Cooking to Save the Planet: Black-Eyed Peas and Collards Curry

Say that you have some of your new year's day good-luck dishes--black-eyed peas and collard greens--still hanging around four days into the new year.  What would you choose to do with them as the week winds down, I wonder?  Here's what I've done today, with a bow of thanks in the direction of Sonje, who reminded me in a comment several days ago of the powerful virtue of a good, hot curry when one has a nasty cold.

More Analysis of Cardinal George + Ku Klux Klan

And for those continuing to follow the controversy His Eminence Cardinal Francis George, the past president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, recently ignited when he compared his gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to the Ku Klux Klan, there's the following:

Angry Anglicans Swim Tiber to Rome: Maureen Fiedler and Lisa Fullam Examine Their Motives

At National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal, Maureen Fiedler and Lisa Fullam take a careful look at the implications of the Vatican decision to create a new "ordinariate" for  disaffected Anglicans/Episcopalians.  Both note that a primary motive of those Anglicans crossing the Tiber to Rome is their resistance to women's ordination and their refusal to accept the ordination of openly gay clergy.  

Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot: An Audio Clip

What follows is an experiment, and it may well not work--because I am definitely not one of God's most techie-savvy creatures.  Here's the frame for the experiment: after I posted recently about Jeffrey Eugenides's new novel The Marriage Plot, Esther Bochner, senior publicist for Macmillan Audio, emailed to thank me for my comments and offered me an audio clip of Eugenides reading from Marriage Plot.

Sarah Posner Dissects U.S. Catholic Bishops' Bogus "Religious Freedom" Arguments

I highly recommend Sarah Posner's first-rate essay at Religion Dispatches right now, on the attempt of the U.S. Catholic bishops to repackage discrimination as "religious freedom" in one shameful way after another--in their attack on the proposed HHS guidelines that would require Catholic institutions to provide contraceptive access in their health insurance plans, in their ongoing (and ever-increasing) attack on the human rights of gay and lesbian citizens, etc.

News about Catholic Sex Abuse Crisis: Netherlands, Ireland, Canada

Re: the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church, there are a number of significant items I've been saving  to bring to readers' attention in the post-holiday period:

Cardinal George and KKK Discussion Continues: NCR Editorializes

In other news today: National Catholic Reporter's latest editorial casts a cold eye on Cardinal Francis George's recent attempt to compare his gay brothers and sisters to the Ku Klux Klan.  The editorial's bottom line: His Eminence's outrageous comparison "diminishes any standing the church might still have in the public arena."