Wednesday, October 10

Joseph news for family, friends and anyone else interested:

He's six months old now, and just a lot of fun. He is quite close to crawling - he get almost anywhere he wants with a combination of rolling and turning - the forward motion is coming soon. He's also discovered his tongue. During most of his waking hours, it's hanging out of his mouth, and his working it in and out, opening and closing his mouth, experimenting with the sounds he can make. It's a riot.

As noted by a couple of other webloggers, a bizarre image is appearing on posters of bin Laden: it's Bert of Sesame Street fame. One is tempted to see it as Photoshop joking around, but the image keeps popping up in news photos - look to the right hand side of the posters. The origin of the image seems to be on a personal website out of Holland, and Instapundit wonders if the poster-maker was surfing the web for images and just grabbed this one, without knowing who the puppet was. Photographs found here, here, and here.
Here's a heartening article by Jean Bethke Elshtain from the University of Chicago Divinity School about a meeting she and about twenty other religious leaders had with President Bush on September 20, the day of his speech before Congress. Still working out of Clinton fatigue, I can't help but read things like this and contrast it to our previous presidents narcissistic and PR-seeking approach to things. Click here for the piece.
The perfect quote has been located. Not by me, but by a reader who most graciously passed it along. It's the words of Hans Urs Von Balthasar from "The Christian and Anxiety:"

Consider the abysmal problem of the relation between
God's Kingdom and earthy power... whether, for example, a
call to arms by the Church, a blessing of weapons, or
taking up the sword of this world is an expression of
the courage of the Christian faith or, on the
contrary, the symptom of an unchristian and faithless
anxiety; whether something that can be defended and
justified in a hundred ways with penultimate reasons
drawn from faith (quite apart from the lessons of
Church history - but then what does Church history
teach?) will collapse miserably before the throne of
judgment of the ultimate reason - because what of
course appeared to be God's weapon in the hands of
God's warrior against God's enemies is now suddenly
exposed as Peter's desperate sword-waving against the
high priest's servant, whose side Jesus takes in order
to expose such brandishing of weapons for what it was:
anxious betrayal.

No, it doesn't solve anything, but it certainly articulates the problem perfectly, doesn't it?

Sorry for yesterday's silence. The Blogger server was a little pesky at the beginning of the day, so I didn't bother for the rest. I also needed to get a good start on some projects, and with Joseph's cooperation, I actually did - wrote 1300 words on Prove It: Prayer. This AM, I need to write a fairly big article for OSV, but I'll be back with you later this afternoon, I hope.