Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

It need hardly be said that few men are great. But even fewer great men are so good. - Mona Charen on NRO of Bill Buckley

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. - - Kurt Vonnegut

So what else is new? The Faith is not a matter of genetics. This is America. Anyone who expects American children to autotmatically accept their parents' beliefs is not living in the real world. We are not part of peasant communities of the Old World where children were rarely exposed to views other than their parents' and neighbors'. And this, indeed, is a very good thing. Faith that is nothing more than consent to unchallanged custom is no faith at all, but merely conformity. That it is conformity to something that is true does not change anything if the conformity is not because the child is convinced that the beliefs in question are true, but because "everybody else believes them". The question then becomes, "do we live our lives so in conformity to Christ so that the young will look on us and and think, 'they know the right way, these old ones, I wish also to walk in that way'"? - - commenter on Byzantine Catholic forum on de-linkage of ethnicity and religion

Remember that Serial Dilution technique you learned in high school chemistry? You mix one part base with nine parts solvent, and then use that solution as the base to which you add nine parts solvent, and so continue as long as you wish. Each step results in a ten-fold reduction in the concentration. You start out with, say, raw battery acid, and after five or six steps you could drink the solution on the rocks with no ill effects. What brought serial dilution to mind was a number of recent articles in which Catholics are invited to embrace "a diversity of religious perspectives" about teachings that belong to the deposit of faith. Here's what's going on: doctrinal differences are reductively treated as theological differences, which are in turn reductively treated as methodological differences, which are reductively treated as aesthetic preferences, i.e., matters of taste. - Diogenes at Off the Record via Terrence Berres

He encouraged me to become a Catholic. He encouraged me to stay sober. He encouraged me to keep writing columns. He encouraged me stick with my new career in broadcasting. Sometimes he would call, out of the blue, and tell me I was making good progress and that he was proud. Can you imagine? I’m the one who was proud — proud to be his friend and that he would take a moment of his time to call. - Writer/TV personality Larry Kudlow on WFB

My wife is nervous when I take my boys to the park by myself because I actually confront people who dress their kids in Che chic clothing. I usually "Nice shirt, I have my kid in Hitler underoos" and walk away. - commenter on "the Corner"

WFB was the lodestar of my political youth. At one period I made a point of acquiring every one of his books. But he kept publishing while I wasn't paying attention and I was left irretrievably behind. The collections of his essays and columns - like the one pictured above - were especial treasures because they saved one the labour of keeping a scrapbook of them as they appeared in the newspaper. Part of my world view -- Credo, if you will -- and habits of mind were learned from his writing and remain to this day. God rest his soul. - John at "The Inn at the End of the World"

Mom, upon seeing me recoil in horror at a (doctor-recommended) fish oil pill roughly the size of a .50 caliber bullet: "Oh, taking that will be a splendid Lenten suffering. And then, after Lent...you can continue the suffering." And there you have it. - Lickona of "Godbody"

The wedding took place according to the current cant, with everybody popping up, and kneeling down, and responding, more or less, to the stream of objurgations that issued from the nervous and tone-deaf young commentator, all together now, Who Do We Appreciate? Jesus! Jesus Jesus! Je-zus—it was awful. - William F. Buckley in a 1960s piece on experiencing the New Mass

Feminism arose because women were being sinned against. I think that is a fair argument. But feminism also arose because women were sinning in response. That's a classic human problem--sinners tend to sin in response to being sinned against. - blogger at "Radical Womanhood"

I think today’s Gospel is one of my favorites for many reasons...The way in which Jesus heals him points ahead to the sacramentality at the core of Christian life. Some despise ritual, say none of it matters, say that God is not bound by any of it. Of course God is not bound by it. God can do anything he likes. But in this world he created, he uses all that he created to reach us, to touch us, to heal us. Jesus could have said - go - y0u’re healed, but here he didn’t. He spits. He makes mud. He rubs it on the man’s eyes and tells him to go wash.  As often as we gripe about the complexities and mysteries born of the Incarnation - that now God’s ways are mixed up in human ways, and wouldn’t it be simpler if God would just reach in and do some magic and bypass creation to act? Would it be simple? I don’t know. But it wouldn’t be consistent with the very act of Creation and God’s presence within it. It is the glory and mystery of God-With-Us. No magic wands, clearly labeled....It seems to me to be a very accurate account of how faith grows and develops - in response to questions and challenges in which we are forced to examine our encounter with God, who we think God is, exactly, open ourselves more and more to him until finally, we meet him again, having been through the ringer, from within and without, and can finally put our ultimate trust, no matter what others say we should do, in the One who touched us way back when. - Amy Welborn