Round-up

  • I’m for­ever try­ing to think in terms of the shorter blog entries that just ref­er­ence a good read and move on, a la Instapun­dit. Usu­ally I begin adding my 2-cents in, and infla­tion takes over.

    But I think I’ve got a real shot at keep­ing it short right now, because it’s 100-something out­side and our upstairs a/c unit isn’t keep­ing up. So with this cook­ing lit­tle lap­top sit­ting on my legs and a Sun­day nap loom­ing in my future, here are some nota­bles out there:

    • Via Symeon’s Jour­nal — St. John of Dam­as­cus on Islam. He didn’t call it by that name, and he seemed to think it was more bizarre than threat­en­ing. I’m not sure there’s one sen­tence of this that’s polit­i­cally cor­rect, but some­times that’s why we love the saints.
    • Via “The Aban­doned Mind” — Fr. Mike’s rem­i­nis­cences of some evan­gel­i­cal weird­ness about prayers. I think I remem­ber the Scofield Bible that my grand­mother gave me hav­ing the spin he lists on the Lord’s Prayer, that the Lord didn’t mean us to pray that prayer, just to pray like that. And it con­fused me back then too, because evan­gel­i­cals don’t use that as a tem­plate for their prayers. But there’s a lot more going on there, of course.
    • Via the Ortho­doxy Today blog — The Wall St. Jour­nal is onto some­thing with this arti­cle titled “War Media: War images drain the wells of moral out­rage”:

      There is now a belief, held for dif­fer­ent rea­sons by paci­fists and pro­pa­gan­dists, that if the media forces the peo­ple in Amer­ica or Europe to see and read the bloody details of these con­flicts, then pub­lic opin­ion will force their lead­ers, as Kofi Annan would put it, to stop the fighting…

      The way war arrives in liv­ing rooms nowa­days has an effect, and the effect often is revul­sion. How could it not be? … One’s emo­tions and pol­i­tics are rou­tinely jerked now from revul­sion to hatred and back…

      A world in which peo­ple get fed streams of awful images to drive polit­i­cal con­clu­sions pro­duces a famil­iar effect: They even­tu­ally become inured to the images. Human wells of moral out­rage are deep, but not bot­tom­less. If emo­tional out­rage is the basis on which they are expected to make judg­ments about polit­i­cally com­pli­cated events like Lebanon, many will turn away, rather than sub­ject them­selves to a gra­tu­itous, con­fus­ing numb­ing of their sen­si­bil­i­ties. This is not progress.

    There’s lots more good stuff out there, but the upstairs sauna has ren­dered me brain-dead, so I’ll go chill out.


    Related posts:

    1. Blog round-up, part two
    2. “Lord, have mercy”, cont.
    3. The Lord will have mercy; the Lord has had mercy
    4. Bright Week do’s & don’ts
    5. War and prayer

    August 6th, 2006 | Grace | 1 Comment |

One Response and Counting...

  • Mimi 08.06.2006

    Great round up! Thanks.

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