National Catholic Reporter now keeps most of their content behind a pay-wall, also preventing them from facing criticism from the blogosphere. (Same for the NYT, by the way.)

My own version of Jeanetta's Seven Things

7 Things I Plan to Do within the Next Year:
1. Pray More
2. Excercise More
3. If books are mediocre and unimportant stop reading even if I've already read part way through
4. Write some
5. Sell my car
There's two more that I'm not putting here.

7 Places I'd Like to Visit (in no particular order and only counting places I haven't been previously):
1. Jerusalem
2. Germany
3. The Black Hills of South Dakota
4. Kyoto, Japan
5. Ireland
6. Poland
7. Crown Heights

7 Places I've Already Been:
1. Rome
2. Los Angeles, CA
3. England (inc. Stonehenge, London, Bath, Oxford, Salisbury)
4. San Diego, CA
5. Maine
6. Chicago
7. Pittsburgh

7 Books I Love (not counting the Bible and happening to be all books I already own):
1. The Summa Theologica
2. The Book of Lights
3. The Rule of Benedict
4. Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel-On Prayer
5. The Liturgy of the Hours
6. Seven Storey Mountain
7. Problems of Knowledge: a Critical Introduction to Epistemology
8. The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge
(oh come on...you thought I could limit myself to 7?)
[and Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will, the Collected Poems of Phillip Larkin, and something else I'm forgetting...]

7 Movies I Like:
1. Michael Collins
2. Das Boot
3. Stalag 17
4. Slavador
5. Casablanca
6. The Gathering Storm
7. Boiler Room

7 Websites I Love:
1. New Advent
2. National Review Online
3. Catholic Answers
4. The Heritage Foundation
5. Notre Dame Nation
6. Fox News.com
7. This American Life

Ira Glass and Philip Glass are cousins.

1998 Aquinas Lecture: "Thomism and the Future of Catholic Philosophy"

So this is useful...

...I believe it's officially reached rigamarole status.

Wow.

I like WFB's ..."Out For Myers"... sounds like a plan.

For TTLB Here We Go

I oppose the Miers nomination.

Hopefully it'll be withdrawn.

For No Particular Reason
Latin gang members and witness protection.

"She wasn't just a witness," Greg Hunter, her court-appointed lawyer, told NEWSWEEK. "She was like the Rain Man of witnesses."

from Newsweek via Howstuffworks.

Brian Stetler on Gail Shister on Chris Matthews on FNC

[Chris Matthews] tells Gail Shister that FNC's daytime news shows have a "nice zest." "You can almost hear the old news ticker. There's a sense of immediacy and significance when they present the news. I think they do it very well," he says.

The broadcast nets could learn a thing or two from them, he continues: "You have to sell it. You have to present it with more gusto, more zest. You have to let viewers know, 'This is important.' You don't just report every story like it's a weather forecast."

Back in New York and back to work.

The National Catholic Reporter Review of John Allen's New Book on Opus Dei:

Herewith one small example: the treatment of Josemaria Escrivá’s seminal work, The Way, which has sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, a favorite of today’s conservative Catholics, called the book a “little manual for Scouts at the upper level,” and its spirituality “insufficient to support a worldwide organization.” By contrast, Mr. Allen quotes Thomas Merton, who wrote of The Way: “It will certainly do a great deal of good by its simplicity, which is a true medium for the Gospel message.” Mr. Allen also cites excerpts from Fr. Escrivá’s later works that are genuinely edifying and not banal.

Perhaps The Way should be looked at as a book for beginners? Then Balthazar's idea can be reconciled with Merton's and the reviewers opinions of some of Escriva's later works. The Gospel message of course is not that complicated, though it is deep, it's amplified greatly in the Epistles.

(and no, I'm really not trying to present the Opera Omnia of Escriva as the same as the Bible)

It's always interesting about those liberal favorites though...Romero was also a big fan of The Work.

ESPN.com - COLUMNIST - Wojciechowski: The Greatest Game Ever Played:

"The Trojans were ... out T-shirted (my favorite: 'New Coach. New Pope. New Era. Same Jesus')..."

