What if I were Romeo in blogwatch?

What if I were Heathcliff, it’s no myth…

Dear Raed is back from Jordan and has begun posting again.

Mark Shea: Powerful letter about the death penalty, mercy, and a prison conversion. Rush Limbaugh and a kind of optimistic stoicism that besets some (mostly, but not exclusively, secular) conservatives. I’m not hyped on armchair psychoanalysis of Limbaugh himself, but thought Shea’s post was right-on about the larger “conservatism as self-actualization” worldview. Also, Muslims as Samaritans.

Sed Contra has moved. Visit the old site for a good basic post on friendship and same-sex attraction (SC’s earlier writing on this subject has definitely shaped my thinking), and then hit the new site for the brawling pope.

“Mrifk!” Possibly the worst fantasy story ever written gets the MST3K treatment. I really did laugh ’til I cried. Via Mark Shea.

And yeah, that’s a darned weird, and, honestly, annoying choice of covers for the big Peanuts book we’re getting soon. I really, really love the “darker” Peanuts strips, but in part I love them because they take place in this sunny, inquisitive world. Peanuts so often shows the kind of hope that is the same as resignation, or vice versa. If you only emphasize the resignation or darkness, you become all self-dramatizing and tragedizing in a very ’90s alt-adolescent way. And I know from self-dramatizing and tragedizing!