Category: A Sampler of Posts
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The other daily specials.
The last fast-food restaurant I took the kids to was Sonic, an eat-in-your-car drive-in kind of place. We were in Bloomington, I didn't want to get the sleeping baby out of the car, and I thought the novelty of the roller-skating car hops would be entertaining. (I was right about that one, by the way.)…
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Bland and cautious: Two posts that say something I meant to say.
First, from Darwin, a few weeks ago. [T]here are a good many people who know me in real life who read the blog. More than that, after writing a blog for four-and-a-half years, you get to think of a number of your long-time readers and commenters are friends. The blog becomes like a corner coffee…
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The corpus and the cross.
Rich Leonardi has a cryptic post up about a hypothetical bumper sticker he'd like to see in the Cincinnati Archdiocese: "We Preach Christ Crucified." I read through the comments while waiting for him to update and explain himself, and came upon this comment: Evangelical friends of mine maintain that their cross, devoid of a corpus,…
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Dialogue.
Tito Edwards at The American Catholic has a post on ecumenism that is followed by an interesting combox discussion. Writing about institutional-level dialogue and ecumenism, Tito states: Ecumenism, whatever that means anymore, is a dead cat. It’s going nowhere because it has no idea what it is. Hence the forty years of fruitless labor…
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Short lived.
Something about this memoir of a severely malformed baby's short life, written by his 16-year-old sister, brought something home to me. One of those things I knew in my mind but that nevertheless struck me with new, raw power as I read her words. How crazy that a substance as unimaginably beautiful as the soul…
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Feeling fear.
I've never had trouble with the concept that Jesus felt physical pain, that He physically suffered. Seems obvious to me: If you have a body, it hurts sometimes. And that doesn't feel good, even if you know the pain is necessary and a sign of something good. Anybody who's given birth knows this. Pain is…
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I hope you are still reading Charlotte Was Both.
My heart leaps into my throat every time that blog comes up highlighted in my feed reader. I think: Oh Amy, how are you doing? And what have you got to tell us? She is writing about how things knit together, and I am experiencing a certain knit-togetherness too. Her Michael died suddenly, on the…
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Self awareness.
Here is a thesis that occurred to me over the weekend as I mused about success and failure, about weakness and willpower, about competing selves: Could it be that… once you KNOW what you should do… moral behavior, or "good" behavior, or "healthy" behavior (take your pick) is nothing more than the setting-up of…
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Via dolorosa.
Last Friday I was staying at a high-end casino and spa in Las Vegas, part of a vacation we take with Mark’s family, on his parents’ dime, every couple of years. (Vegas was chosen for its something-for-everybody nature. Even though I don’t think any of us did any gambling.) You know how when you’re…
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Speak, show, argue, listen, rebut, correct, pray.
Doctrinal Note On Some Aspects of Evangelization, a clarification on the faithful's responsibility to evangelize, produced by the CDF. (link is a pdf file of 14 pages). It's an argument that positive evangelization is still necessary, as well as a caution against attempts to put dishonesty and coercion at the service of the Gospel. This…
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Faith —> hope —> charity.
A friend of mine wrote to me on my post about Spe Salvi, where I'd written B16 begins with a discourse about the nature of Christian hope and how it intersects with faith. He talks about the "certainty of hope," which sounded paradoxical to me at first (isn't hope something that concerns the thing you…
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Specializing in generalities.
When I was a very little child someone bought for me a book. It lived at my grandparents’ house; I browsed through it whenever I visited. I remember it was a fat, large-size paperback, with cheap pages. I do not remember its name, but I think of it as the Big Book About Everything. That…
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