promptings' potpourri

Love that purple -- those ‘dreadful first sentence’ winners of the "Dark and Stormy Night Contest," posted by Amanda at Wittingshire.

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Lots of discussion about who the new pope will be, and how he needs to be ‘progressive.’ Fresh from reading Seeds of Deception earlier this week, the black hat, white hat tug-of-war aspects of this jostle for power seem apparent. Mark Steyn of the Telegraph (U.KL) writes in
"Why Progressive Westerners Never Understood Pope John Paul II":

"If I were Pope - and no, don't worry, I'm not planning a mid-life career change - but, if I were, I'd be a little irked at the secular media's inability to discuss religion except through the prism of their moral relativism

"[...]The root of the Pope's thinking - that there are eternal truths no one can change even if one wanted to - is completely incomprehensible to the progressivist mindset. There are no absolute truths, everything's in play, and by "consensus" all we're really arguing is the rate of concession to the inevitable: abortion's here to stay, gay marriage will be here any day now, in a year or two it'll be something else - it's all gonna happen anyway, man, so why be the last squaresville daddy-o on the block?

"[...]Thoughtful atheists ought to be able to recognise that, whatever one's tastes in these areas, the Pope was on to something - that abortion et al, in separating the "two meanings" of sex and leaving us free to indulge in one while ignoring the other, have severed us almost entirely and possibly irreparably from traditional impulses, such as societal survival. John Paul II championed the "splendour of truth" not because he was rigid and inflexible, but because he understood the alternative was a dead end in every sense.

toque-tip: Proud to be Canadian

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Talking about ‘Seeds of Deception’ – here is an audio interview of author Georgiana Preskar, from Stacy Harp’s Mind and Media Blog

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'Faith Stories' -- lots of good ones featured at Rebecca Writes and The Upward Call

e.g. Eric Liddel - will any of us ever forget the movie "Chariots of Fire"?

and Jim Elliot - who, when I meet him in heaven, I will thank for writing his journals, which I read (Through Gates of Splendor and Shadow of the Almighty) in my youth.