing lasting. It had been years since I had prayed and really meant it. But I did just that one evening in January when Imam Omar Suleiman asked me to, at a candlelight vigil at Thanks-Giving Square opposing the Trump administration’s short-lived travel ban. What struck me about him then — and when he spoke at Thanks-Giving Square last July after the downtown shooting, and all the other times I’ve been around him — is his ability to very simply get to the humanity at the core of all religions.

That’s part of why I wanted to write about him for months. I finally got the chance to profile him in the July issue of D. But he’s so involved in so many things, I only was able to touch on his work with the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. So after you read my story, check out this Huffington Post piece about Yaqeen, too.

Carrolton’s Spa Castle In Hot Water. The 24-hour, 140,000-square-foot Korean spa is under fire after four women filed a lawsuit, accusing male employees of creeper antics (taking sly snaps of bathers, walking into the women’s locker room, etc.) all of which is not necessarily surprising after hearing the wading-pool sex stories coming from the Queens, New York flagship. In March, Spa Castle’s New York-based owners were arrested for evading more than $1.5 million in taxes.

Fort Worth Officer Fired for 2015 Shooting Incident. Officer Courtney Johnson admitted that his life was not in danger when he shot Craig Adams, a man who was on his own property, on one knee, and who had already dropped the large barbecue fork in his hand when Johnson pulled the trigger. Adams injuries were not life threatening. Johnson’s May trial for aggravated assault by a public servant ended in a mistrial, and yesterday, he was officially fired from the force.

Billy Bob’s on Shaky Ground. Billy and his son Concho are not getting along, which does not bode well for the largest honky tonk in the world.

MegaFest Begins Today. If you notice an uptick in activity in downtown Dallas, it might be because T.D. Jakes’ bi-annual, four-day faith festival is expected to bring 100,000 attendees to the convention center.

Taco Charlton Cashes In. The Cowboys defensive end signed his first taco-related endorsement deal with Tex-Mex chain Taco Bueno, coming on the heels of an agreement with Big Red. He isn’t the only pro to make a deal based on a name: Charlton’s one-time Michigan teammate Jake Butt inked a deal with Charmin in April.

In the aftermath of last week’s Dallas Area Rapid Transit board vote, which kept DART from taking out a $1 billion loan to build the Cotton Belt rail line from Plano to DFW Airport, the debate over the future of the transit agency has been framed as the city versus the suburbs.

This is somewhat understandable. After all, DART was sold as a regional network, and the cornerstone of that regional network is a light-rail system that is designed as a regional commuter rail service. By sheer geographic necessity, the first 30 years of construction of the network required building lots of miles of rails in Dallas. Now, having poured their sales tax dollars into that construction, the suburbs are impatient to see their portion of the rail finally delivered.

In a recent Dallas Morning News op-ed, former Addison city manager Ron Whitehead restates the terms of this mutual trust.

“We know the promises that were made and that Dallas could not have built the system that exists inside Dallas in a timely manner without the commitment of the suburbs,” Whitehead writes. “Dallas has already been well-served by its membership in DART. … Where now is the leadership that will talk about the region?”

However logical Whitehead’s argument may seem to appear at first glance, it is a dangerous perspective. This is not because DART and Dallas don’t have a commitment to think regionally about transit but rather because it is the expression of a political perspective that has long obscured the very mission, goals, and measures of success of the regional transit agency. Whitehead’s comments reflect an attitude that equates DART with its light-rail network, and it doubles down on a long-term transportation planning strategy that was questionable 30 years ago when it was first devised and is today demonstrably a failure.

Incomes vary for any number of reasons—education, skills and talent, type of job, productivity, work effort, wealth, industries’ ups and downs, bad or good luck. The simple truth about the labor market goes a long way toward explaining the wide and persistent income gaps among Dallas-Fort Worth cities.

In 2015, median family incomes ranged from a high of $211,847 in University Park to a low of $28,427 in Wilmer, a small suburb to Dallas’ southeast. With median family income of $46,902, Dallas ranks fourth from the bottom, behind Wilmer, Hutchins, and Seagoville.

Median Income in Four North Texas Cities

Some other large North Texas cities:  $124,794 in Frisco, $101,750 in Plano, $78,682 in Arlington, $62,345 in Fort Worth, $57,926 in Irving, and $55,417 in Garland. Overall, the median for the DFW metropolitan area was $70,673. For the nation, it was $66,011.

Dallas generates a tremendous amount of wealth—the product of all those gleaming downtown skyscrapers, a vibrant financial sector, the booming real-estate sector, and the retail and services industries spread across the city. So why do the city’s incomes trail all but a handful of suburbs and the nation as a whole?

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When my wife and I first moved to Dallas 13 years ago, the directive to our real estate agent was simple: we want old, we want trees, we want easy access to DFW Airport (where my wife was going to work), we don’t want to spend a lot of money, and we never want to move again. Oh, and we’ve got one week to look.

The real estate agent took us to one neighborhood, Oak Cliff. We looked at three houses on Saturday; we made an offer on the third home, a 1924 bungalow, the following day. It was a for-sale-by-owner, so things got dicey for a minute when the artsy owner insisted on moving into the guest house for a month or two after we closed, but ultimately we didn’t care. We had old, we had trees, and we were never going to move again.

Thirteen years later, we have to use an upholstery clip remover to jimmy the front door so that it will lock because the foundation has shifted. The window blinds have started to fall apart on the living room window where rain leaks in, which in the big scheme of things doesn’t matter so much because we rarely sit in the living room due to the gale-force winds that blow through the original single-pane pulley windows. The rear screen door resembles a bear attack after the neighborhood stray cats decided to use it to sharpen their claws. And yet, our house has nearly doubled in value.

So when the editorial team was researching the city’s best neighborhoods for our Great Places to Live feature, I was sorely tempted.

The best performances, parades, and festivals for Independence Day in North Texas.