You’re just a blogwatch to me, and you can’t deliver…

Dappled Things: “There is a school of thought among some laypeople that Sacraments are valuable in themselves quite apart from any life of faith in Christ. One gets calls from non-practicing parents who want a 2-year-old baby baptized because he cries too much, and maybe it’s because he never got baptized. I’ve heard well-intentioned laypeople suggest that other, totally non-practicing Catholics should receive Holy Communion because that will give them extra grace to change their lives. I’ve had people who never go to Mass want to go to Confession, because they have bad dreams and their nerves bother them. It’s good that they believe in the power of the Sacraments, but the Sacraments are events of grace that depend not just upon the objective power of Christ, but also upon the subjective receptivity of the Catholic who receives them. Apart from the regular life of faith in Jesus Christ within His Church, the Sacraments make no sense at all and can come to be seen rather as magic rituals or lucky charms. Obviously, this applies to the Sacrament of Matrimony, too.”

Disputations: “Each sacrament unites those three points in time: Christ’s death on the Cross; the current moment; and the Last Day.”

On a very different note: WANT.

Hit & Run: “Without making a big honking deal out of it, the choice of design and approach has a lot to say about how the artifacts of junk culture–from R. Crumb’s encounters with L.B. Cole’s bizarre 1940s comics noir to Art Spiegelman’s fascination with Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy to Jaime Hernandez having his imagination sparked by cheap wrestling mags and old Little Archie comics–feed and inspire works of art of greater ambition and deeper complexity.”

Mumpsimus: EURYDICE: “Words can mean anything.”