From MSNBC: This unprocessed image was captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during Saturday's flyby of the Saturnian moon Enceladus. It shows the moon's south polar region, where jets of water vapor and other particles spew from fissures on the surface.
When there is no good solution to a problem, a president has three options. One is to avoid the problem. The second is to pick the least bad of the available options. The third is to mix and match among the proposed solutions and minimize the long-term damage any decision will cause.Afghanistan has presented President Obama with exactly this situation, and he is soon likely to settle on something closest to the third approach. This will make no one very happy. Yet it might be the least dangerous choice.
Instapundit spotted and featured this site, "Bad Vestments," which means that the political color for the moment is libertarian true blue. The site itself features photographs of lavish, odd, or, if I may, ugly liturgical clothing being worn by priests and bishops. The site's recurrent theme is "because Christian worship is not supposed to be about you." As far as I can see, its creator doesn't identify her- or himself, so one can only speculate about the coloration of their theological views. One hint is the persistent references to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, as Mrs. Schori, a commonplace on theologically conservative blogs, where some find her views objectionable and others, her gender, at least insofar as its being fit for the episcopacy is concerned.
screams, "Please look at me, and get ready for a homily about where this bizarre rig came from." As a matter of fact, I have some stoles (the long strips of colored cloth, a vestige of Roman senators' garb, that priests wear around their necks) that people have given me or that are meaningful for some other reason. This especially applies to those I've brought home from two Holy Land pilgrimages. The red stole shown here, a treasured gift from the Altar Guild of the Cathedral Center of St. Paul in the Diocese of Los Angeles, prevented me from being the most inconspicuously dressed new priest in recent history at my ordination in January 2004, for which I'd neglected to order a custom-made chasuble as my beloved colleagues had.But husbands were more likely to take off, even if that meant the wife suffered more. And the study found that the medical consequences were considerable. Abandoned spouses, the researchers found, were more likely to be depressed and less likely to complete prescribed treatment or enroll in new therapies. They also spent more time in the hospital and were less likely to enroll in hospice care, probably because that's a service that generally takes place at home, Chamberlain says.One answer, according to experts, is for doctors and other medical professionals to make sure couples get early access to counseling and other forms of support.
The first section of The Forty Years War traces the rise of the “neocons” during the fateful presidency of Richard Nixon. Though the conventional narrative has Nixon being overthrown by his traditional enemies on the left, Colodny and Shachtman reveal how much Nixon’s historic fall owed to conservative resentment of the foreign policy of Nixon and Henry Kissinger, particularly Nixon’s overtures to the USSR and China. They reveal how administration insiders—including White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig—used their positions of responsibility to bring Nixon’s foreign policy to a halt. And they show how Nixon’s alienation of the emerging neoconservatives in Washington ultimately left him politically isolated and unable to survive the storms of Watergate.
The New York Times on Saturday's Vatican meeting between Benedict XVI and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams:[Williams]...questioned why the longstanding dialogue between the religions had foundered over the question of female clergy.Here's why, your Grace. The pope's brazen move to convert British Anglican priests who oppose female bishops is an obvious sign that he considers the Roman Catholic Church's misogynist ecclesiology to be its leading missionary edge. Because it marginalizes women to say they shouldn't be bishops or priests (or pastors, as most U.S. evangelical Protestants still do). It devalues women to say that they aren't pure enough to do sacramental work. It insults women to claim that they are a lessor order of humanity, as Gen. 2 seems to teach, though Gen. 1:27 does not (which notion of creation have you been taught and do you prefer -- woman made as an afterthought from man's rib or male and female created simultaneously in God's image?). It cuts women off from the grace of God itself to say that God and our LORD Jesus Christ view them as less worthy to preach and teach and bless and absolve in their holy names.
but my guess is that, deep down, it doesn't make complete sense even to young American Roman Catholics, both male and female. And it no longer makes sense to most in the Episcopal Church, which has had female priests since the 1970s and now has a female presiding bishop, nor to ++Rowan, who favors the British Anglican church eventually ordaining women as bishops.
