Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

If you can find a moment, pray for my dad's soul. I am morally certain that he was not in a state of grace, and I can only hope that at the very last he came to an acknowledgment and repentance. I take hope in the private revelations given to St. Faustina about the Divine Mercy. Pray, too, for one of my sisters. She and my dad were estranged, and now she is just torn up inside and out. Pray that she will find the peace that I know God wants her to have. - Alicia of "Fructus Ventris"; also if you might offer a prayer for my friend Amy who died yesterday

Rod Dreher, in the course of a post about GOP recriminations, remarks that "it'll be easy after the November slaughter to blame the Evangelicals, because the media despises them." Is he right? I'm afraid the signs point to yes. A while back, I argued that religious conservatives were going to come out of the Bush years in better repute than other factions on the right, because they hadn't sold out (or seemed to sell out) their principles the way the small-government types did with pork-barrel spending and the Abramoff affair, and their ideas hadn't been discredited the way, say, neoconservatism looks to be at least temporarily discredited by Iraq. But I think that I reckoned without the eagerness of pundits left and right to use the religious right as a whipping boy for GOP failures. Thus Ryan Sager's claims about the Southern captivity of the GOP; thus Dick Armey's attacks on James Dobson; thus Andrew Sullivan's argument that everything from the prescription-drugs entitlement to the botched post-war plans are the fruits of "fundamentalism," which dovetails nicely with the oft-heard canard that we really invaded Iraq because of nutty religious millenialism. - Ross Douthat of "American Scene"

As for the subject of translations (rather than commentaries or editions), my first advice is always to pick a book that you like the look of, read some of it, and if you like the sound of it, then buy it. The New American Bible is somewhat more banal than the Catholic edition of the RSV; but both are "accurate" and readable. If you can read Latin, the Nova Vulgata is better than anything in English, but, well, that's not a recommendation for everybody.- William Porter on "Evangelical Catholic"

I remind the readers that [unbelievers] do the exact same thing with Bible texts: assert that there are "errors and contradictions" in the text. Again, talk is cheap and anyone can do it. This person would probably not be so critical of those who sought to demonstrate that there were not contradictions and errors in the biblical text. So I for one wish that they would kindly stop being inconsistent and acting as if those who do this with magisterial texts are somehow disingenuous while those who do this with the Bible are not. The underlying methodology to this approach is either commendable or it is not: they cannot have it both ways. - "Rerum Novarum" on magisterial texts

I will agree that the two ex-marines were most irritating, perhaps some extra discipline is due, such as mild therapeutic beatings. - Fr. John, on "Open Book", regarding two monks on TLC's "The Monastery"

One monk waxed poetic about the virtues of focusing one's attention on one thing at a time. He said our many distractions caused our exhaustion at the end of a day. Then there was a break for commercials a minute later. - Kevin Jones on "Open Book"

Ijust heard Cardinal Arinze's latest podcast on modesty. One point that the rather irritating interviewer kept going back to was on the morality of artists drawing from the nude. The cardinal was taking the position that it is at the very least dangerous to the soul for an artist to draw nude models. The objections that the interviewer kept throwing up were primarily straw men: arguments of art for the sake of art, that there is so much of this in culture that it can't possibly be wrong, etc. Insofar as the ordinary person's understanding of looking at the nude goes, the Cardinal quite properly pointed out that morality trumps art and that morality trumps culture. Fine. What both the interviewer and the Cardinal miss, however, is that a serious artist drawing from life tends to distance himself from the prurience that is assumed in spending hours with a nude model. I have spent many hours drawing and painting nude models, and based on my own experience and from talking to many other artists on the matter, one tends to take a fairly clinical and anatomical view of the body...Now, certainly there are artists who will find the sort of detached view difficult, and simply cannot get beyond the fact that a purty nekkid girl is in front of them. There are probably med students with similar problems, and it behooves them, as it behooves the aforementioned theoretical artist, to avoid this sort of thing, even if it means abandoning the profession. - Erik of Erik's Rants & Recipes

We have an insufficient understanding of the term "sufficient." Because the common usage has come to mean "just barely enough to cover it," we tend to look at "His grace is sufficient" as a kind of wary half-promise. But the real meaning of "His grace is sufficient," says nothing about the amount of it nor its efficacy. What it says is that it is His grace alone--entirely and only. His grace is sufficient in that nothing need be added to it and we only need a kind of meta-desire for it to be effective. - Steven of "Flos Carmeli"

The functional-utilitarian-self-fulfillment way of doing Church has failed because it is not true. It is a mixed-up confused consequence of the perceived need to make faith more understandable to the modern person, and the slow acceptance of the total privatization of personal faith - that it is all about my personal spritiuality and no longer about the story of the world. It has resulted in a mode of doing and speaking that is profoundly misleading, leaving many Catholics adrift in the culture, not quite sure why they should go to church on Sunday apart from habit, guilt and the vague hope that they might be "inspired" a bit and their kids might absorb some moral constraints here and there. It is not their fault. When this is what they are taught, this is the fruit. - Amy Welborn

If you aren’t fully conversant with the scholarship, I’d tread very lightly in those areas, and focus on the text itself...Ignatius Press is coming out with some study guides, put together by Scott Hahn. Now Hahn has a lot of advantages, and a lot of people get a lot out of what he offers. That doesn’t make him an oracle or anything. Keep in mind, there isn’t necessarily "one" proper interpretation of most passages: Scripture is God’s word, and it is endlessly fruitful. So, Scott Hahn gets this from it; the early Father of the Church got other things; the editors of CSB and NJBC got what they got; I offered you my thoughts, for what they’re worth…The goal of our use of Scripture is, after all, to lead people to faith in Christ! It isn’t Scripture for its own sake. - Fr. Martin Fox of "Bonfire of the Vanities"