Tensegrities

Here’s a cool website space for Catholic teens who care about social justice. They’re giving away free songs “in the key of justice” this summer. Check out their quick description of social justice teaching, and ways to get involved.

The next time I’m looking for the resources from the Carnegie Study on clergy education, I’ll find them here. Chuck Foster was the main researcher, aided by a number of people including Larry Goleman and Lisa Dahill.

I have to admit it: I wasn’t really paying attention when I scanned the headlines this morning and learned that Sen. Obama was going to give a speech on patriotism. I just read it here, and was refreshed anew. Now I’ll look for a video version, so that I can listen to him and watch him while he’s giving it. A good speech, definitely worth attending to.

I’ve been struggling to get a paper written (it’s due tomorrow and I despair at meeting that deadline). In doing so I’ve been dwelling in some of my favorite books, and just now was struck again by something Kathryn Tanner wrote in her Theories of Culture:

Christianity is one big poem in that the meanings of its elements are subtle and ambiguous, and the connections among them elusive and associative, as matters of practice always are. (91)

Ok, I just had to smile at this!

Just in case anyone wants to put an ELCA logo or a Book of Faith initiative logo someplace digitally, here are a number of official versions.

I missed this story last week, but the NYTimes reported on the vanishing coverage of the war in Iraq. I do not know how anyone thinks we can make reasonable policy choices if we aren’t at least trying to get accurate information about those decisions.

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.) CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.

Here’s a handy little blog: a CT post which brings together a bunch of clips of the Colbert show with religion authors. (Hat tip to Melissa Rogers.) This is precisely the kind of useful reporting I wish the MSM would do more often!

Seymour Hersh has another lengthy piece in an upcoming issue of the New Yorker spelling out further moves on the Bush Administration’s part towards Iran.

It’s interesting that the mainstream news media are NOT reporting on the fact that this kind of pressure on Iran — the sense that there will be an overt attack by the US or its surrogate, Israel, there shortly — is pushing up the price of oil

.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has released a study guide on torture – it’s definitely worth sharing widely.