Finishing up our quick cruise with a stay in a really great hotel, I picked up a book in the room called “On Art and Life” by John Ruskin. I’m not sure anyone was really supposed to read it — it had the look of something that was placed there to lend an artsy atmosphere […]

Greg and I are on the last day of a short cruise that took in several stops in British Columbia. Today’s the last day, and it’s a “sea day,” a day when the ship doesn’t dock anywhere. Today in my Gospel reading, I happened on Mark 6:30-32:
Then the apostles gathered to Jesus and told […]

Today the Church commemorates St. John of Kronstadt, and so I was curious to see what the day’s readings in “My Life in Christ” would offer up. It seemed very fitting that several reflections centered on prayer, as indeed it was fitting that my gospel reading included the verse, “Now in the morning, having risen […]

All right, we’ve all got real serious things to think about, and the world’s going to you-know-where in a you-know-what. But I think it’s important for everyone to take a short break and check out the cockatoo that dances to the Backstreet Boys:

Many thanks to Word Mama for sending it along.

More fun from a collection of his essays in this book. This essay is called “On the Transmission of Christianity” and was a preface to a book published in 1946 called “How Heathen is Britain?” The theme of how in the world Christians can hope to pass on the faith in a culture that seems […]

Hanging out in a little town in central Missouri last week, I saw an old factory. Because of the seminar I’d just been sitting in on, it caught my eye. It was falling apart, probably unused and unoccupied for decades. The situation in rural Missouri is the same as it is all over the country: […]

As I think I’ve said, I enjoy drawing and painting very much, and it makes me sad that there aren’t more people who get into it as a pasttime.
From what I’ve seen, there are two things that kill off the would-be artist right away, long before they’ve had any way of knowing if they like […]

My little town is putting on a fall festival this weekend, and so they had scheduled a parade for this morning. But with the usual contrariness of weather, it seems like they have been granted the very worst day ever on which to hold a parade. Yesterday’s mild temperatures have dipped down five degrees, and […]

I still have a few leaves of basil left on my puny little basil plant, which is just as well. When I was giving this recipe for what to do with fresh basil, I forgot my other favorite — a quick little pizza with a lot of good stuff in it.

It’s just something I came […]

Pretty off-topic, but I thought it was funny.
Via the London Times online: Paris is under attack by extremely well-organized stealth operatives who have been sneaking into museums and Parisian catacombs and … cleaning up historic sites. Or repairing things. Or holding poetry readings.

Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on […]