Even the Devils Believe

Last night I came home to find Tomato lounging on the couch, listening to the music (Iron & Wine, as always) that Sue left playing for him. When Mahler came over, Tomato started grooming him, and I caught it on camera. (Video is probably NSFW because of the music, so turn your speakers [...]

From bls, there’s a great review essay on the Psalms in the New Yorker, reviewing Robert Alter’s new translation, The Book of Psalms.
This is all part of the human drama of the Psalms, that sense we have of a voice arguing with itself and its God. You could say that soliloquy begins in the Psalms, [...]

Derek has a must-read post up about disparities in the hiring of male and female clergy in mainline denominations. Sexism is not dead, not even in the rarified air of liberal Protestant churches. (Or in universities or our other “enlightened” institutions, I might add — I was asked illegal, family-related questions in an interview [...]

The United States Holocaust Museum has been given an important scrapbook of photos from the Nazi camp at Auschwitz, where hundreds of thousands of Jews and others were killed during the Second World War. Unlike many other photos from the camp, it depicts German SS officers and their families at leisure, laughing and celebrating [...]

There’s an unusually well-balanced column up on USA Today’s opinion blog, Accommodating the Faithful, written by the director of the ACLU’s program on religious freedom and belief. It’s definitely worth a read:
A few months ago, I had dinner with a prominent Evangelical Christian who insists that Christians are “persecuted” in the USA. Although we [...]

I’ve got some more things to post on the pluralism discussion, but I think it’ll have to wait until next week. Until then, here’s a photo of Mahler on the cat tree, looking more than a little like an alien:

Have a blessed holiday and a great weekend!

Blessed Exaltation of the Holy Cross!

Since I travel frequently, it’s strange I didn’t do this earlier, but during the summer I put together a contemporary-language Itinerary. It follows the same lines as my previous trial liturgies of this type — ‘79 BCP Psalms, Scripture from the NRSV, etc. Here it is!
Rite II Itinerary (PDF, 59k)
I will eventually do [...]

Sorry for being away again so long. Work intervened — I had a big deadline on Monday and almost everything else fell by the wayside.
I meant to post something yesterday, but I admit that Sept. 11th is a difficult day for me to blog on. I feel pressed to write something about the [...]