MJ of Logos Forum Fame

Occasionally I'll wander to the Logos Bible Forum and look for posts by the inimitable MJ Smith, she who stands amid the forum contents like a colossus of catholic civility. 

Here are a few of her recent thoughts/replies:

I have a basic preference for believing we constantly overestimate the quality of our [biblical] scholarship just as our predecessors did. Of course, my measure of language competency is that you don't know a language until it becomes bathroom reading. More seriously, as long as we use dual language dictionaries, I am uncomfortable saying we know a language. And, to the best of my knowledge, Logos is short of completely Hebrew (or Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Latin, Ugaritic, Coptic ...) dictionaries. There is a big difference between reading a foreign language to translate it into your native tongue and reading a foreign language and understanding it in that language ... what we nicknamed the dream test.

I don't disagree that multiple translations serve as pointers towards the original language meaning as each translation gives us additional clues of the constraints on the original text. Another thread offered a link to a journal article that I find apropos - BaxterBiblicalWords.pdf

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My translation pet peeve is people having a pet peeve rather than recognizing translators have to make compromises in order to best meet the need of their ideal intended audience which I not me. I much prefer to have my pet translations such as Psalm 4 in the Jerusalem Bible ... I measure all other translations against it even though i know the grammatical argument against the translation.

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David A: Textual Criticism ASSUMES that all versions have the same chances of being found.

MJ Smith: Really? That is odd because it is so unlikely to be true. It could only be a simplifying assumption to make the data manageable. How many ancient manuscripts do we have from the Mar Thoma church in India? [Trick question - use of banana leaves as a writing surface has seriously limited the number of old manuscripts in a bug infested environment.]

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Dean053: ...with the moral brigade always trying to shut down legitimate questions or concerns about the product.
MJ Smith: While I have seen this accusation made frequently, I have seen the shutting down of legitimate questions only occasionally. As in a face-to-face community, there are particular people who by reasons of upbringing, culture, age or mental health need to be given a broader leeway than others.


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There are also many excellent graphics for the liturgical year. My (very simple) favorite also captures the sense of a spiral i.e. movement towards the end of time:

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I'd set two rules for myself when I offered to create the [following] list - non-Catholic Logos resources. As you can see, I ignored the Logos part when I tried to tailor the list to what L.S. seemed to need - enjoyable, non-confrontational reading that raises the important issues. Getting people to ask the question is more important than giving an answer to a question not asked.

• Prayer by Richard Foster - a good introduction to liturgical prayer
• Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster - a good introduction to spiritual disciplines
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - a good introduction to logic and what words mean
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - a study in social ethics
• The Way of the Pilgrim by Olga Savin and Father Thomas Hopko - a study in Christian growth
• The Psalms through Three Thousand Years by William Holliday - use of psalms in worship, Jewish and Christian
• To Pray As A Jew: A Guide To The Prayer Book by Hayim H. Donin - liturgy as way of life
• Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture and Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan- church history made enjoyable
• Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality by Alan W. Jones - not really introductory but presents a very catholic spirituality in a contemporary way

and cheating to add one Catholic convert book:

• The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth by Scott Hahn to explore the heavenly liturgy as described in Revelation

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[Professor Evans] spoke to me about man's search for God, how that search is the "spirit" of "spirituality," and how it is manifested throughout great literature, whether it could be called "Christian" or not. At the time, I was more interested in how I could identify things as "Christian" or "not Christian," rather than this vague spirituality he was talking about. I was ultimately won over to Evan's spiritual reading of literature by his recommendation of the novels of Patrick White, - Deal Hudson on "Inside Catholic"

I’m always suspicious of vacation. This can’t last...Another year or two and these kids are going to be too big for this, or too busy or...Every year we do the same things, though we’ve forgotten why we do them. We drive to Point Betsie and watch the sunset. We stop at the mineral springs to drink the sulphur water said to contain health-reviving properties. We swim. We hike. We play tennis. Each day a triathalon to offset the ice cream and cherry fritters that are never as good as we remember them being. We drive down Graves Road in the dark and look for deer. And we look in at the three shops in Beulah...“It’s the climate,” my husband says. Morning is Spring, evening is Fall, and the afternoon, from noon to six is a perfect Summer. As the days pass, my oldest son’s jaw, which has been set forward since the end of the school year, begins to recede. He smiles and engages in conversation, which shouldn’t be as big a deal as it is. My kids don’t fight with each other when they’re with their cousins; so much discipline replaced by positive peer pressure. And somehow, everyone becomes uncommonly good-looking as their hair bleaches out, the skin browns, and eyes brighten. My own kids look like palominos crawling on the sand, each muscle set off by sun and shadow. "The world doesn't owe you a trip to the lake each summer," it's been said. Oh, but it does, I'm afraid. - Betty Duffy

