Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

[Rick] Warren did not ask Obama when human life begins. Here’s what he asked: "Forty million abortions — at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?" So the question was not about ensoulment or the beginnings of a unique biological entity, but about rights. Questions of rights are not above a president’s pay grade. And if Obama supports Roe and related decisions, that would indicate that a baby gets human rights at birth. If that is what he believes, then let him say so, openly. - Amy Welborn

While there is a great deal of interest in and curiosity about the devil in the realm of possession and exorcism, there is much less interest in him in the realm of one's day-to-day life. Indeed, in the realm of our own lives. For the most part, people of America generally proceed with their daily lives as if Satan did not exist at all. An undue fascination with the details of possession is perhaps not spiritually healthy but neither is ignoring the existence of the devil and the reality of evil. We can be sure he is not ignoring us. - Bishop Vasa, via Tom of Disputations

It’s true that some doctors and fathers and theologians of the Church raised the question of “ensoulment,” asking when an unborn baby receives a soul, and given different answers. But in Christian (as opposed to Gnostic) tradition, humans are not only souls but also bodies. And thus no Father ever, ever used the idea of later ensoulment (often borrowed from Aristotle) to excuse or permit abortion. Contrary to what Pelosi expressly says, Augustine never ever said life begins at three months. In Christian tradition, until the 1960s, life was thought to begin at conception, regardless of the details certain thinkers put forth about speculative embryonic anthropology. - blogger at Cathliodocy

Hello. I'm here to abduct your family and sell them into slavery. Now, I know that many people, people of good will, believe this is wrong. I understand that, and I respect their opinion. At the same time, many others are equally convinced of the need for slaves, particularly when our own government can't guarantee that hard-working families will have time to clean their own houses. For my own part, I have thought long and hard about this difficult issue, an issue that doesn't admit of simple answers. And I've come to the decision that the right thing for me to do is to be a slaver. But a new kind of slaver, one who does not vilify those who disagree. - Tom of Disputations spoof

I was at a gathering a few weeks ago for an aged Southern sage, a politico with an accent so thick you have to lean close and concentrate to understand every word, so thick, as they used to say, you could pour it on pancakes. Most of the people there were from the South, different ages and generations but Southerners—the men grounded and courteous in a certain way, the women sleeveless and sexy in a certain way. There was a lot of singing and toasting and drinking, and this was the thing: Even as an outsider, you knew them. They were Mississippi Delta people—Mizz-izz-DEHLT people—and the sense of placeness they brought into the room with them was sweet to me. It allowed you to know them, in the same way that at a gathering of, say, Irish Catholics from the suburbs of Boston, you would be able to know them, pick up who they are, with your American antennae. You grow up, move on, and bring the Delta with you, but as each generation passes, the Delta disappears, as in time the ward and the parish disappear. I miss the old geographical vividness. But we are national now, and in a world so global that at the Olympics, when someone wins, wherever he is from, whatever nation or culture, he makes the same movements with his arms and face to mark his victory. South Korea's Park Tae-hwan moves just like Michael Phelps, with the "Yes!" and the arms shooting upward and the fists. This must be good. Why does it feel like a leveling? Like a squashing and squeezing down of the particular, local and authentic. - Peggy Noonan in WSJ

There's nothing new about air travel, I've never known a time when it wasn't there, yet still I'm amazed at the fact that there are people in the sky. - Bill of Apologia

"There is something colorless and odorless about him," says a friend [about Barack Obama]. "like an inert gas." And Mr. McCain, in his experience, history and genes, is definitely military, and could easily come from Indiana or South Carolina or California...The lack of placeness with both candidates contributes to a sense of their disjointedness, their floatingness. - Peggy Noonan