Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think,

Oh blogwatch! up yours! 1-2-3-4!!!

Camassia: “What’s the difference between Christian love and Buddhist compassion? Katherine seemed to imply that Christian love is more passionate, and that seems so to me. Buddhists seek to rid themselves of desire, but Christians have desire all over the place: God desires us, we desire him, we desire each other, etc. I can see why Katherine finds that more appealing than the Void, but I can’t help feeling that this also brings the things that appall me about the Christian God — the anger, the punitiveness, the blood and suffering and the whole shmeer. Is that the price we pay for having an impassioned God?”

Dappled Things: Powerful post on belonging to the Catholic Church. I have a different perspective, as an adult convert raised very very much outside the Church. But I definitely see this: “Reading Luther or Kierkegaard (who are the Protestant thinkers I’m most familiar with), I’m impressed by the intense personal faith of the individual who stands naked before God and calls out for salvation. I’m impressed by the great personal responsibility that the classical Protestant takes upon himself as he picks up the Bible and, relying on his own mind and the Holy Ghost, attempts to figure out what God means to communicate to man and then bets his soul upon it. To me (and, I think, to most Catholics) this fearsome responsibility has something very distant and cold about it. It is awe-inspiring, but it also seems very, very lonely.”

[Eve adds–it also seems to make the Descartes mistake of seeking truth outside relationship, rather than viewing trust and personal relationships as a matrix within which we can gain greater understanding of God–which is sort of what I was getting at in my post about Derrida and being “open to the Other.” But I should probably shut up about that until I have a more thought-through thing to say about it. Back to Dappled Things:]

“…When I think of ‘faith,’ I think of something that has been passed along to me from the hands of another. …I think of something I’m not entitled to change, because it doesn’t belong to me and because I’m charged with passing it along intact to the next generation, who will depend upon me as I have depended on the last generation. The writings of the Saints and the Church’s worship are the checks and balances which keep my own personal interpretations of the Faith from straying far afield….”

Eve again: It’s very strange for me to think about people growing up in the Church, since so much of my conversion was about a sense of exile (which is a sense of the Fall) and entering the Church was, not a homecoming, but the anticipation of a homecoming–like hearing an echo before you hear the voice. So it’s hard for me to imagine experiencing this echo or shadow of homecoming as home, as normal, as the known. Fr. Tucker makes me see the beauty of a formation I find very foreign.

Forager 23: What ever happened to the heavy? Great question for those of us interested in a) movies or b) masculinity.

Johnny Bacardi: Flattery will get you everywhere. Also, you all are wrong about Chuck Jones. Read his autobiography, Chuck Amuck, for some of the straight-up funniest stuff I’ve ever seen. I named my solo zine Femme Skunk after, of course, Pepe Le Pew’s petit chou-chou. That skunk’s always been a hero of mine.

Kesher Talk: I haven’t read the linked post yet, but this sounds fascinating: “Naomi Chana wrote an excellent and moving essay — inspired by a widespread discomfort and misunderstanding of the Yom Kippur Avodah service by liberal Jews — on the translation from the sacrifice-based Temple service to the rabbinic innovations in liturgy. I have some remarks in the comments. I think this would fit into my Pintele Yid series as another window onto the Jewish worldview, so if you are interested in what makes Jews tick, read the whole thing.”

The Old Oligarch: Part one of his review of “The Matrix: Revolutions.” I hated the second movie but loved reading the O.O.’s commentaries on it (here here here), so I anticipate much chunky, funky philosophical goodness from his posts on the third film.