Martin Marty on new book subtitled A New American Christianity:

[D]ecades ago the word “New” appeared in my first book title and in ten books edited with colleague Dean Peerman. They have since become old-new and in some cases are more old than new. We chronicled valuable experiments and creative achievements which had positive effects. Is it the right moment now, however, to note that criticism of the established Christian institutions for not keeping up with the Zeitgeist, the “spirit of the times,” matches the Zeitgeist. The “emergent church keeps emerging,” yet many of its “newnesses” are seen as settling in and settling back along with “conventional” religious observances of old.

Oh yes, that ellipses above: . . . the more things . . . go ahead, you know the rest. Ze French has it zo neatly:

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

See what I mean?

Imagination goes wild:

Imagine a lawyer returning his fee when he loses a case; imagine a television pundit suddenly admitting that he doesnt know what he is talking about; imagine a Hollywood starlet speaking English; imagine the Cubs winning the World Series; imagine anything most absurd, and you have not yet approached the absurdity of those who claim that Catholic Social Teaching implies the existence of a vast welfare state, bureaucratically organized, unanswerable to the people, undermining families, rewarding lust and sloth and envy, acknowledging no virtue, providing no personal care, punishing women who take care of their children at home, whisking the same children away from parental supervision and into schools designed to separate them from their parents views of the world, and, for all that, keeping whole segments of the population mired in a cycle of dysfunction, moral squalor, and poverty, while purchasing their votes with money squeezed by force from their neighbors.

Anthony Esolen is “sick of it.” Find out why.

It’s ObamaCare, stupid.

Tsunami-size.

Tax rates down, tax revenues up. What d’ya know?

. . . you pay more.

Ah, the intricacies of it all.

Two from one school!

Jesuits still attract and provide opportunity for best and brightest. This fellow Asian, I’d say Chinese, by the way, the other East Indian, both by extraction, as we used to say, as in Irish extraction, etc.

He’s pastor of St. Alphonsus, has bald head screwed on straight.

America Mag editorial:

With creative proposals and determined diplomacy, President Assad may still be made to see reason.

Didn’t the Jesuit-educated Voltaire have a character who would have come to this conclusion?

Special election = low turnout. Blood-spattered Dem primary = bloodied candidate. Green black candidate = split Dem/black vote. Whole thing = Republican win?

Among the thousand (million?) stories in the naked city, can this be one that pans out?