Well, that’s what I get for being too busy to be out in the blogosphere. There are interesting tidbits everywhere. Some quick points you might find worth a mouse-click:

• Stem cells don’t have to come from embryos — Thanks be to God! It may be that a scientific breakthrough will make the bitter debate over the use of stem cells a thing of the past. According to this article, scientists in the US and Japan have created an equivalent to embryonic stem cells from ordinary skin cells. Interestingly enough, two inidividuals who are already ready to move away from stem cells are two of the scientists who had been hailed as pioneers of cloning — “Dolly” creator Ian Wilmut (HERE) and James A. Thomson (HERE). As Thompson said, “If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough. I thought long and hard about whether I would do it.”
• Your favorite Narnia book — Darn! Too late to get a word in on Touchstone’s survey of the favorite one of the Narnia series. I would’ve put in my vote for “A Horse and His Boy.” It was the first one I picked up, and so it’s always had a special place in my heart. “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” is probably a close second (and judging from the Touchstone article comment list, it looks like it’s the winner), if only because the description of what was involved to change Eustace from a dragon to a boy still seems incredibly powerful to me. And least favorite Narnia book? Probably “The Silver Chair.” It’s not just that Puddleglum is a wet blanket. That whole book seems to be more about failure than success. Just color me shallow, but I’d rather read about people getting things right. I’d be interested to hear other people’s faves and least-faves.
• The Russian Church may leave the World Council of Churches (WCC) (HERE) — Remember back HERE when the Antiochians got out of the NCC and I wondered why the other Orthodox archdioceses couldn’t do the same? Am I right in thinking the NCC is connected to the WCC? Or is it connected to the kneebone? Well, in any case — hooray! It’s obvious that these “worldwide church organizations” have just become political organizations that preach a secular-progressive ethos from the pulpit. If we can’t turn that around, we need to make it obvious that we don’t agree with policies that “turn the WCC into a rostrum for promoting feminism, the rights of sexual minorities, ideas which erode the principle of national sovereignty, and certain political programs,” in the words of Moscow Patriarchate spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin.
• The importance of Being There — John Mark Reynolds has THIS on the problem with having a virtual network of friends.
  

  Virtual contact (phones and Facebook) can sustain me only so long. God made us to want to be with each other. He takes this so seriously that though God sent a perfect Story, He loved us enough to come and live that Story out in front of us.

• The Mystery of the Missing Romanovs — solved! (HERE) As all the watchers of the Discovery Channel know, there were two bodies missing from the remains of Czar Nicholas II’s family, which was unearthed in 1991. One of the younger daughters and the son, Alexei — who would have been the heir — weren’t present. That led to a little speculation that they might have made it out, but a couple of amateur sleuths have laid that to rest. Hopefully the remains of all of these 11 martyrs of the Communist Revolution can be laid to rest now as well. The article points out that the Russian Orthodox Church has not participated in any of the burials, because the missing two bodies had made them skeptical that the bodies found were actually the Romanovs.
  

  The nine sets of remains were interred in a lavish ceremony in 1998 at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, which contains the crypts of earlier Russian royals. But the Russian Orthodox Church would not formally take part in that ceremony because of its concerns about authenticity.For now, the church has declined to say whether it considers the newly found remains genuine, pending further tests. But people who have long sought the remains say they are hopeful that once the results are in, the church will formally conduct a service at the cathedral in St. Petersburg to lay to rest the final remains of the Romanovs.

  “This brings closure to a very sad chapter in Russian history,” said Peter Sarandinaki, an American of Russian descent who started an organization to help find the remains and had conducted several searches here. “It is because their murder symbolizes the start of a diabolic era in world history. And now that has all come to an end.”

Here’s hopin’.