Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

    Spanning the Globe To Bring You The Constant Variety Of Posts & Pics

The First Thing She Said: "Thank God I'm Single!"

- Karen Hall of "Some Have Hats", on news that a Kansas woman severely brain-injured after an accident in 2002 has begun speaking

I'll tip my hat to the Dogmatic Constitution...

- first line of Jeff Miller's revised refrain to The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again"

The life of a bookseller is very demoralizing to the intellect... He is surrounded by innumerable books; he cannot possibly read them all. He dips into one and picks up a scrap from another. His mind gradually fills itself with miscellaneous flotsam, with superficial opinions, with a thousand half knowledges. Almost unconciously he begins to rate literature according to what people ask for... That way lies intellectual suicide.

-Christopher Morley, in "The Haunted Bookshop"

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier’s one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

-Scipio of Credo Intelligam

To understand the Catholic Faith you have to understand that it is not primarily about intellect, or even morals: it is about Christ received through the sacraments, because He commanded it, and because those who love Him will do as He commands because they love Him. And He commands as He does because He loves us. Understanding may follow practice, to a greater or lesser degree. But the Catholic faith is a loving response to our King and Redeemer, not an intellectual response to a text. A Downs Syndrome Catholic who can't read the Bible is in no way lesser than a theological polymath. The Catholic faith doesn't get snagged on "what exactly is it that saves us" because the thing that saves us isn't an "it". The thing that saves us is a Who. Asking what you have to do to be saved is like asking what you have to do to make sure that your wife will still love you tomorrow (or in this context what do you have to do to make sure that you still love her tomorrow). There may be things you can do, but it isn't a mechanical process. It isn't something that you do today, making everything that you do tomorrow irrelevant. It is love.

- Zippy Catholic

Back to work...my cold is mostly behind me (prancing on the lawn at 3:00am in my nightshirt didn’t help - but I don’t think it hurt, either.)...[I'm] hoping that the ad hoc wedding coordinator that is working on one of the weddings won’t be too dismayed when I can’t find her two altar servers of equal size. And her message also said that I should bear in mind that the bride is a tall girl. What does that mean? She wants tall servers to make her look shorter - or short servers to make her look taller? This is a church, lady, not central casting.

- Ellyn of Oblique House

It's like herding cats... shepherding the intellectual lives of theologians and philosophers. But it has to be done. Free enough to be joyous and productive (catching lots of mice, teaching lots of students, leaping out the hayloft window, following the fascinating new concept.....) and controlled enough to stay safe (not get lost off the farm or hit by a car, not wandering off into heresy or getting mauled by other creatures on and about the place....).

- Karen of Anchor Hold

A priest I know once pointed out to me that one of the marks of the satanic is that it claims to see right through you, to identify you with your sins and pin you to the wall like a bug on a card. The devil, in speaking to Jesus, says "I know who you are!" He does the same to us. He says "I see right through you. You are your sins. This is who you really are!"

- Mark Shea

I suddenly had a whole new vision of how much God loves us. I was so used to the popular view that Earth is merely average and ordinary. No matter how fully I accepted the idea that God created the universe for man, I was indoctrinated with the concept of our world being just one more average little planet, in one more average little galaxy, tucked away in a remote corner of the universe. Robin Collins had a whole new view. God could have created the universe with a sense of delight over giving us surprises. This was an astonishing spiritual insight to our relationship with God.

- Julie of Happy Catholic

I'm not saying this to suggest my superior spirituality. Far from it. Most days, I'm barely hanging on in that respect, my faith this strange, fluid mix of constant questions and moments of complete trust.

- Amy Welborn

I’m Too Sexy for This Faith

- title of huffingtonstoast.com parody post attributed to Andrew Sullivan


(photo credit - Jeff)