The 100 best mystery novels of all time. Here they are, with links…

1. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (Included in this are The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Study in Scarlet, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Sign of Four, each of which garned a lot of votes on its own.)
2. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
3. Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allen Poe (Includes “The Gold Bug” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which also received a lot of individual votes.)
4. The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey
5. Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow
6. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré
7. The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
8. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
9. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
10. And Then There…

Some “crazy things” in papyruses:

Scholars are questioning the authenticity and significance of a much-publicized discovery by a Harvard scholar who reported that a 4th Century fragment of papyrus has provided the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was married.

“. . . many questions remain unanswered about the Harvard fragment.”

. . . from Martin Marty at his best:

Vying for space and time on the religion-and-media front this week, in competition with presidential campaigns, Muslim extremist riots, and almost numberless other stirs, has been the attention given to a tiny piece of papyrus which includes the teeny words “Jesus” and “wife.” This text was pictured as being “hot off the press,” with only a four century pre-publication delay after the time of the occurrences to which it presumably referred. Four centuries from the implied wedding of Jesus to this “evidence” is the amount of time from the writing of the Mayflower Compact to our own.

And there’s more more more . . .

It appears that “pro-choice” Victoria Reggie Kennedy has been invited again to Anna Maria College, which disinvited her last spring. This time she will share a stage with a Catholic congressman who has a 100 percent rating from the pro-abortion group NARAL.

As reported by The Cardinal Newman Society in March, Anna Maria College in Paxton, Mass., honored the wishes of Worcester Bishop Robert McManus and disinvited the widow of Sen. Ted Kennedy as commencement speaker because of concerns about conflicts with Catholic moral teaching. Then the College asked Bishop McManus not to attend the commencement ceremony, claiming he would be a “distraction.”

Now the College reportedly has invited Kennedy to speak on October 24 as part of its fall symposium on “Faith and the Public Square: Balancing Religious Beliefs with the Common Good.”

Since when do Catholics “balance” their faith with the common good, as if the two are contradictory? Sounds like the perfect venue…