On wearing crash helmets to church

"Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”

-Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk

"...before it can be sacred or religious or devotional art, it must be beautiful and true."

Sacred art

"...before it can be sacred or religious or devotional art, it must be beautiful and true."


Sacred art


http://thesacredarts.org/

men

• Currently the US has 1.5 million men in the slammer, a 15 to 1 lead over the fairer sex.
• We guys are much more likely to be alcoholics and we are ahead in the obesity derby.
• No surprise, then, that on average women have a five-year lead in life span.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/boys_will_be_doofuses/

Children with married mothers and fathers do better on every single significant outcome. Cause marriage matters.

Caitlin Flanagan’s cover story for Time magazine titled “Is There Hope for the American Marriage?” 

The reason for these appeals to lasting unions is simple: on every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration — if you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others. - Time Magazine, 16 July 2009

Few things hamper a child as much as not having a father at home. ‘As a feminist, I didn’t want to believe it,’ says Maria Kefalas, a sociologist who studies marriage and family issues and co-authored a seminal book on low-income mothers called Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. ‘Women always tell me, “I can be a mother and a father to a child,” but it’s not true.’ Growing up without a father has a deep psychological effect on a child. ‘The mom may not need that man,’ Kefalas says, ‘but her children still do.’ 

ibid

LOL Saints

Not meaning any disrespect, but I find some of these pictures funny.

from http://www.lolsaints.com/saints/most-popular-all-time

Picture. Nice Grass, peoples, the Lamb that was slain.

Love this picture. Wish I had a bigger version.