I find [the hearings] depressing because [Elena] Kagan epitomizes the kind of careerism I loathe. She has almost always talked as if she knew there was a tape recorder in the room and has always maneuvered as if her road map was her permanent record. Her whole career has been an act of self-grooming. Kagan is not a major legal scholar. Rather, she has published just enough stuff to allow her to claim to be a scholar and for her supporters, in and out of the press, to say she's a scholar with a straight face. She's never been a judge, and her litigation record as solicitor general, while impressive, mostly amounted to checking off another box to get her on the court. - Jonah Goldberg

Kagan edited a medical opinion to give a policy dimension to justify sucking the brains out of children just before being born...The sad thing is the people who will confirm a judge that willingly subverted the truth. Great judge she will make. Even worse is that her subversion of the ACOG statement was used by the Supreme Court to strike down the Nebraska ban on Partial Birth Abortion. - Jeff Miller of "Curt Jester", with more compelling reason of not liking this confirmation

Art, he says, has always been about “trying to alleviate the pain of existence”. Modern art “collaborates with misery as opposed to trying to oppose it”. “A painting by Titian is like a Leningrad, holding out against the forces of the world. Even if they’re having to eat rats in there, they still will never surrender to it. Whereas the art of Tracey Emin is a complete capitulation to the world. Cutting a shark in half and putting it in a tank of piss is just art giving up. I find it very odd when they describe art as challenging, because I always thought art was meant to calm you like a lullaby, not challenge you like some skinhead in an underpass.” - From Bill of "Summa Mintiae" via Andrew Cusack via Hilary White, Alexander Stoddart on art in an interview with The Scotsman

I do not like this Uncle Sam,
I do not like his health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks,
Or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals,
I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like this speaker, Nan ,
I do not like this 'YES WE CAN.'
I do not like this spending spree,
I'm smart, I know that nothing's free.
I do not like your smug replies,
When I complain about your lies.
I do not like this kind of hope.
I do not like it, nope, nope, nope!
- "Chickenhawk Express" via Muellerstuff

At some point, the peak of a dune reveals a civilization of reveling dune climbers. They are still smiling and talking about how they would like to try and make it all the way to Lake Michigan. So foolhardy. So naive. And they don't ask for my opinion, "Is it difficult? Is it worth it?" I feel like a warrior returning from battle to find that those left at home were unaware a war was taking place. - Betty Duffy

I suspect the reason [Evelyn] Waugh prized [Helena] above all the other works is that in the course of writing it, he became a different person. No other piece of his writing has such deep insight and appreciation for a single character. Yes, the old Evelyn is there nipping at the heels of nearly every person in the book other than Helena. However, his obvious admiration for and reverence of Helena effects a transformation in his prose to create a work unlike anything else He had done... - Steven of Momentary Taste

It's funny about the Bronx. When I moved there after living for so many years in "the city," I felt as if I already wore the mantle of the exile, in spite of the fact that I had moved only about four miles. But as any New Yorker knows, four miles might as well be a million; venturing even four blocks from your home can catapult you into a parallel universe, one with strange and incomprehensible customs and a populace that may or may not view you as having come in peace. If the four miles separating you from your old home are inaccessible by public transportation except via an elaborate system of transfers, as is often the case in the outer boroughs, you might as well forget about seeing what begins to feel like your distant, native shore. When I moved to the Bronx, my English friend and mentor John Allitt wrote me a letter in which he commented that "Bronx" was an ugly name, and what did it mean anyway? (Well, Archie Bunker said it meant "the land where no trees grow.") Nonetheless, the Bronx, that most forsaken of boroughs of the City of New York, really burrows its way into your heart. Anyone who has ever lived there will tell you that, for all of its problems, they have come to love it. When I moved to my old neighborhood, people there used to say that it was the best neighborhood in the world. I looked at them as if they were out of their minds then, but now I agree. - Pentimento

