From The Onion:

My faith in the Lord is about the pure, simple values: raising children right, saying grace at the table, strictly forbidding those who are Methodists or Presbyterians from receiving communion because their beliefs are heresies, and curing homosexuals. That’s all. Just the core beliefs. You won’t see me going on some frothy-mouthed tirade about being a comfort to the downtrodden.

I’m a normal Midwestern housewife. I believe in the basic teachings of the Bible and the church. Divorce is forbidden. A woman is to be an obedient subordinate to the male head of the household. If a man lieth down with another man, they shall be taken out and killed. Things everybody can agree on, like the miracle of glossolalia that occurred during Pentecost, when the Apostles were visited by the Holy Spirit, who took the form of cloven tongues of fire hovering just above their heads. You know, basic common sense stuff.

But that doesn’t mean I think people should, like, forgive the sins of those who trespass against them or anything weird like that.

a good essay on making schools work:

Oddly, the first extraordinary boon for public education in America is the economic apocalypse. A 30-year-long habit of increasing privatization of our own little corners of democracy, of swiping the credit card to flee our public spaces, is dying hard. Even in Los Angeles, independent schools are feeling the hit as families who can no longer afford the $20,000-plus tuitions are transitioning to public school. Yes, they may be charter schools but, in a gradual move from competition to community thinking, it is a first step.

On top of that, Mr. Obama’s presidency has indeed set off an emotional sea change: Why look at that, there is new hope for everything, even public schools! I see, amazingly, small green shoots of tentative optimism even among my Left Coast private school Democrats — those who’ve fallen into a bad habit of mocking public education in every sentence, as though it is a George W. Bush “No Child Left Behind” swamp they’d never deign to venture into, a dumping ground for the unsophisticated, a warehouse for the poor. With any luck, in the next generation, the meritocratic dream conveyed in the ascension of Barack Obama will not hinge on a lucky jaunt at the Punahou School but will be entwined in a narrative that reflects the triumph of public school, a fought-for hearth in which burns the essential goodness, fair-mindedness and optimism of America.

McSweeney’s is danged funny.

It’s harder than you think and it’s harder to measure.

David Gibson weighs in here.  It’s complicated, and I certainly support CCHD and I can’t think of any of their work I don’t support.  But I recognize that some conservatives feel that CCHD is not only paying too little attention to issues of abortion but is actually encouraging directly pro-choice activities.  The former, I feel, might be a question of priorities that reasonable people can disagree about, but the latter does seem contrary to Church teaching.  The problem, of course, is that a lot of groups doing great work are also officially pro-choice.  So can those groups be funded still?  I would say yes, provided the money is going to work that has nothing to do with abortion (job skills, addiction outreach, the list could go on and on) but I can understand those who would say we should only give to charities that have no pro-choice attachments at all.

He’s got a new album coming out, and a lot of the singles are already being played.  I’m not gonna lie: the guy can produce.  In fact, his beats and music might be the best in hip hop today (I can’t think of any better off the top of my head).  But his rapping skills and his lyrics are often mediocre at best, and songs like Swagger Like Us show it (his rap is by far the worst of the four, and none of the other three rappers are really bringing their A-game).

Stereogum’s got a review of the new album, saying pretty similar stuff:

As you’ve no doubt gleaned from this and other blogs, every song on this album is built from a blueprint of TR-808 drum machine beats and conspicuous digitally manipulated crooning. It’s a departure that’s especially confounding given the prevalence of Auto-Tune abuse in countless recent hip-hop hits. Kanye knows the pitch-shifting mechanism is played out, he just doesn’t give a shit. It’s still a crutch (a more skilled singer wouldn’t rely on the gimmick) but we won’t harp on it. The absence of samples is one key difference between this concept album and the acclaimed school trilogy. The lack of pop singer guest appearances and co-producers is another (though Jeezy and Weezy make high-profile if totally unnecessary cameos, and No I.D. co-produces two songs with Kanye). Those creative choices coupled with King of Pain (T-Pain?) lyrics help define 808s as a solitary pursuit. Don’t expect any club bangers, this is more like a soundtrack for stalking ex-girlfriends on Facebook.

So, a few things about aliens.  One, today is the birthday of SETI, a program to search for extra-terrestial intelligence, which you should think is cool, because if you don’t, you’ve got a real lack of imagination and should get excited about, among other things, the new Stark Trek movie.

But I digress: also about aliens, there’s a new The Day the Earth Stood Still movie coming out, which prompts a clever reflection in First Things:

This is the way a lot of “alien as messiah” films go, and the 1951 version had more than its share of religious stuff. There was Klaatu’s reference to “the Almighty Spirit,” plus that climatic Lazarus-like resurrection. There was, however, nothing miraculous to be found. It was due to a medical science far beyond our capacity to understand. In these alien–savior films, everything is beyond our capacity to understand.

In the 1982 E.T., we have both a resurrection (cheers were said to be heard in theatres) and an ascension, awe-struck humans looking upward at their departing friend.

You want more sci-fi religion? There’s Jeff Bridges as the Starman in 1984. He impregnates an Earth woman and promises that her Child will be a Teacher. That’s my capitalization of the two words, but you won’t miss the capital letters dripping from the Starman’s accent. There was even a short-lived television series based on the product of that union. Starman, by the way, resurrects a deer killed by a red-neck hunter—so, take that you awful NRA people! Were the film being made today, I think an Alaskan moose shot by a pony-tailed governor would likely get the role. While there is no resurrection in Starman, except for the deer, the ascension scene is not to be missed—another picture of slack-jawed humans gazing wonderingly upward.

We want to believe there’s Somebody Out There, somebody wiser, stronger, smarter, kinder than ourselves. Surely, in this vast, incomprehensible cosmos there must be other beings selflessly prepared to snatch us out of our troubles. You can hope so. A lot of science fiction is depending on it.

He’s one of our country’s best writers, and he knows a whole lot about music (it shows up all over in Fortress of Solitude, for example).  Rolling Stone has him talkin’ about singin’:

This points to what defines great singing in the rock-and-soul era: that some underlying tension exists in the space between singer and song. A bridge is being built across a void, and it’s a bridge we’re never sure the singer’s going to manage to cross. The gulf may reside between vocal texture and the actual meaning of the words, or between the singer and band, musical genre, style of production or the audience’s expectations. In any case, there’s something beautifully uncomfortable at the root of the vocal style that defines the pop era.

It’s something a lot of religious men struggle with.  There’s help with this website and this book:

Living Free, which is published on Friday, follows on from the Searching for Intimacy initiatives pioneered by CARE to support people trapped in the use of internet pornography, as well as their families.

The book sets out how to identify and acknowledge the problem, how to find or be a mentor, and how to set up a support group. It also gives advice on how to protect the family or help a spouse overcome their use of internet pornography.

Will it work?

The Church of England has its own ecclesiastical courts. British Jews have had their own “beth din” courts for more than a century.

But ever since the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, called in February for aspects of Islamic Shariah to be embraced alongside the traditional legal system, the government has been grappling with a public furor over the issue, assuaging critics while trying to reassure a wary and at times disaffected Muslim population that its traditions have a place in British society.

Boxed between the two, the government has taken a stance both cautious and confusing, a sign of how volatile almost any discussion of the role of Britain’s nearly two million Muslims can become.