More Mychal Judge Commemorative Pieces: Kittredge Cherry and Lisa Fullam

More on Mychal Judge, the Franciscan saint of 9/11, this weekend at Kittredge Cherry's Jesus in Love blog: Kittredge offers an excerpt reflecting on Judge's life from Salvatore Sapienza's book Mychal's Prayer: Praying with Father Mychal Judge.  Sapienza is a fellow Franciscan who worked with Mychal Judge to form St. Francis AIDS ministry in New York.  And then she follows the excerpt with reflections of her own about why Mychal Judge deserves to be remembered as a specifically gay saint.

David Bromwich and Chris Hedges on Aftermath of 9/11: Moral Voices Worth Hearing

In my view, two of the best statements, the most morally truthful ones, to appear during the commemoration of the 9/11 ten-year anniversary:

Reflections on the 9/11 Commemoration: Mourning for Whom, for What?

I was not going to write about 9/11 today because the commemoration of that day has been so hyped by the American mainstream media, there seems little left that's worth saying, little that can make a dent in the distortion of truth and authentic meaning in the midst of the hype.

Ellis O'Hanlon on Vatican Response to Enda Kenny: Facts vs. Truth

Brilliant analysis by Ellis O'Hanlon in the Irish Independent today about the distinction between facts and the truth, and how  Catholic officials trash their moral credibility when they try to answer courageous articulation of the truth about the abuse crisis with recitals of "facts"--as the Vatican did recently in response to Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny's scathing denunciation of Vatican complicity in covering up crimes against Irish children by Irish Catholic clergy:

George Lakoff and Bill Keller on Role of Mainstream Media, Post 9/11

George Lakoff at Huffington Post on the role of the mainstream media in propagating right-wing frames for the significant issues we face in the post-9/11 world:

More Alan Bennett: His Lady in a Van

And speaking of characters and saints who stretch the boundaries of imagination (piggybacking on what I have just posted about Mychal Judge): one final (?) excerpt from Alan Bennet's diaries . . . . This 2004 diary entry (again, from Untold Stories [NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005]) has to do with Miss M. Shepherd, an eccentric (and some would say, mentally unbalanced) woman who appeared with her van in Bennet's garden in Camden Town one day, and took up residence there for some fifteen years up to her death.  She was an erstwhile postulant for more than one Catholic religious order who never quite made it to the vowed stage.  

Her madness was presumably part of the problem.

A 9/11 Remembrance: NPR Pays Tribute to Father Mychal Judge

On the eve of the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, I want to take note of NPR's tribute to Father Mychal Judge earlier this week.  A number of readers have drawn my attention to this NPR piece, and Kerry Weber has a moving posting about it on the America "In All Things" blog right now.