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Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. - Epicurus from "The Letter to Menoeceus" via Steven Riddle

What Epicurus seems to point to is not allowing the good things of the world own us. When we allow them to get their claws in and was luxury becomes necessity, we've lost a little bit of ourselves to it. Think about it--how many of us now "need" e-book readers, computers, iPods, iPads, laptops, cell phones, and all of the paraphenalia that seems to accompany contemporary life...I'm not trying to say that all such items are worthless, 'but rather that we have so completely sold ourselves to them, we're no longer in a place that allows for objective analysis of actual utility. And I sit squarely in the center of that "we" and "us." I am not exempt, as exhibited by the fact that I type here on my laptop with my cellphone at my side and my iPod playing Debussy piano preludes as I wait for the three-second water boiler to stream water through the nearly instant ginger tea basket. All luxury that leads to slavery. Now I have to find some way of toting all of these "necessities" from place to place, rather than just going myself. Now I must care for them and must guard the bag that contains them rather than treating them like my suitcase (isn't it Iago who says "Who steals my purse steals trash?"--so too with my suitcase). - Steven of Momentary

We continually close our doors; we continually want to feel secure and do not want to be disturbed by others and by God. And so, we can continually implore the Lord just for this, that he come to us, overcoming our closure. -From “Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict” via BD

While discussing Absalom, Absalom! last night, Darwin and I were wondering if there were any great Southern writers from before the Civil War....Did it take the War to produce a specifically Southern style? Perhaps that has something to do with what Quentin Compson ponders at the beginning of Absalom, Absalom: that although he was born after the War and had no personal connection to it, just by the fact of living in the defeated South his psyche is populated with the ghosts of those who died to defend a doomed culture. - Mrs. Darwin at "Reading for Believers"

It took me so long to realise why so many writers are alcoholics: because they are scared. - author Alain de Botton

You should remove your hair shirt,
The plank in your eye, you choose
to look for pain
So you are less
saddened by the good
When good isn’t certain. - Excerpt of Betty Duffy poem

...thus the attraction of suburbia, which grants its residents a stand-alone house and enough yard to give privacy and some sense of touching nature, while at the same time leaving them able to commute to their jobs, belong to a church which only claims membership by a minority of the population, enjoy bookstores and ethnic foods and all the bustling variety which an urban center provides. Suburbia represents a compromise between our natural desire for land and local rootedness, and our cultural and economic desire to take part in city life. - Darwin Catholic

I will be cramming 14 weeks worth of stuff into 6 weeks, twice. I accomplish this by doubling the speed at which I speak. It's like attending an auction. - Professor Luse of Apologia

Only prayer is a cure. It is a cure each day, when each day the demons attack with fresh ferocity. It is a cure when my will is not enough to overcome fatigue, when nothing is good: “Let us sing to the Lord all our life, alleluia!” What the hell language is that? The language of the Church supplants my own. I need new words, those of my fellow believers. “The waters swirled about me, threatening my life; the abyss enveloped me.” (Jon 2:6) and yet, “From on high he reached down and seized me; he drew me forth from the mighty waters.” (Ps 18:17) I had forgotten. Even since yesterday, I had forgotten that the wind and sea obey my God. Sometimes I need the Church to speak for me, to pray for me, to save me. Sometimes I don’t want to pray; death is preferable. But the words read from the liturgy of the hours, other people’s words, the prayer of the Church throughout the centuries, literally saves my life. And then the magnitude of that universal prayer lifts me up. I am in awe of it: the idea that if I pray for the whole Church, everyone is the beneficiary of my prayer, including myself. And if others pray for the whole Church, I am the beneficiary of others’ prayers, even those in another part of the world, in other times of history; the Church eternal, the Kingdom of God, prays with me and for me. It saves my life. And it blows my mind. - Betty Duffy

It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable. - Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005.

