Mother Angelica

Mother often reminded us, “Unless we are willing to do the ridiculous, then God cannot do the miraculous.”

Green energy

In May, President Obama came to a Fremont, Calif., solar plant where he announced, "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra." This month, Solyndra announced it was canceling its expansion plans. The announcement came after voters rewarded the green lobby by defeating Proposition 23 -- which would have postponed California's landmark greenhouse gas reduction law AB32 -- because voters bought the green-jobs promise.

Congress [again]

Senator John Danforth has said, "I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. We know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected."

Congress

Serving in Congress should be seen as just that: service, which is distinct from self-service.

Donkeys

In Mexico, we say "No hay que ponerse con el burro a las patadas" ("don't play kick-me with donkeys",

Ecumenicism

Yes, Prime Minister, “interfaith interface” (in which one character is an Anglican cleric who thinks that “the Bible is some sort of Christian version of the Koran”)

Vocations

I've heard crackpot theories about early Church life -- exactly the sort Protestant demagogues used to confuse the peasantry centuries ago. And yet, at the height of the "reforms," these were coming down like snow through the Catholic hierarchy itself, in the bureaucratic language of episcopally appointed commissions, shaking and shivering the faith of the laity and discouraging all Catholic vocations.

The reforms

That Latin inheritance was suddenly replaced with crass translations into faux-contemporary English. A conscious effort was made not only to avoid the poetic but to smash the rhythmic and pedal order of words that had scanned with the music of the Mass. Centuries upon centuries of accumulated beauty were destroyed, pulverized, almost overnight.

Fatima

Yet it is hard not to think of the image presented by Our Lady of Fatima -- of souls falling like snowflakes into Hell -- as one ponders the fallout from the "reforms."

Social justice

The Church’s preaching remains too “one-sided … largely directed to the creation of a better world,” according to the Pope. “Hardly anyone talks any more about the other, truly better world. … Our task is to open up this horizon, to broaden it, and to turn our gaze toward the ultimate.”

Church bureaucracy

Pope Benedict reserves his most withering criticisms for some aspects of the institutional Church.
“The bureaucracy is spent and tired,” he says of some Church institutions in Europe and the West.

Error

My aunt was "often in error, but never in doubt"

Politicians

But politicians are an interesting group of frauds, by nature

Kibbutz

In the words of philosopher Martin Buber, the kibbutz was the world’s only “socialist experiment that did not fail.”

Stereotypes

In "Up in the Air," that ironic take on the cramped freneticism of airport life, George Clooney explains why he always follows Asians in the security line:

"They pack light, travel efficiently, and they got a thing for slip-on shoes, God love 'em."

"That's racist!"

"I'm like my mother. I stereotype. It's faster."

Dolan as USCCB president

it is more accurate to say that the moderate won and the liberal lost.

Abortion

After all, over 80% of all abortions are sought by single women.

Paper money

"Only government," Milton Friedman noted, "can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink, and make the combination worthless."

Mencken

H. L. Mencken’s words: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Mr. Obama

boy blunder

Wilde

Oscar Wilde once argued that “when bad ideas have nowhere to go they gravitate to American universities and become courses.”

Max Weber

In The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber noted that in the final stage of this evolution, it might truly be said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

Tina Brown

Tina, Tina, Tina, you delightfully airheaded little British expat you. Odd that you don’t seem to understand that many of us fundie bitter clingers would prefer a Muslim president to an Episcopalian president since Muslims, you know, actually believe stuff.