Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

My son is in Rome [and] asked me today about the “wax effigy ” of John XXIII in St. Peter’s. Uh…not a wax effigy. “What? I thought maybe he was buried underneath it or something.” Nope. It’s him. In the flesh. Welcome to Rome! - Amy Welborn

I knew labor was coming the night before, and I was scared. I prepared for birth by reading the lives (or more accurately, the deaths) of the North American martyrs. Contractions, I reasoned, could hardly be as bad as having your thumb bitten off. And given that a week and a half later, I'm not in pain and still have my thumb, I think that assessment was correct. - Mrs. Darwin

This generation -- whether Jesus' or our own -- has initiated nothing. Everything, everything we do is in response to what God has already done, even if we think we're acting first. Yes, sometimes we pray to God to do something, then wait to see if He dances or weeps as we've directed Him. But it is an illusion to think our prayer is the first movement, that it creates the relationship -- and just as well to see it as an illusion, since the terms on which we create such a relationship will sooner or later lead to ruin. It is, rather, God, always, Who calls to us. The Son came [action verb] to reveal [action verb] the Father. The story of salvation is the story of God's action and our response (or, as in this simile, our lack of response). The Way may be narrow, but there are many places to step onto it, and God invites us at each place. - Tom of Disputations

I’m consistently surprised how little one needs to know in order to find things on the web. Like so much on the Web, YouTube is set up to suck you into an endless chain of clicks that will lead you to quit your day job and surf forever down an endlessly breaking wave of stuff almost interesting enough to be worth your attention. You know how it works. Next to your selection, the search mechanism offers related items. Looking for a copy of The Golden Bowl by Henry James? Very good, and by the way, there’s also Wings of a Dove, and a biography of James, and even a copy of The Golden Bough by James Frazier. Well, you haven’t thought about Frazier for years, but you’ve always wanted to read that classic in early anthropology. So you click, and soon you’re distracted by still other related items: a book about the California gold rush, a DVD of Treasure of the Sierra Madre that has old footage of interviews with John Huston, and then a whole fascinating set of images of ancient Egyptian ceramics. - R.R. Reno of "First Things"

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end. - Jerry Steinfeld

Kafka’s humor–not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane, is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. [Flannery] O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made...You can ask [students] to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward–we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. - David Foster Wallace

I like comments. Waaaay too much sometimes. I will sit on the edge of my seat sometimes and wait for comments to come in. Well, not really, but it feels that way. Especially when the comments don't come. I watch and wait for a day or two, then I gradually forget that I've written anything at all. With more controversial posts, it is a bit different. It's not the excitement of having someone contribute to a discussion, it's a morbid fascination--the proverbial train wreck. With anxiety, anticipation, and dread, I wait for the lashes. I do the same when I follow heated comments on others' blogs. I can't help myself. This leads to my not posting on certain topics sometimes, until the bottled-up thoughts come bursting forth. And then, the waiting, and the contradicting, and the endless explaining. And that takes up a lot of time that I should be using for other things. - Blogger at "Words, words"

It is not we who have something to offer; it is He Who has something to offer. - Henry of "A Plumbline in the Wind"

Two quick points about the common complaints regarding "certain bishops, whose criticism of politicians sometimes seems designed to be exploited for partisan purposes." First, the complainers are always more upset that the Republicans can exploit the bishops' statements than that the Democrats are so easily condemned. (Of course, it used to be the other way around.) When Catholic teaching amounts to criticism of a particular political party, should Catholics condemn the criticism or the political party? Second, the complainers seem to want the bishops' words to be completely ineffective -- what effect could they have, after all, that wouldn't be partisan? But why should what a bishop says have no effect? - Tom of Disputations

The principle of double effect notwithstanding I can't think of any reason that it is morally justifiable to link to an article by Commonweal. - Commenter on Disputations

Joe Biden is the only Catholic candidate in the Presidential or Vice-Presidential races. He is my brother, and we are one in the body of Christ. So it is with great disappointment that I lament his prostituting his mother, the Church, for a few electoral points. - Frederick of "Deep Furrows"