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I know parents and families whose days and weeks are filled with activities, from the end of the school day to nightfall, and all weekend. Some of them love it and flourish, and others confess such relief when a game or practice is cancelled. All I know is that my son loves karate and wants to be a black belt someday. But on the days he has nothing after school, which is 3 out of the 5 school days in a week, he is ecstatic. He’s home by 3:30, and he can just…play. He and his brother may squabble. The little boy across the street may get on his nerves some times. The two children down the street, who are younger than he is, may not be his ideal companions. But he can play. And as he plays, as he imagines, as he is free from rules and schedules, and as he can create his very own world…he is so happy...I am pretty convinced that the current activity-centered culture which demands so much of families exists only because people don’t have many children. - Amy Welborn

Here’s a post over at the Long Now Foundation on the ever-interesting topic, “How to Restart Civilization From Scratch.” One thing they haven’t mentioned is the “doomsday book” that has already preserved and restarted civilization from scratch more than once in the past: the Catholic church. - Bill of Summa Minutiae

The difference between Intelligent Design Christians and Evolutionist Christians is the difference between people who think that God's causal agency is of the same sort that occurs within creation, and people who think that God's being radically transcends creation, and so can't be "fit" into it--in the way that ID arguments make it look like God fills in the gaps of an otherwise coherent naturalist process. I believe this all gets back to the question of whether Being may be univocally predicated of God and creatures. Thomas says no, some later Scholastics say yes. The problem is, once you have a conception of God according to which he is just one more entity in your ontology, then you start to have to explain how his agency works with the agency of other things in your ontology. And hence it starts to look as if God becomes more and more excluded, the more and more we can explain naturalistically. Classical theism, which holds that God's being is *not* univocal with creaturely being, does not have this problem... I guess what I'm trying to point out in the above comment is that believing that "intelligence agency" lies behind the created world does *not* in any way commit one to ID's account of that agency. - Commenter on Zippy Catholic

My husband and I did the Safety Dance at the wedding last weekend. People gathered around to watch, so we put ourselves into it, and the next morning, we were both plagued with doubt. “I’m just worried that I didn’t look as good as I thought I did doing the Safety Dance,” my husband said. It was a legitimate concern...I'm writing in long sentences, stream-of-consciousness because I'm reading Faulkner right now, and as Mrs. Darwin said in a comment stream here, "What he (Faulkner) does not repeat much is the period," and nothing is more alarming than a period that goes MIA, as evidenced by the fifty dollars worth of pregnancy tests I took this month trying to figure out where mine went--which is no where, that is, until without rhyme or reason, it decided to return, and now I want my money back. - Betty Duffy

During the height of my ambition, perhaps around age 10, I thought I might write the Great American Novel. I wasn't really clear what exactly the Great American Novel was, but I was sure it involved summer camp, and I spent a great deal of time hashing out the details of my character's names and personal appearance and the number of brothers and sisters they had -- all crucial details in such literary serials such as The Baby Sitters Club which the girls in sixth grade passed around during study hall. These were the sort of seminal works in which you learned all you needed to know about the characters by description of their personal appearance: such girl had frizzy reddish hair and braces and wore a turquoise turtleneck! This one had her ears double-pierced and wore big sweaters and leggings! 'Nuff said.... My enthusiasm to write the Great American novel waned along with my fondness for the nifty names with which I endowed my juvenile characters (but none of my actual children), and I try to avoid the kinds of novels in which the height of characterization is to describe the clothes the characters wear ("her Prada handbag brushed against her toned thigh as she strode down the hall, her Manolos clicking on the parquet floor with each step..."). Still, I miss the idealism of the days in which a vast literary potential could be unlocked if only I had the proper writing instrument and a fresh blank notebook. Then, time was on my side. - Mrs. Darwin of "Darwin Catholic"

On the topic of individual versus collective in earlier, it strikes me that one of the important things to understand here is that the groups within which we live out our lives (families ties, church ties, associative ties, etc.) may not be capable of committing sins as a group, but that the necessary reparation for sin does often carry through a group. This is because sin is not merely the violation of a legal code, but is destructive to the relationships that bind us together into communities...Imagine a situation in which it becomes known that the father of a family abused one of the children over a period of years. This is clearly a sin of the father .. bBut the relationship between the mother and the abused child, and the other siblings and the abused child will have been changed by the father's sin. They can't just ignore the fact that the sin occurred, and indeed they will need to make special efforts to heal their relationships with the abused member of the family... In our family of the Church, we now face a similar situation. Few of us shared any knowledge or culpability in the abuse which a small percentage of priests perpetrated, and yet our relationships with those abused, with each other, and with our priests have been changed by the fact that this abuse occurred within our family. That is why healing will require work towards reparation on the part of all Catholics (in different ways depending on our places within the Church) even though most of us hold no personal culpability in the sins themselves. - Darwin Catholic

