Searching for Mr. Right,

Blogwatching half the night…

Amptoons on a couple whose son was taken by Protective Services solely because the couple is blind. (The child is home now, due to an outcry by disability activists.) This article includes another blind couple describing how they are raising their two children.

Oxblog: “Sickened as I was like other observers by the scenes which appeared over the summer from Abu Ghraib, I’m left by the onset of Charles Graner’s trial by court-martial in Fort Hood, Texas with a sense that there ought to be more coverage in the press on the reflection Abu Ghraib casts on American prisons at home.” Yes, yes, yes. I will write this piece if somebody wants to pay me for it.

Stuart Taylor looks at the recent “affirmative action in law schools is reducing the number of black lawyers” study. (Via How Appealing.)

And three great links, from different angles, all touching to one extent or another on hardness of heart (a recurrent ailment over here):

Amy Welborn on the Memorare:

…It is just a fact of life that God is hard to fathom, and the further we push God away, the more difficult it becomes. Like a kid buried so deep in lies he can’t look his parents in the face, like a couple whose relationship is so defined by externals, whose biggest fear is actually having to be alone together and having to talk, we can be so buried in our own baggage that God’s voice is nothing but the faintest echo.

We need an intervention. We need mediation. We need someone we trust, someone who has something in common with us to help us see ourselves as we really are and for what we could be. The deceitful kid needs to hear from someone who told the truth to his parents and lived to tell the story. The couple needs a smart-aleck daughter or a quietly observant friend to say, “Why did you guys get married, anyway?”

And the hardened criminal might just need a mother.

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Dappled Things on God’s justice.

David Morrison on participation and authority:

The passage assumes that the blind will, in fact, want their sight back and the deaf to hear again, the lame to walk properly and dumb to speak. But one of the most perverse aspects of human pride is that sometimes we would really rather sit in the darkness of our own weakness, obstinacy and sin than accept the healing God wants to give us. Sometimes the Gospel passage where Jesus asks someone if they want to be healed before He heals them can jar us, of course they want to be healed, we can sometimes think. But we don’t know that. Being healed, participating in our own salvation, can bring all sorts of unexpected costs and burdens and sorrows. So often we can focus our prayer on the symptoms of the troubles we face and not on having the commitment to not only be rid of them, but to live different lives once we are rid of them, lives sometimes with deeper and more daunting responsibilities.

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Also, if you pray, please pray for the women I have counseled in the past month. It’s been an unusually difficult month. (If you wanted to pray for me, too, I wouldn’t complain!) I will be praying that my readers have a blessed Advent.

Wednesday is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Go to church!