Washington Post: Want to help veterans? Stop pitying them.

Sweaty mornings of community service are part of the veteran experience that civilian Americans rarely see. Stories of painting schools, building playgrounds or feeding the homeless don’t attract the same attention as a mentally ill veteran who goes on a shooting rampage or one who has sustained life-altering injuries.

Boring Ourselves To Death

One of my favorite riffs is on the color and style of automobiles today versus fifty years ago. If you walked through a typical American parking lot in 1968, you would have seen cars with fins, lots of chrome, a variety of colors and lots of brash styling. The colors would be what jumps out to the modern eye. Today, the three most popular colors today are gray, black and white. Fifty years ago, green, yellow, teal, blue, red and orange were the popular colors.

Dangerous Criminals Brought To Justice

Police charge 90-year-old man, 2 pastors with feeding homeless

Law enforcement prefers soft targets as they put up less of a fuss and can be cowed by military surplus costumes and vehicles.  Besides, demonizing Christians for being Christian is a growing trend.

Are We Being "Benzed"?

I'm trying to come up with a verb to describe what is done to the food ministry when a fellow in a Mercedes Benz comes by, takes with him enough toilet paper for twelve families, and then complains to the town government a few days later that we don't have any toilet paper.

The Chapter: A History

In their enthusiasm for chapters, however, early Christian editors and writers introduced a problem, one that cut to the heart of their own sacred texts and presaged the challenge that chapters present to writers even today. How do you segment continuous, narrative texts rather than informational ones? How, for instance, do you divide Scripture—like the Gospels—into bits, given that they were written as one continuous text, undivided and unlabelled? At first, the problem must have seemed merely technical. Eusebius solved it by devising an elaborate system of small sections cross-indexed among the different Gospels, one that remained popular well into the Middle Ages, but it was cumbersome: there were over three hundred such sections in Matthew and Luke each. The Bibles of late antiquity and early medieval culture contained a bewildering variety of chaptering systems to complement or replace Eusebius’s sections, and each system had its own sense of what counts as a significant unit of action or a significant moment deserving of its own heading. To divide, it turns out, is already to interpret.

Fit to a Fault?: Seeking the Perfect Body Can Endanger Our Spiritual Health

Play and sport are part of being in community. They give us a relaxing setting in which we can create friendships that are fun. Even working out to maintain health is beneficial to helping us engage the community. But this cult of the body, when physical perfection becomes the elusive and consuming goal, is a beast of a very different nature. It’s a vanity and pride that stems from an ethic that values the individual before all else; in a way, through this sort of practice, the individual becomes estranged from the community.

It’s not surprising, then, that often more people can be seen in the gym than in church on Sunday. Both groups are seeking to defy death – one through the perfection of their own bodies, the other through the broken Body and spilled Blood of Christ. Fanaticism for fitness does bring to life the words of St. Paul, however, and that does give us advice we would all do well to practice, if we hope to live:

Looks Like

Does the military have a problem with Jesus?

A colonel’s column was removed from an Air National Guard newsletter because the writer violated military policy by including references to Jesus Christ and God, an Ohio National Guard spokesman said.

I Don't Know; It's Been In My Head All Day

Jeez, Make Up Your Mind

Post-Modern Religion

Goat heads found hanging from NYC light pole

High Schools Are Deranged

Two high school runners in Minnesota have been disqualified in the state girls cross country meet for helping an opponent who fell.

Great Lakes Surf Season Has Begun

Monstrous Lake Michigan waves top 21 feet: See photos from Great Lakes

Separating meditation from faith is a dubious business, morally and sometimes in its effects

Think how hostile an awful lot of companies are to organised religion; to any talk of ‘faith’. Now consider that in both America and the UK, it’s probably easier to count on your fingers the number of institutions that aren’t engaging in ‘mindfulness’ than those that are; giving ‘mindfulness’ teachers special spaces to have classes and encouraging staff to take part.

Suddenly, Public Schools Really, Really Care About Religion

Newington schools cancel Halloween parties

An Obituary Of Note

Tom Magliozzi, Popular Co-Host Of NPR's 'Car Talk,' Dies At 77

Country Time

Would You Like Some Good News? Of Course You Would.

Stamford Is More Interesting Than I Realized

Human Skulls, Books On Satan, Witchcraft Found At Transfer Station

One Will Never Go Broke Predicting The Apocalypse

PBS: There’s a giant spot on the sun, and it’s acting weird

No. Next Question, Please.

Daylight saving time: Is it worth it?