Interestings, Fri. Sept. 04

Interestings for the Week

What is an interesting, you ask?

It comes from a now-older KDUP radio show called The Mean Saints, in which a couple of friends of mine pretended to be miraculously radio-ized dead saints Athanasius and Jerome, and Jerome accidentally said "an interesting about G.K. Chesterton" instead of "an interesting fact about..." Anyway, it got me and a friend from the Faith and Leadership House using adjectives as nouns like no tomorrow. So here's some interestings from the last week that I've picked up, blogosphere or otherwise.

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I found an interesting. Apparently, according to the USCCB and numerous Vatican documents, health care is a right,, not a privilege. I'm down with that. The unfortunate thing is, well...

Catholic teaching on health care + Catholic teaching on why the heck health care is even a right in the first place --> If any governmental system, a governmental system that nobody wants to run because it won't be allowed to provide abortion.

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There's an awesome about the new NIV Bible coming out...

How does that make you feel? If you're reading this you probably knew already, but at any rate. Roger Pearse, a hobbyist of classics and church Fathers, gives an awesome here. He also provides what amounts to in my mind a thought-provoking (if unintentional) commentary on the nature of corruption, as opposed to legit theological development.

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Do yourself a favor and check out the gigantic that is Brickistan. It's a city made of Legos and it is nothing short of crazy. Overview photo of Brickistan follows:


So go to the Flickr page and check it out in detail.

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Here's an impressive. The President is apparently going to give some speech to school kids about staying in school and trying hard or somesuch other after-school-special stuff that the kids probably really do need to hear, and some parents don't want it heard because they're afraid Obama's going to go socialist on their kids.

The official government website for the speeches is here and contains some classroom materials. I'm still not sure I really understand what the criticism is. I'm also putting this forth regardless of the question of how outraged we'd be if Bush wanted to talk to our nation's children without parental consent or...state education oversight of speech content? are you kidding? If Obama had said "I'm going to talk to the children about health care," then there'd be concern. Then this would be political, like if Bush had wanted to talk to kids about the War on Terror, which is, sadly, a much more politicized animal than anyone wants it to be.

But quite frankly if anyone who's the President of the USA wants to present an after-school-special message to kids about trying your hardest and how YOU can make a difference or whatever. If anyone's got an actual excerpt of this speech that shows it championing socialism, I'd like to see it. The White House plans to release the speech on Monday, a day before it's given, so opponents will have their chance to skim it for socialism if they want. As far as I can tell, though unless Obama tells the kids they're clinging bitterly to small-town values, he's fine. As it stands the only real case I've heard made consists of empty rhetoric, and that's not cool.

But it sure makes for a fun week.