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Terry Mattingly at Get Religion on how the Pope is reported to be cool with atheists:

The pope said all are redeemed through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Check.

The pope said that it is important to recognize that all can do good and, thus, to move closer to God — even if they are not believers. Check.

Did the pope, to be blunt, say that hell is empty, that all have chosen to accept the redemption offered by Jesus Christ? Did he say that no one has chosen to remove themselves from the cleansing fire of God’s love? No check.

Was this sermon worthy of coverage? You bet. However, it helps if reporters interview a source or two, or three (these are ultra-complex issues) who understand Catholic tradition and thought.

whisker-biscuits:

No Touching!

Pour a shot of any alcohol of your choosing. Place it on the table in front of you. Grab your hands behind you back, place your mouth over the shot glass and lift, drinking it without using your hands.

The Franklin

Pour 1/2 shot of Kahlua into a shot glass. Using the back…

David Dennis, regarding the our collective capacity to notice some tragedies and ignore others:

So I shouldn’t be surprised that the Mother’s Day Parade shooting has largely been forgotten. On Sunday, shots were fired into a crowd during a parade in the New Orleans 7th ward. Police said they saw three suspects running from the scene.

This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free.

So why am I allowed to go outside? Where’s the city quarantine or FBI and Homeland Security presence for this act of “terrorism”?

Because this is an act of domestic terrorism right? Just because the alleged shooter was wearing a white tee and jeans does that suddenly make the shooting a gang-related affair? And we all know how irrelevant gang-related shootings are in America. The Mother’s Day shooting is so irrelevant that politicians haven’t even bothered to mention it to further their anti-gun agendas. If the shootings aren’t even important enough for politicians to spin, then it’s truly reached a black hole of irrelevance.

Did I mention the shooter is still on the loose? I have? Just checking. Police have released photos and video of one of the suspects, but he is still at large.

Now take a moment and imagine a Mother’s Day Parade in the suburbs of Denver, a neighborhood in Edina or a plaza in Austin where bullets rain down on civilians and even hit children. I can’t help but imagine the around-the-clock news coverage. And I can’t help but think it’s because most of America can identify with the fear of being bombarded with gunfire while just enjoying a parade in the middle of town. But America can’t identify with being at a parade in the “inner city” where “gang violence” erupts. The “oh my God, that could happen to me” factor isn’t present with a story about New Orleans or the Chicago southside.

This is the first I have heard of this shooting.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

This essay was frequently referenced by Milton Friedman, and is a great example of Hayek’s ideas about how prices represent information. I often think about this story in the context of my work as a scientist: I couldn’t easily do the job of most of the people whose papers I cite, and they couldn’t easily do mine. While no one can understand all of the developing scientific knowledge, cooperation enables all of us to make progress together.

John Fox, the official historian of the FBI, said that the shutdown of such a major city was virtually unprecedented in recent U.S. history. He said the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was far bigger, knocking New York and Washington on their heels and clearing the airspace over the entire United States.

But beyond that, Fox said, a city shutdown has “only happened on a smaller scale.”

The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (which happened on April 19, Friday’s date) was far deadlier and devastated the city center. But the government didn’t order a far-reaching lockdown.

Other manhunts and events have terrorized and paralyzed cities, including in 2002 during the Washington sniper attacks. But rarely, if ever, has a large U.S. urban area come to such a complete and utter halt as happened Friday in Boston.

Fox said the closest recent parallel might be in London after the July 7, 2005, transit system attacks that killed 52 passengers and four bombers, and injured more than 700 others.

London was badly disrupted, with trains and buses out of service, and schools and many businesses were closed. But the city was back on its feet almost immediately, with a sentiment summed up by Ian Blair, then the head of Scotland Yard.

“If London can survive the Blitz,” he said, “it can survive four miserable bombers like these.”

Petr Gandalovič, Ambassador of the Czech Republic,

As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect. The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities - the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.