Blithe SpiritReblogged from Not for Attribution:
The 100 best mystery novels of all time. Here they are, with links...
1. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (Included in this are The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Study in Scarlet, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Sign of Four, each of which garned a lot of votes on its own.)
2. The Maltese Falcon…
This accident waiting to happen in the wild and woolly world of newspapers and copy editing happened in this week’s Oak Leaves:
Among items discussed Monday by Oak Park’s finance committee was employment of five full-time engineers. Trustee John Hedges asked if having in-house employees was the most cost-effective way to go.
Having in-house engineers, staff responded, was more efficient than contracting the work out.
“They are extremely efficient,” Pubic Works Director John Wielebnicki said.
I say leave people’s privates alone.
Reblogged from Not for Attribution:
Some “crazy things” in papyruses:
Scholars are questioning the authenticity and significance of a much-publicized discovery by a Harvard scholar who reported that a 4th Century fragment of papyrus has provided the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was married.
“. . . many questions remain unanswered about the Harvard fragment.”
Reblogged from Not for Attribution:
. . . from Martin Marty at his best:
Vying for space and time on the religion-and-media front this week, in competition with presidential campaigns, Muslim extremist riots, and almost numberless other stirs, has been the attention given to a tiny piece of papyrus which includes the teeny words “Jesus” and “wife.” This text was pictured as being “hot off the press,” with only a four century pre-publication delay after the time of the occurrences to which it presumably referred.
It appears that “pro-choice” Victoria Reggie Kennedy has been invited again to Anna Maria College, which disinvited her last spring. This time she will share a stage with a Catholic congressman who has a 100 percent rating from the pro-abortion group NARAL.
As reported by The Cardinal Newman Society in March, Anna Maria College in Paxton, Mass., honored the wishes of Worcester Bishop Robert McManus and disinvited the widow of Sen.
This fellow uses GK Chesterton to refute the social-gospelling nuns of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
Chesterton “would have been more than happy to befriend the wetlands had he known they needed befriending; [and] he would have endorsed reasonable measures to promote clean and sustainable energy,” he writes.
What the Curmudgeon of Catholicism would have vehemently denounced, however, is the LCWR’s conflation of sin and sociology such that the gospel becomes essentially a clarion call to social action, and sin is redefined to encompass only those perceived injustices committed by the collectives in power. This is not the gospel Chesterton embraced, nor is it the gospel Christ entrusted to his apostles.
Well said, that.
Reblogged from Over the Rhine and Into the Tiber:
We've grown depressingly accustomed to hearing our bishops speak of Social Security as something akin to a sacrament, despite the ever-worsening pattern of dependency that it has fostered, after only a couple of generations, on an ever-less solvent state. How refreshing, then, to read this:
Paul Ryan shocked the gentle souls at Georgetown University when he traveled up to their campus last Thursday and said: "We believe that Social Security legislation, now billed as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity.
