Blog Talk: A Serving of Appetizing Bites from Around the Blogosphere

Once again, with a bow to Fred Clark's wonderful Slacktivist blog, from which I'm shamelessly borrowing, a serving of savory mezes to whet your appetite for the entire piece to which the meze bite links . . . . One of the following links points to Fred's blog.  If you can spot it cold, without clicking on the links below, you win the I'm Correct prize of the day.

The I'm Correct or IC prize: if my sweet, funny elderly cousin Lucy Price Grafton, who taught first grade for 100 years, were still with us, I'd have her pen you a note in the first-grade dialect she spoke in her touching little cards to me from New Iberia, Louisiana, all carefully printed in beautiful block letters, often in multiple colors: "I loooong 2 C U," etc.  But the I would be carefully drawn as an eye, and the "looong" might or might not have a tiny dachshund drawn next to it.

And so here goes with the meze plate:*

1. I guess one could define JPII's level of denial as infallibly wrong. 

2. The man who once called the Nicaraguan contra thugs “moral equals of the Founding Fathers” gets to go down in history, even in MSNBC’s Chris Matthews’ assessment, as “one of the greats.”  

3. All in all a very large isolated dysfunctional secretive male dominated organization funded mostly on the taxpayer’s dime and setting the standards of excellence regarding child rape and criminal cover up etc. in house.

4. Kann es ein Bündnis zwischen dem Lamm (der Ökologie) und dem Wolf (der Ökonomie) geben? Alle Anzeichen stehen dagegen.

5. We may look back upon this year as the one in which climate change began to wreak serious havoc, yet we hear almost no conversation about changing policy or behavior.

6. The issue of financial disclosure isn't a sideshow to this election -- it's a big part of what this election is about.

7. But wisdom crystalizes one's attention.  As pressure and time turn coal into diamonds.

8. Really? Refresh my memory - in just which gospel did Jesus lay out a plan for the structured sacramental life in the Church?

9. Pioneers are always out of the mainstream, but in the not too distant future, it will be those resisting full inclusion who can most accurately be described by that epithet.

10. It seems as though Douthat’s real complaint is not that these churches lack conviction, but that he personally doesn’t like the substance of those convictions.

11. The best I can figure is this: Pay attention and take responsibility.

*The order in which the mezes are served signifies nothing.  Except that I read them in this order originally.