In Both Death and Life

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Coming Attractions

Marshall Ulrich, who climbed Mt. Vinson (and a few others) for a good cause. Don't quote me, but I think this is the highest mountain in Antarctica.

And where would I make contact with Mr. Ulrich (who I have written about previously)? Almost immediately on Facebook, where I stared at his name for a week, trying to decide where I had seen it before.

If you don't have a Facebook account, I find it entirely funny. You don't even need 60 seconds a day to use it. Superfluous beyond my expectations. This might be insulting to users, but I'm one, so I THINK I can express that opinion.

Guilt. I love it.

Webster Bull's Advice on Blogging

Favorite Things

In what is hopefully a pioneer endeavor, we even have a bishop explaining to a Kennedy what it means to be a Catholic. Rev. James V. Schall, SJ

“…there must be something else in God that the word love does not cover. It seems we must say, God is humble… Humility…does not move upwards, but downwards…the greater reverently bends to the lesser one. By this profound mystery we can measure how far removed the Christian attitude is from any natural earthiness. That the great one kindly descends to the little one, gently respecting his importance, that he is touched by weakness and makes himself its defender…humility begins only where greatness reverently bows before one who is not great.” Monsignor Guardini, The Lord

Christ did not become a child so that we could have warm thoughts about each other in a non-specified holiday season. Jeffrey Miller, The Curt Jester

Christianity is faith in the Creator Spiritus, from whom comes everything that is real. Precisely this ought to give Christianity its philosophical power today, since the problem is whether the world comes from an irrational source, so that reason would be nothing but a "by-product" (perhaps even a harmful by-product) of the development of the world, or whether the world comes from reason, so that its criterion and its goal is reason. The Christian faith opts for this second thesis and has good arguments to back it up, even from a purely philosophical point of view, despite the fact that so many people today consider the first thesis the only "rational" and modern view. A reason that has its origin in the irrational and is itself ultimately irrational does not offer a solution to our problem. Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in the crucified God can truly show us what life is. Joseph Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures.

He is not, after all, the world’s ecumenical coordinator but the Vicar of Christ. Carl Olson on Pope Benedict.

One note of interest to my Catholic friends. I found a church where I could take Mass, and felt a sense of coming home when I stepped in the door and saw sacred images of the Virgin, Christ, and St. Joseph (to whom I have been addressing myself particularly in prayer these days, since he is sort of an adoptive father) -- even on the far side of the world, I was among friends. Of course I understood not a word of the service. Of course I understood it perfectly. John Wright, in China to pick up his new child! I think she is a teenager.

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