Baby, better come back, maybe next week

‘Cause you see I’m on a blogwatch streak…

Dappled Things: Rejoice in the Lord–and reject “spiritual” sullenness. Great reminder, well worth your time.

Hit & Run: Political interrogations at the NYPD. Egregious.

Mommentary vs. me on superheroes. I should say 1) I love both Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe; I was dissing, not the character or author, but the floridly sentimental bit of writing cited in the original anti-superheroes piece.

2) Still disagree re what superhero stories are (often) like, and whether these exaggerated, “living symbols” characters are lamer than less-exaggerated characters.

Sursum Corda: What’s so natural about natural law? I think it’s a mistake to think that natural law = doin’ what comes naturally; I blogged about this a bit in my capsule review of Corydon. There are two better ways to think about what the body can tell us about our nature:

1) Culture is what humans transform biology into. But biology isn’t infinitely plastic. How has our culture arisen in response to human biology, and what are the likely consequences of trying to reshape culture without changing the underlying biological facts that gave rise to the culture? (For a specific example, check out the discussion of family forms in my piece on reproductive cloning.)

2) What does the body mean? John Paul II uses the term “the language of the body,” which I like a lot; from this book I snared the more Jewish terminology of things in the world as “words spoken by God,” which I also really dig. Since S.C. presumably agrees that the human body is a word (or words?) spoken by God, we can perhaps redescribe natural law as the study of what the words mean–God’s dictionary.