PET SHOP BOYS LYRICS, IN RUSSIAN. You’re welcome. Read more

TELL ME WHAT TO SAY: I’m speaking this Friday at the Fordham U. conference, “Learning to Listen: Voices of Sexual Diversity in the Catholic Church,” and then again at Princeton University on Tuesday, 9/20, on some gay Catholic thing TBA. What do you guys think I should talk about? Where do you think I’ve made good points, and where do you really want to push me and make me clarify my thinking? Also, of course, I would love to meet... Read more

And funeral trains got much shorterand people chose to which they wentand into the earth the flowerswent and no one remembered their names only that they died that summerwhen rains came late and the streets emptiedand flags flying on car roof topswaved like women welcoming the armyinto a small, abandoned city.–“Summer Rain,” Atar Hadari (entire poem here) Read more

Dev comes to the doorway, one knuckle making a screwing motion in his eye socket, saying, Are y’all crying again? Then, Why does everybody from Texas cry and smoke?–Mary Karr, Lit Read more

COMPASSION MAKES A FAMILY. Via the Rattus. Read more

THE FORGOTTEN LOVE: Chuck Colson on Bert and Ernie: …And blogger Alyssa Rosenberg summed up the biggest objection. “I think it’s actively unhelpful,” she wrote, “to gay and straight men alike to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple . . . Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way.” Strange indeed. It teaches the ridiculous and deeply destructive idea... Read more

RECONCILIATION: Photos of confessionals. Via IP, I think. Read more

“NO, SHE’S FOREIGN!” A question for language-learners: what have been your most depressing moments along the path to fluency? more (via IP) Read more

“I DECIDED TO PHOTOGRAPH the reactions of my friends and family when I told them my good news – I’m going to be a dad!” Via Ratty. Read more

FOR THE FOUR PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT ALREADY SEEN THIS. Read more