In a two-country race to kill as many foreign babies as possible: " The head of the World Health Organization signaled Wednesday the United States -- not Canada -- was on the right track over the question of supporting access to abortion services amid an international bid to improve child and maternal health. Dr. Margaret Chan ... added: "I am very pleased to see the change in President Obama -- this is really wonderful; sometimes ... it is not easy for outside people to tell them what to do."... Let me make note of the fact that the World Health Organization is the kind of organization that has a director general who considers killing babies "really wonderful." - Tom of Disputations

In Roe v. Wade, the keen-eyed Justice Harry Blackmun secured the right to procure and commit abortion by discerning a sacred and inviolable right to privacy hidden among the penumbral emanations of the Constitution. Obamacare will force Americans to buy health insurance, which involves disclosing private medical history to an insurance company. Not that the Constitution means anything anymore, but wouldn't it be sweet irony if Roe v. Wade made Obamacare unconstitutional on privacy grounds? - Bill of "Summa Minutiae"

Often poetry is taught in school as though each poem were some sort of rebus or puzzle that needs to be deconstructed, analyzed, and reconstructed to the specifications of whatever the present school of criticism is teaching about poetry.  Most people approach a poem as though it were some sort of exotic and potential deadly animal ready to unleash its fury at the slightest provocation. I think we have Eliot and Pound to blame for that--purposeful obscurity and the creation of the rebus/puzzle poem.  But most poetry before the twentieth century, and a good deal during and after is not at all like that.  A poem is an invitation to take a break, to share a moment with the poet, to see as he or she does.  In that seeing you'll sometimes get a message, but if you don't, it is the seeing that is the thing after all. - Steven at "Momentary Bliss"

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In addition to the novena, I've spent some time each day reading from St. Faustina's Diary in which the visionary wrote about her visits from the Lord, as well as her own thoughts, reflections and experiences. In it one encounters Jesus in a unique way as He opens His merciful heart for this young saint and for us, patiently explaining the depth of His mercy and how our God expects us, as Christians, to respond. I could probably spend pages and pages writing about some of these messages from our Lord, but one in particular struck a significant chord today: “You are to show mercy to your neighbors always and everywhere. You must not shrink from this or try to absolve yourself from it" [Diary, 742]. - Deacon D. at "Being is Good"

I learned the Chaplet of Divine Mercy from the Sisters of Life back in 2004, and few days have passed since then that I haven't said it. It has been a good fit for me as a devotion: it's short, it goes by quickly, and it hammers home relentlessly the point that God's mercy trumps his righteous justice, which is, I suppose, why some Traddies shun it. After all, it's human nature to insist that those pathetic stragglers who showed up on the job at the eleventh hour not be paid a full day's wages. It's human nature to reel in horror when you see your father having a huge party for your wastrel brother who spent down his fortune on booze and whores. But if God were only a God of justice, we would fear Him, but we would not love Him. And God wants our love, and wants it freely given. And who could not love so good a God as He, who looks at us, as He revealed to Saint Faustina, through the wounds of His Son, with compassion for our fallenness, our brokenness, our sin? - Blogger at Pentimento

Part of the problem of growing up in a well-read family is that we all knew that some books were better than others...None of my reading counted. Meanwhile, in our living-room, my older sister had curled her body into a pretzel and was squinting her eyes into the minuscule print of Gone With the Wind which she finished in all of two weeks. Her concentration was unbreakable. I was invisible to her, though I crawled up behind the wing-back chair in which she sat and put my finger in her ear, or whispered words like “suburban” and “couperf” and “satchel” because I knew she hated those words. Her friends would ride their bikes over to play, find her reading, and have to be satisfied with my company. And I would be playing Barbies, no doubt, making the dolls do naughty things, and then saying, “It’s ok, they’re married,” even though in my head, they were not. - Betty Duffy

