Category: A Sampler of Posts
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Pickiness.
One problem with being “on a diet” in America: It tends to make you an aggravated, and possibly aggravating, dinner guest. This is where the habit of gluttony* really shows its true colors, and in so many different ways. Our cultural expectation of overeating as part of a celebration — and I don’t mean ordinary,…
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The remains of impulse.
I was obese [editing note: I’d say “fat” today] for my entire life, up till age 33. That year, for no apparent reason, I had an epiphany: a new desire. The twin desires for a better [thinner] body and better health, I’d always had those. As long as I remember I alternated between wanting thinness badly enough to work…
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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…
bearing blog 