The Fishers’ Shmedifying Guide to Van Maintenance

Drips, smells, rumbles, squeals, groans, blinking lights, shudders, tremors, mice, hiccups, spasms, heat that won’t turn on, heat that won’t turn off, heat that smells like dolphin meat, the unpredictable squirting of fluids, and the occasional refusal to acknowledge who’s in charge here. This is just what it’s like having a car that you aren’t making huge monthly payments on, and if you can’t live this way, then you’re overdue for a fancy pants check, Mr. Fancy Pants.

Read the rest at the Register. 

Obedience Gives Us Jesus

Icon_of_jesus_baptism

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons 

Why tell us that Jesus is the Son of God as soon as He does the one thing that the Son of God doesn’t really need to do? What does this tell us?

Read the rest at the Register.

The abortion lie that just won’t die

Emergency_room

image by Thierry Geoffroy via Wikimedia Commons 

 

It’s expensive to run a medical facility, and reasonably so, because when people’s lives are at stake, you should be willing to spend a little money. If you want to perform surgery, then you should be ready to perform surgery. If you think women’s lives are not worth an upgrade or two on your facility,  then maybe you’re in the wrong business.

Read the rest at the Register. 

It’s silly season for Catholics who bash Francis on climate change

If we want a pro-life message to be part of the conversation on environmental policy, then the Pope must speak.

 

Read the rest at the Register.

Happy New Year! You’re Going to Die.

Gedenck_O_Mensch_sich_wer_Du_bist

Anonymous painting courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I’m telling my daughter the brightest version of something that is true, and something that we all need to remember: that the best way to deal with death and the afterlife is to remember, always, that it’s our behavior right now that decides which path we’re on. It’s a good thing to spend some time thinking about death, not to terrify ourselves or to revel in dark things, but to shed some light on our present choices.

Read the rest at the Register. 

Happy Old Year!

Colette,_213_rue_Saint-Honoré,_Paris_-_Canards_dans_la_cour

image source

Between FEMEN, climate change, and that ill-considered paintball showdown between Rocco Palmo and Bishop Coyne in the Sala Clementina, the last thing the Vatican needs to do is take any chances with any werewolves. You know there’s room in the papal apartments. They could put newspapers down on the floor if they’re worried about the marble. (I suggest L’Osservatore Romano, because please.)

Read the rest at the Register

Mother and Child: A Christmas Gallery of Original Art

Merry Christmas, everybody! I offered up Midnight Mass for all of you, especially for anyone who is lonely or grieving or in pain today. Thanks for another wonderful year of company.

Over at the Register today, nine artists have graciously shared their lovely Madonna and Child artwork with us. Here is just one, by 16-year-old painter Noyuri Umezaki:

 

Christmas art Umizaki

 

Check out the rest here.

If it saves even one American life . . .

The world is full of people who want to hurt, torment, maim, and kill. They all think the have a good reason to do these things, or else they would not be doing them. The Church begs us to be different. The Church begs us not to be an accomplice to intrinsically evil acts, either with our actual hands, or with our wills, or with our assenting words.

Read the rest at the Register.

It was a beautiful confession.

PIC crying kid with running nose

[T]he priest said what this particular priest always says: “Thank you for that beautiful confession.” He says this when I have a long and sordid list, or a short and sordid list, or when he can barely understand me because my nose is running from the sordidness of it all. The point is, I am not aware of ever having made a confession that any normal human being would consider “beautiful.”

But the confessional is not a normal place.

Read the rest at the Register. 

Broken Windows and Depersonalization

PIC broken windows

One aspect of a “broken windows” policy indisputably works, and that is the idea of cutting off crime at the root, before it has a chance to blossom.

But there are different ways to cut crime off. You could go in like a bulldozer, crushing petty criminals like Garner into the ground. Or you could do what a town in North Carolina did: they identify the petty criminals who help sustain the criminal subculture — and they give them a chance to get out, before they “blossom” into dangerous offenders.

Read the rest at the Register.