I’m forever trying to think in terms of the shorter blog entries that just reference a good read and move on, a la Instapundit. Usually I begin adding my 2-cents in, and inflation takes over.

But I think I’ve got a real shot at keeping it short right now, because it’s 100-something outside and our upstairs a/c unit isn’t keeping up. So with this cooking little laptop sitting on my legs and a Sunday nap looming in my future, here are some notables out there:

• Via Symeon’s Journal — St. John of Damascus on Islam. He didn’t call it by that name, and he seemed to think it was more bizarre than threatening. I’m not sure there’s one sentence of this that’s politically correct, but sometimes that’s why we love the saints.
• Via “The Abandoned Mind” — Fr. Mike’s reminiscences of some evangelical weirdness about prayers. I think I remember the Scofield Bible that my grandmother gave me having the spin he lists on the Lord’s Prayer, that the Lord didn’t mean us to pray that prayer, just to pray like that. And it confused me back then too, because evangelicals don’t use that as a template for their prayers. But there’s a lot more going on there, of course.
• Via the Orthodoxy Today blog — The Wall St. Journal is onto something with this article titled “War Media: War images drain the wells of moral outrage”:
  

  There is now a belief, held for different reasons by pacifists and propagandists, that if the media forces the people in America or Europe to see and read the bloody details of these conflicts, then public opinion will force their leaders, as Kofi Annan would put it, to stop the fighting…

  The way war arrives in living rooms nowadays has an effect, and the effect often is revulsion. How could it not be? … One’s emotions and politics are routinely jerked now from revulsion to hatred and back…

  A world in which people get fed streams of awful images to drive political conclusions produces a familiar effect: They eventually become inured to the images. Human wells of moral outrage are deep, but not bottomless. If emotional outrage is the basis on which they are expected to make judgments about politically complicated events like Lebanon, many will turn away, rather than subject themselves to a gratuitous, confusing numbing of their sensibilities. This is not progress.

There’s lots more good stuff out there, but the upstairs sauna has rendered me brain-dead, so I’ll go chill out.