MEMENTO MORI: Very awesome page with photos of Italian “memento mori” sculptures (“remember that you will die”). Via Dappled Things. Read more

Why do you build me up (build me up) Blogwatcher, baby Just to let me down (let me down) and mess me around… Body and Soul: Does executing murderers comfort victims’ families? I don’t know. But I do know that a “therapeutic” understanding of capital punishment is exactly the sort of thing that Avery Cardinal Dulles warned (scroll down to Cardinal Dulles’s response) would happen as democratic societies maintained execution without an overarching belief that state justice is ordained by... Read more

THE FAERIE QUEENE: Last night I started re-reading Book One of The Faerie Queene. This time I’m going to try to read more than just the first book! Not sure if I’ll tackle the whole thing though–your advice is much requested. Scattered thoughts: 1) Wow, I’d forgotten how much I love the Spenserian stanza. It’s very simple, English almost naturally falls into that rhythm anyway, but the extra foot (?) in the last line really adds a kick. Freshman year,... Read more

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine… —The Faerie Queene, bk I, canto I Read more

Hey folks. Sorry for hiatus–unusually poor time-management on my part, plus, uh, laziness re blogging–I have a lot of fun stuff for you though. Tonight I want to finish Dostoyevsky’s Gambler; tomorrow I’ll return to blogdom. Likely topics: review of “The Pianist”; All’s Well That Ends Well; Iraqmania; more on affirmative action; Constitutional interpretation; and whatever else sails across the plate. Read more

HOW TO GET OFF A DESERT ISLAND: The Rat is revisiting an old question of ours–which ten books you’d take to a desert island–and asked me if I had any thoughts on my own list. Here’s my gut reaction. (We’d already set the rules of the game such that they allowed the Riverside Shakespeare and any translation of the Bible to count as one book each.) I’m only allowing myself to list books I’ve actually read, thus no listing Flannery... Read more

A blogwatch hand on my shoulder And then it’s over Alabaster crashes down, six months is a long time To try to live in the blogwatch Instead of a jail… Yeah, a lot of watching lately, not so much blogging. I know. You’ll thank me, though, because these links are good stuff. Dear Raed: Watching Iraqi propaganda: “At one point ‘the doubter’ asks ‘the wise one’ about war, the answer is evasive. He says it doesn’t matter whether matters ‘get... Read more

AHA: I didn’t realize that the Sanchez post I talk about below is responding to this post from Gene Healy and thus ultimately this one from Will Wilkinson. I strongly encourage you to read both those extra links. Wilkinson offers a confessional view from inside the meat-machine, somewhere between irony and pure existential need I think, a materialist atheist in church. Healy (who is not the Gene I talked about in my post) and Sanchez hit more the argument and... Read more

TWELFTH-NIGHT OR, WHAT YOU WILL: Sanchez also blogs about free will. This is one of those subjects I don’t feel especially confident discussing, but here are a couple thoughts tentatively advanced. Pardon the egregious ramblyness. I fully admit that I’m coming at these questions from a decidedly slant angle which may not address what Julian had in mind. First, a recent conversation with my friend Gene underlined for me the ways in which the question of freedom of the will... Read more

TALL LOTT-E: (Sorry, I’m running out of puns.) Julian Sanchez has a post on the John Lott survey stuff–corroboration that Lott’s hard drive crashed catastrophically, losing lots of his data. Read more