Every day, I can wake up and have the newspaper already sitting on my desk in the form of a piece of “paper” that changes on a daily basis or whenever I happen to need it for something. I carry around the better part of a library in my pocket, and when I find I’m lacking something it’s the matter of a few moments while it is beamed to me from far off locales to prevent me the inconvenience of getting up and driving to the store. In moments of curiosity, this wonderful device [the Kindle] can get me answers to most any question by accessing one of the largest knowledge bases in existence from nearly anywhere in the world at no charge with no questions asked. It’s so mundane right now, too. That’s quite possibly the most surreal point of all. We have devices like the Kindle and nook and a dozen others to choose from, the main difference between them often being aesthetics and level of convenience, and nobody even realizes what they mean! - blogger at a Kindle blog

How discuss verity with cynics, cynicism being a plant with no fruit or interesting seed? - - Marianne Moore via Dylan of "dark harp"

Most Republicans spent the first two-thirds of 2009 underestimating how big a problem pro-life resistance would be for the Democrats. If they had run ad campaigns based on the issue in the districts of pro-life Democrats, it would have made it harder for those Democrats to back the bill in the end. Those Democrats could well have been the decisive holdouts. Here, again, Republicans were on the popular side of an issue — even many supporters of legal abortion don’t want government funding — but failed to press their advantage. - Ramesh Ponnuru of "National Review"

This morning's paper mentioned in passing that today is James Joyce's birthday.. I remember was a quote from a friend of his who recalled that he, Joyce, loved to drink and loved to dance: "Ah, the drink went straight to his feet." I never read Ulysses..but did have a go at Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man... And I am grateful to it for two things. The first is one of the great hell-fire and brimstone sermons in print. Short, but a powerful piece of work and worthy of the Jesuits of the turn of the last century. The second is a permanent love for the Little Office of Our Lady. It's not dwelt on in the book but the mention of it in the "Portrait" fascinated me. I got a copy immediately. (They were still available in those days, but disappearing fast.) I have a small collection now of various versions. - John at "The Inn at the End of the World"

The word of the Lord has not come to me, as far as I know. But I don't think it requires any new divine revelation to see that an alliance with the world against the Pope will not end well for the Church. - Tom of Disputations

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Nature abhors a vacuum: The Church got rid of devil's advocates, but we still have the New York Times! - Tom of Disputations tweet

Listening to the media, one gets the impression that New England's floodwaters would abate, and the Bruins would win a Stanley Cup, and the national debt would be erased -- if only "the Vatican" would ordain women and drop the celibacy requirement. - Dylan of "dark speech upon the harp"

Gaga's hypersexuality defined through skinny pubescent bodies is tedious, predictably destructive of female self-esteem and male female-esteem. And I maintain her hip ugly head-do is a manifestation of the male-gaze gone openly necrophilic. - blogger at "Mildred's Umbrella" on Lady Gaga

There is no doubt a sense - that of the American Declaration of Independence, the supposedly self-evident truth that all men are created equal - in which everyone is important simply by virtue of drawing breath; but of course this kind of importance is not sufficient for the self-esteemist, who derives no comfort from it whatsoever. What he needs is to be more important than someone else in order to have his self-esteem. Nor is it sufficient that he should be more important than somebody else only in his own eyes, because we are all more important in our own - Theodore Dalrymple

I think it's wise not to live-blog vacations, because every post would be a clever variation on "These kids are driving me crazy!" Whereas in retrospect, we can now say that everything went smoothly. And that we wish we had more days of vacation, which we certainly did not wish as we pulled into our driveway at 11:30 PM two Saturdays ago...A long car ride with your spouse is the ideal time to plan out the rest of your life together, especially since none of the plans require concrete action at that moment. - Mrs. Darwin Catholic

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Seas, sailed by little Ahabs,
Each cursing his whale. - haiku by Bob of "Trousered Ape"

In Still Life with a Bridle, Zbigniew Herbert includes “Letter,” an essay in the form of an imaginary letter written by Vermeer to his friend Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the Delft lens grinder, inventor of the microscope and pioneering microbiologist. Herbert has Vermeer question van Leeuwenhoek’s reductive approach to science, verging on pure materialism. The painter writes: “Our task is not to solve enigmas, but to be aware of them, to bow our heads before them and also to prepare the eyes for never-ending delight and wonder.” ...A writer of sophisticated realism renders enigmas – that is, human hearts and minds – without presuming to solve them like differential equations. They are not reducible to simpler forms. - blogger at "Anecdotal Evidence"

