“Boys call up girls and say, ‘Would you like to go to a blogwatch?’

And the girls say, ‘Yes, I would like that very much.’
Have you come to take me to a blogwatch, Linus?”
“Good grief, no!”
“…Isn’t he the cutest thing.”

Amy Welborn: Amazing Easter pictures from around the world. And the same for Good Friday. And:

“I didn’t want to be a Catholic, but I couldn’t get away from it. It was a feeling that when I went against it, it didn’t feel right.”

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and

…Once I had arrived to this “safer” prison, I had met an inmate who strongly encouraged me that I needed to read and study my way out of prison. He strongly encouraged me to read the classics and study Philosophy. To which, I fell in love with the written word and the quest for truth and meaning in my life.

more (every now and then I remember I wasn’t worthy of the philosophy degree)

Daniel Mitsui:

…The story of first millennium Christianity is one of continuous failure and attrition; the Church suffered from Christological and Trinitarian heresies in steady succession, and as easy as it may be to distance the Church from them after the anathemas have been read, all of these heresies arose within the Church. There was a time before the anathemas were read, when each had not yet been condemned, when it was openly professed at all levels of the Church. To live as a Christian in the first millennium, especially in any of the eastern patriarchies, as often as not meant having Christological or Trinitarian heretics for bishops and priests, and most of the faithful either themselves professing the errors or too cowardly or indifferent to oppose them. …

There is no refuge in the Church Militant.

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Disputations:

…We think of Jesus’ word, “Woman, behold thy son,” as proof of His loving care for His mother, who would otherwise be alone in the world, and it is that. But I’d suggest that it is also an instruction to her, that she must now reach out to others with that very love she had for Jesus; given at a moment when all she “would have” wanted to do is look to her Son, it may even have caused her some pain.

But no one, not even the Blessed Virgin, gets to set their own terms as a disciple of Christ. We may wish to remain at the foot of the Cross, our eyes never leaving Jesus. But that grace was not even given to those who physically were at the foot of the Cross. We must take all that we gain from the Cross to others; that’s the only way for us to love Him now as Mary did then.

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Mark Shea: What has Easter changed?:

A reader recently wrote me to say, “I have Jewish friends who ask, ‘How can Jesus be the New Adam and the Messiah when it is painfully clear that everyone is still suffering from original sin? How can he have conquered death when the penalty for Adam’s sin — death — is still being inflicted on everybody?’ Is this a common issue for Jewish people? How do I respond to it?” …

We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners “in Adam” as Paul put it. We can’t save ourselves. We need the help of Christ’s Spirit.

Curiously, this notion of “corporate personality,” of being “in Adam” (and, for the Christian, “in Christ”) is deeply Jewish. The prophets are full of the notion that the nation of Israel and the man Jacob are somehow bound up with one another. Likewise, other figures from the patriarchal period (Ishmael, Esau, Ham, Ephraim, Judah, etc.) are somehow “summed up” in their descendants.

So the concept of original sin, while not a feature of modern Judaism, is deeply rooted in this peculiarly Old Testament way of seeing the human family. Christianity simply elaborates on it and holds that we are bound up, not only with the primordial tasks of Adam (marriage, fruitfulness, rule, work and worship) but in his fall as well. …

Christianity is not about the cancellation of death, but about the transformation of death. It has likewise always insisted that the main thing Adam suffered was spiritual death: the loss of God.

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Mixolydian Mode: Lilacs and frost.

[edited because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say]

Unqualified Offerings: I haven’t read the entire post from which this is taken. But I will sign on to this part:

I have this rule of thumb, which I recommend to everyone: if Solzhenitsyn recounts some practice as one employed in coercive interrogations at Lubyanka, it’s torture.

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