Link O'rama


Curt Jester has an interesting post up on the favorite books of various presidential candidates.
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Catholic Bibliophagist on religious fiction.
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An Orthodox woman meets Padre Pio.
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Interesting post on Calvinism by Mark Shea here:

A non-Christian wrote in with a simple question: "Does God love me?" The rude primitive Papists who know nothing of the Bible or the TRVTH wrote back in their rough, theologically unlettered way and all said, "Hell yes!" The Calvinist guy, trying his best to remain true to the Calvinist diagram of reality, replied, "I don't know." He had to say this, because the Calvinist system demands it, and for a true Calvinist, the System trumps suspiciously touch-feely stuff like the Love of God...

This is, of course, a highly unecumenical assessment of Calvinism today and I must quickly add that, since becoming Catholic I have, as I mentioned above, gained a better appreciation of the many good things in Calvinism: it's commitment to truth, it's love of orderly thinking, it's emphasis on the grace and majesty of God. But I must add that, at the end of the day, what guys like Scott and Jimmy have helped me see is what the good things are that the Calvinist system is insane and inhuman about.

As someone naturally inclined towards systems (I was a Systems Analysis major in college after all) I can certainly see that part of the attraction of Calvinism. Interestingly, the evangelical at Internet Monk writes, "I’d far prefer the out and out Roman view of 'assurance,' plainly stated as something you can’t have with certainty, than the advice to look at my own life for evidence I’m a real Christian. As Catholic convert and commentator Mark Shea says, 'I became more secure in my relationship with God once I was no longer certain I was going to heaven.' This is where we end up when we self-reference assurance."
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Scipio says things in German here, like that he's greatly enjoying Lauren F. Winner's Girl meets God. "Excitingly, freshly, unorthodox." His favorite books of '07 include Benedict's "Jesus of Nazareth", Les Murray's Fredy Neptune and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
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Lots of Spanish happening here. The blogger, ARP, had hoped to have coined a new term, meaning navel-gazing of the sorts bloggers are prone to called: onfalopsia. Leider (German word for 'unfortunately') it's already been coined. He also shares his favorite books of '07.

I had the chance to go to Barcelona last year, free lodging though my dime as far as the flight goes, but after looking at my wife's pictures (she was going there oftten on business trips) I couldn't pull the trigger. It seemed to me too...plastic? Too modern perhaps? Madrid would've been a different matter, I told my wife, and so it was interesting to see that the blogger at Compostela (in a review of "Poems of Province", provided through the fracturing lens of Babelfish) appears to confirm what was only an intuitive, uninformed hunch on my part:

The poems, as it could not have been otherwise, were written in Madrid, almost with nostalgia of that city of province that it despises...It is like the bucólico sort: they create those that no longer live in the province (or they want to escape of her) to apostatize of the opresivo atmosphere, although peculiarly is sometimes a tone of chose. In Spain the black province is associated (as it is seen in High street) with the clerical oscurantismo. As Madrid does not give the stature either - we have been in that manchega was a city -, the ideal is Barcelona, until it is discovered that everything was facade and that is a city that falls to pieces and that are most provincial than one can be found in Spain.

In the end, the solution is to transfer the ideal to Paris or London (without the malolientes alcoves nor the scent to curry) and to say to the goddess Reason so that san Zapatero brings the light to us of the dialogue.

And I, in the black province, enjoying Pimentel, Vighi and similars, when it would have to be reading the Encyclopédie, all illuminating by the electricity. Until I decide Jiménez Lozano to me, whose life and attitude remember to me that the important thing is not where, but how or why and that the all the others is secondary and desire to make cartoons.

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ARP also brings us a link to a researcher who is looking at "virgin", that is heretofore unpublished, Flannery O'Connor letters. Here is a picture of that researcher's goodies, these to Betty Hester: