Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts...special hurricane edition

Would a Hurricane Edwards sue itself for the damage it caused? - Jeff of "Curt Jester"

In any case, let's pray for them there people in Florida, who have obviously been sinning or something. - Thomas of "Endlessly Rocking"

When Elizabeth flew in right after Charley, we were sitting around the second night without power in the candlelight, sweating, and wondered why hurricanes are given such harmless names: Charley, Frances, Donna, etc., like they were relatives or something. Why don't they give them more appropriate names, signifying their nastiness? "Yeah," said Ebe, "like Hurricane Sh*t." "Elizabeth!" said her mother... - William Luse of "Apologia"

Perhaps the highlight of the night was this: John Glenn introduced Kerry. During his introduction, at a moment when the entire crowd was silent and during a pause in his intro, Regis Martin (a fellow prof here) yelled at the top of his voice to the great consternation of the Democrats: "Go back to the Moooon!" You've really got to know Regis - he sure is something. - Fr. Wilson on Amy's blog, concerning Kerry's unlikely visit to Steubenville, Ohio

Some of us seek God as the Beautiful - (Augustine); some as the Good (Francis), some as the True (Thomas Aquinas) and some of us as the One - because we ourselves are inwardly divided (some of the saints who suffered from depression and mental illness seek God as the One). - commenter on Amy Welborn's blog

As an ancestral Democrat, may I say how thoroughly I enjoyed Zell Miller's stemwinder? Heard it on the car radio, and his Southern cadences, like the call of a baseball game, fit the medium. He was just spitting fire – I can see how political speechifying, back when it was a sport and an art, drew crowds. - Mark of "Irish Elk"

Zaragossa's soccer team had won the national championship the night before, and now, the whole team, and town, were going to process into the basilica to present the trophy to the Virgin. For me, it was such a stunning blend of the sacred with the secular. I was actually a little scandalized by the way Our Blessed Mother was draped in a soccer banner in the basilica. But that is my sick American "separation of faith and state" problem. I don't think she has a problem with it at all. In fact, I think the Divine was surely smiling down at all the people bringing their children to be photographed next to the Madonna of Pilar, up there wearing Zaragossa's team colors. (I bought a nice sized Our Lady of Pilar statue and brought it home. Tonight I am going to have a ritual ceremony of draping her in a Boston Red Sox T-shirt...oh, some of you think I am kidding...) - Barbara of "Church of the Masses", on her trip to Spain

If you think the [Ono] Ekeh family was stranded without means of support when he left the USCCB, you probably think the Left is as bad as the Right is at retrieving its wounded. It’s not. - Cacciaguida

We know Jesus as He was in His public life almost entirely from the Gospels, and the Gospels don't do a very good job of portraying Jesus as He was. They tell us a lot of things that Jesus did and said, but very little about how He did and said them. Often enough it's not entirely clear why He did and said things. The Gospels do not provide a psychological portrait of Jesus, so any attempt to transport Him to the here and now, to answer what Jesus would do, necessarily involves a certain amount of invention, of filling in details as they make sense to us. The result is that what is said to be "Christ-like" in the sense of "like Jesus was," to be "Jesus-like" if you will, tends to be speaker-like. If I value a sense of humor, then my portrait of Jesus contains a strong sense of humor, and it's absolutely Christ-like to tell that joke; it might even be Christ-like to call the people who don't think that joke should be told whited sepulchers. How I value informality will inform how Christ-like I think a particular priest is while he offers Mass. Overall, then, I don't think similarity to Jesus in His public life is a great measure of moral rectitude. What He did isn't necessarily what we should do, and what we think He would do isn't necessarily true either...it can be tough to accurately judge how Christ-like many actions are, at least when they aren't clearly animated by something other than love. - Tom of Disputations

I suppose the silver lining is that some folks on the furthest reaches of the spectrum's left side still believe in such things as the anti-Christ. - John of "Inn at the End of the World", on those who call Bush the anti-Christ.

There was an interesting essay written some time ago that pointed out that the United States has adopted the 1908 socialist platform, and we have. We are essentially a semi-socialist country. - Bill Maher on The O'Reilly Factor

It seems to me that Paul indicates to test everything and retain what is good sequentially. Were we to try to test everything BEFORE retaining what is good we'd never finish testing. - Steven Riddle

I am always struck by what must certainly be an absolute novelty of the twentieth century: we have a large and ever-growing class of single women, many of whom become completely established on their own in society and live into their 30s before they decide to find a mate and settle down...To summarize: whether a woman votes Democrat or Republican turns out to be massively correlated to whether she's married...Thus, the 20th century's creation of a large class of single women is both symptom and propagating cause of social dissolution. - Old Oligarch

I have been distributing prolife material everywhere for years. I leave pamphlets in coke machines, at gas pumps, malls, airports, bus terminals, you name it. If they won't let us distribute the voter's guide on church property, I'll distribute it everywhere else. Here in Alabama, people are interested in what Catholics believe. They'll read it! God is wonderful! - Isabel at the Parish Hall

Because of Hurricane Francis we went to the Vigil Mass yesterday. Even though it didn't look like Frances would cause much problems in Jacksonville, the weather has turned out pretty windy and nasty. The Vigil Mass was packed so it looks like we weren't the only ones with this idea. The lines to confession were also rather long so it appears they used the same Hurricane checklist that I do. - Jeff of "Splendor of Truth"