Reading Synodal Tea Leaves

It has been announced that the Synodal Fathers will be participating in a previously unscheduled Holy Hour of Eucharist Adoration. One wonders if this was added to the schedule by someone in response to the deprecating comments that have been made by some about Adoration as a form of prayer.

via Open Book (interpretation mine though)

(N.B.:these are some very sketchy thoughts.)

I bought today the second volume (in the original hardcover edition) of Fr. Francis X. Murphy's original book(s) on the Second Vatican Council. Fr. Murphy's "Letters from the Vatican Council" published in the New Yorker and collected and expanded in his books framed the interpretation of the council for many or most American ecclesiastics. He popularized (or is at least blamed for popularizing) many of the ideas traditionally associated with the Council in modern American (non-traditionalist/conservative) Catholic thought particularly that of the paradigm of John XXIII's aggiornamento being as much a neccesary updating. He also framed the Council as a debate between liberals and conservatives, something I think clearly breaks down when you realize that both Ratzinger and Kueng were "liberals" at the council. That's why so many people today have to read Ratzinger as having moved to the right, because their view of him is focused on his having been a liberal peritus at the Council. If you find it hard to read Ratzinger as having moved to the right, which I do, then you can look back and say that the analysis of the council as having been a debate between liberal and conservative wings might have to be rexamined.

I'm still looking for volumes 1 and 4 of the work and have only sampled it, so I
don't have a lot more to say on it.

Another thought. John Paul II was one of the Council Fathers, and Benedict XVI was only a peritus. That makes him the first Pope since 1958 who was not a member of the council.

Pittsford Carmelites Get Reinforcements

Sadly the a Carmelite monastery (of women) in the Diocese of Albany has closed. The silver lining is that the Carmelite monastery in Pittsford (outside of Rochester) will no longer being closing/be unclosing.

Traveling through D.C. on the bus, as we went up the ramp onto the bridge over the Potomac and past the Jefferson Memorial, the Spanish-accented young man sitting next to me said: "This is a lot better than New York."

After going to St. Agnes Sunday (and headed home to St. Joseph's this weekend), I finally broke down and bought a copy of Fortescue's The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described (revised and corrected by a monk of Farnborough Abbey (UK), Dom Alcuin Reid and originally revised by Fr. J. B. O'Connell, M.A.).

Gawker

• Did Jon Stewart kill magazines? Would anyone notice? If he didn’t, would he consider killing Vogue, please?

Marcus via Harper's via The Observer on the Novel

In the October Harper's, Ben Marcus offers a lengthy state-of-the-novel essay, subtly titled Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction, in which he spends 13 pages beating up Jonathan Franzen--snubber of Oprah and William Gaddis alike--and the middlebrow fiction establishment he represents.

I paged through this essay at the newsstand (a Lost Illusions scene). My conclusion... Who has time for all this contemporary fiction wrangling? There's such a backlog, so many other things to do. The best I feel I can hope for is to grab some occasional choice bit by chance, like Gilead.

Catholic Howl

Check out Gen X Revert's rewrite of Howl:

I saw the best Catholics of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving
hysterical naked
dragging themselves through the streets at dawn looking
for beautiful Liturgy
...
who threw potato salad at Jesuit lecturers on Dogma and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of Groeschel’s
Friary with
shaven heads demanding true religious life.
...

(the whole thing)

(there's probably a technical poetics term for this kind of thing, but I don't know it)

He's on the sidebar now too...

Richard John Nehaus on his new blog:

"Andrew Sullivan – who could be a much nicer and more sensible person if he really tried..."

Saw Capote Sunday afternoon. Was solid, a bit too disturbing to be called a straight up entertainment. But not displacing enough to fully embody its (internal somewhat) billing as a "problem [movie]". Eh...a solid movie, but not a classic. A character actor of a movie.

Upcoming Vacation

I'm off work at 12:30AM on October 13. I'm back at 1AM on Oct. 22, but may try to get it changed to coming back at 12:30AM on Oct. 21.

Travel plans to be worked on later today.