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That NYT article on the Pope made me lose my faith, faith that the NYT  could do a reasonable article at all. --Curt Jester tweet

Don't fear the e-reader...I've used some version for 10 years now. I never abandoned print books. I did not dry up and fly away. Metal parts have not (so far as I am aware) significantly replaced important body parts. Indeed, I have found it liberating to get on a plain, train, or other conveyance with the calm assurance of carrying five-thousand books with me, lest I should get bored or need to consult the 1919 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Catholic Encyclopedia at the spur of the moment. Being able to find any word in any book with a simple search--lovely--better processor speed would make this lovelier. So, it's a brave new world that has such creatures in it, and it is with us to stay. You do not have to become one with the collective, but "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. . . it is not dying, it is not dying."--Steven of Momentary Taste

I really do feel detached from any expectations of what my spiritual life is supposed to look like. I’d like to be a spiritual success story, where my past really is my past, upon which I have never looked back. Iron and Wine sings: “No Christian wants to pick at the scab but they all want the scar.” Well, I have no problem picking the scab. Or maybe I don’t want it to heal because I’m afraid of having nothing to do without it. --Betty Duffy

I’m always reading Winesburg, Ohio — even when I’m not. When I chit-chat books with literature buffs, I can scarcely contain my excitement when the town of Winesburg swings gracefully into view, its buildings and streets and people. Its lonesome mournfulness. Maybe I love the book for strictly personal reasons. After all, Anderson crafted this lovely little gem just for me. Every word, every sentence, every story reads like an envelope stuffed with a personal letter kindly penned by Anderson to say something about a pastoral world, going, going, gone. ”Hands,” the first vignette, reads with great simplicity and throat-tightening poignancy. Even its memory moves me to emotion. What a gorgeous book!--Blogger at "Interpolations" via Steven Riddle

We've passed a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it but exempts themselves from it, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, and the whole thing to be financed by a country that's going broke. What could possibly go wrong? --forwarded email

"The apostles had never seen someone tread water before, so when they saw Jesus doing it, they thought that he was walking on water and assumed it was a miracle." - Darwin Catholic, parodying the current fashion of watering down Christ's miracles

I can't be the only one who, as a child, thought it would be great to win a donkey. --Tom of Disputations on one of Monty Hall's less appreciated door prizes

W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson. It was this modern exemplar of the biographer's art, not Boswell's Life, that introduced me to the man who became and remained my hero. Not only did Dr. Johnson's clear-eyed, cant-free view of human nature help me to see the world as it is, but I found his lifelong struggle against his own inborn defects of temperament to be powerfully inspiring. I still do, and probably always will. - Terry Teachout on ten self-influential books meme

Overall, the great joy of this book for me was all the one-liners I got to write down in my journal. "The goal of the discipline is not victory but submission" for example. It really was a sort of spiritual reading, a little homily on almost every page--but I never felt like I was receiving a homily. - Betty Duffy reviewing "House of Brede"

I expressed some of the opinions derived from [James] Joyce to a professor who commented to me, "Ah then, but we haven't seen the end of it all yet, have we?" I pondered those words for a long time and realized what he was saying to me--it fired the motion toward Catholicism…We must remember the sermon on hell [in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] and the other things popular at the time that tend to do one of two things--create Saints, like Therese, and agnostics like Joyce.  Had I been exposed to that Church and some of what was considered de rigeur at the time, I suspect I would have felt the same.  - Steven Riddle

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Over our altars floats the joy of the joyful message, from the plains of Bethlehem it sinks into our hearts and breathes consolation and hope into our souls. The Saviour is born for us, a Saviour who will deliver us from sin and from the thralldom of Satan, who reconciles us to God and opens heaven to us. - St. John Vianney, Sermons on the Nativity

A priest once told me that that "self-talk," those words that comfort us or tear us down in our heads are like our friends. If our friends are advising us to be dissatisfied, or criticizing our loved ones, etc, then we're hanging out with the wrong crowd. - Betty Duffy

