loving this new CW commercials. they are funnier and I really like that.
This is a gem.
Two doves owe their freedom, including a soaring flight over St. Peter’s Square, to Pope Francis.
As he toured the square in his open-topped popemobile at his Wednesday audience with the public, someone at the edge of the crowd thrust a white bird cage with two doves inside at him. Looking puzzled, his security detail took the cage and handed it to Francis.
Without hesitation, the pope opened the cage door, thrust a hand inside, extracted one dove and sent it to fly over the square.
Francis struggled to remove the other bird, whose feathers got caught in the cage bars. It sat for a while on his hand, before it too flew off.
(Photos: L‘Osservatore Romano, AP / Alessandra Tarantino)
The joy on the Holy Father’s face makes my heart smile.
“…Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5, NKJV)
When you wake up each morning, God sends you a special delivery of joy. It’s like it comes knocking at the door of your heart every day. The problem is that some people never answer the door. It’s right there, month after month, year after year saying, “Come on! Let me in! You can be happy! You can cheer up! You can enjoy your life!” The way to answer the door is to get up and choose an attitude of faith and expectancy by declaring that “today is going to be a good day.” When you start the day like that, you are choosing to receive the gift of joy that God sent to you.Today, make up your mind to answer the door to joy! Get up every morning and say, “Father, thank You for another beautiful day. I’m going to be happy. I’m going to enjoy this day because You are faithful. I’m going to brighten someone else’s life. I am choosing to receive Your gift of joy and passing it on to others because I love You, and I know that I am called for Your purposes!”
This actually relates directly to some of the discussion we had at Theology on Tap last night: how to cease focusing on the negative in our lives and refocus on thankfulness; how to cease focusing on ourselves and refocus on God. Like St. Therese, we should ask God how we can serve him each day, how we can bring him joy and consolation, and in that work we will find our own joy.
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Pope and the One True Church
“I myself am convinced by the Petrine claims, nor looking around the world does there seem much doubt which (if Christianity is true) is the True Church, the temple of the Spirit dying but living, corrupt but holy, self-reforming and re-arising.
“But for me that Church of which the Pope is the acknowledged head on earth has as chief claim that it is the one that has (and still does) ever defended the Blessed Sacrament, and given it most honour, and put (as Christ plainly intended) in the prime place.
“’Feed my sheep’ was His last charge to St. Peter; and since His words are always first to be understood literally, I suppose them to refer primarily to the Bread of Life. It was against this that the W. European revolt (or Reformation) was really launched—’the blasphemous fable of the Mass’—and faith/works a mere red herring.”
Can be found in Tolkien: Man and Myth, p. 193
Photographs taken inside musical instruments making them look like large and spacious rooms.
Oh my goodness, these are amazing!
Lena Horne performing in the lounge of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, New York, 1942.
Oh, Lena, I loved you so! I model my jazz singing largely on you.
A rainbow is seen over the fields and mountains prior to an Ascension Day procession on May 9, 2013 in Grassau, Germany. Ascension is an ecumenical feast that commemmorates the ascension of Jesus Christ to Heaven. Bavaria, in contrast to the rest of Germany, is heavily Catholic, and the religious calendar plays a strong role in its deeply-ingrained folk traditions.
Beautiful! I loved this area of Germany. Well, I loved all that I saw of Germany, but especially Bavaria. It’s refreshing to see that some of the old Catholic traditions have survived there! Many of them played important roles in community life, and it’s a shame they’ve fallen out of favor and been forgotten.
America is becoming a more tolerant nation, we are told. Each new thing that we learn to tolerate makes us more progressive. But tolerance is a relative thing. For every new thing we learn to tolerate, there is a thing that we must stop tolerating.
Tolerance does not usher in some tolerant anarchy in which we learn to tolerate all things. Rather tolerance is a finite substance. It can only be allocated to so many places. While a society changes, human beings do not fundamentally change. They remain creatures of habit, bound to the poles of things that they like and dislike, the people that they look up to and look down on.
The balance of tolerance and intolerance always remains the same no matter how progressive a society becomes. A tolerant society allocates its intolerance differently. There is no such thing as a universally tolerant society. Only a society that tolerates different things. A tolerant society does not cease being bigoted. It is bigoted in different ways.Daniel Greenfield, The Playground of War
Likewise, there are things we ought not to tolerate. Tolerance is not necessarily progressive, and progressivism is not necessarily progress towards a more just society.
Yes! “Progress” has positive connotations that it does not necessarily deserve. Modern society seems determined to think of itself as “progressive,” and in doing so it often undervalues—and sometimes actively denigrates—the achievements, societies, and people of the past.