I’ve read and enjoyed any number of classics not assigned in school. I started Shakespeare early, thanks to my parents’ leftover college textbooks...I like pretty much all the major and minor poets until after World War I. I really enjoyed Moby Dick — it’s a hallucinatory techno-thriller, written by a natural blogger who loves to digress. I read Boswell’s Life of Johnson until my eyes started to cross. The unabridged Don Quixote was a bit of a slog for a sixth grader, but things do happen that aren’t all despairdespairdespair. And nobody made me sit in English class and discuss What Things Meant. But most of the books assigned in school are depressing, depressing, depressing. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. (Didn’t make it past the first chapter.) Earth Abides. (One of the top ten worst sf novels ever!!) Stupid Catcher in the Rye. Stupid Stranger in a Strange Land. That dang Bear story by Faulkner. (Also skipped.) To Kill a Mockingbird. (Okay, not stupid or hideous, but not exactly enjoyable.) Crime and Punishment. (At least when it gets into the investigation thriller part, there’s some relief.) We don’t teach schoolkids to enjoy wit and depth; we teach them that literature is about the mute endurance of literary suffering and despair. Fortunately, I was a voracious reader before, after, and during my English classes, so even the horrors of assigned reading couldn’t convince me that all books were dull, stale, and unprofitable. - post at "Aliens in This World"

British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations thrive when the lower classes aspire to be like the upper classes, and they decay when the upper classes try to be like the lower classes. Looked at through this prism, it’s hard not to see America in a prolonged period of decay. - Jonah Goldberg of NRO

Universalism is perhaps the second-most American belief about the afterlife possible. For the most nationally characteristic view, I turn to an existentialist friend of mine, who once told me, "I heard someone say that everybody gets the afterlife he or she believes in. And I couldn't help but think, That's so American!" Americans believe in a universe whose order is apparent to the naked eye; an order where God's justice lines up neatly with American cultural preferences for self-definition and multiple "truths." This is a mindset that we might expect from a nation that has built its identity on both Enlightenment philosophy and immigration -- as ZZ Top didn't quite sing, everybody's crazy 'bout a self-made man. Even our Last Things must be self-wrought and accommodating, pluralist and tolerant and as blandly nice as an American airport smile. - Eve Tushnet

Patronal dissonance: I found a lost St. Anthony medal today. - Tom of Disputations tweet

I've given up all hope of finding my St. Jude prayer card. - John J McG tweet

Where platitudes are concerned, I dislike them because Jesus is not just the reason we celebrate the season, he’s the reason for my entire life. I don’t like the idea that I have to cue up warm fuzzy Advent and Christmas feelings simply because I’ve pressed the pause button on my crazy life. It so rarely works and then I feel disappointed...As long as my joy is my Christ, no one can take it from me. But I can squander it, as easily as I stop “doing” my faith. If I am not practicing my faith and my joy every day, then it’s no wonder I feel nothing when I pause to remember the reason I celebrate anything. - Betty Duffy

Books to the ceiling,/ Books to the sky,/ My pile of books is a mile high./ How I love them! How I need them!/ I'll have a long beard by the time I read them. - Arnold Lobel

There's a terrific moment in the TV show House, in which the irascible and brilliant Dr. Greg House is explaining to a lapsed Catholic subordinate why he doesn't believe in the afterlife. House, with all the self-lacerating irony that actor Hugh Laurie can impart to the character, says, "I would hate to think that all of this was just atest."....[Modernity] poses the question, "Are pious actions good because the gods love them, or do the gods love pious actions because they are good?" No fully Christian answer can accept the terms of the question, since it drives a wedge between God and the world He created...As a final argument that this life is not just a test, I'll point to the sacred wounds of the risen Christ. When Christ appeared, resurrected, before the apostles, He was so thoroughly wounded that St. Thomas could actually poke a finger into His bleeding side. What happened to Him in this life was irrevocable. There are no "do-overs"; there are no "give-backs." Whatever healing or transformation of our wounds occurs in the next life, I suspect the wounds themselves will remain, just as Christ's wounds remained. So think of the penitent centurion -- think of his heaven. In his heaven, he is still the man who speared the side of Christ. His wrong action was not erased by God's love -- though it was transformed. His life was witness, not a test: In a test, all that matters is whether you pass. In witness, what matters is whether you live the unique and strange vocation you were given in a way that makes it possible for Christ's fingerprints to be seen on your face. - Eve Tushnet post