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Today is Ash Wednesday, which begins the forty-day period day Lent in the liturgical calender. Ash Wednesday is celebrated by many denominations, including Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and even some Baptists. Ashes are placed on the foreheads of the celebrants in the shape of a cross, hence the name. The ashes are traditionally from the palms from the previous Palm Sunday after they were burned. As Lent is a period of repentance and fasting, the ashes symbolize sorrow for the sins committed.

As I said, Lent is a period of fasting, though few people actually fast for forty days. Generally Christians who take part in Lent abstain from meat on Fridays and give up some favorite thing, a favorite food or habit.

Ash Wednesday is a movable fast because always occurs forty-six days before Easter which is also movable.The forty days are a reminder of the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the desert before beginning his public ministry. Lent ends on Holy Thursday, the day before Good Friday.

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• Ash Wednesday 2012 (mumbailaity.wordpress.com)
• LENT – a time of repentance & renewal (samuelanand.wordpress.com)

 But who could supply the deficiency? Even if a man-and he would have to be a far better man than I- could scale the spiritual heights required, what “answerable style” could he use? For the style would really be part of the content. Mere advice would be no good; every sentence would have to smell of Heaven.

Jim Peschke might perhaps be thought a fool for trying what a master like Lewis feared to attempt. He suffers from at least two disadvantages that should make a book like The Michael Letters a failure. First, Peschke, by his own admission, does not have the satirical wit of Lewis and is only a novice writer. Second, human nature being what it is, is more attracted to the darkness than to the light, and so the diabolical is inherently more interesting than the angelic.  Despite these disadvantages, The Michael Letters succeeds beyond all expectations. The correspondence between the guardian angel and the archangel holds the attention of the reader and the story moves along briskly. If this book does not quite come up to the level of The Screwtape Letters, it more than satisfies.

There are, of course, fundamental differences in the two works. The angels, unlike the demons are genuinely interested in the welfare of the human in their charge. Peschke shows this by giving the human a name and including details of his everyday life. Screwtape and Wormwood did not care about any such details. Their “patient” was simply food to them. The whole flavor of the correspondence is entirely the opposite. Unlike the demons who hate and mistrust each other, the angels willingly help and encourage their fellows. These and other differences make The Michael Letters a fitting counterbalance to The Screwtape Letters.

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• The Screwtape Letters (davidscommonplacebook.wordpress.com)

David –

Welcome to the Truth Team tipsheet. You signed up to be part of the team that fights back, and there’s no time to waste.

This is the first of regular updates we’ll be sending with actions you can take immediately to help support the President — to debunk false attacks and make sure folks hear about what we’ve accomplished.

Here’s how it works: We’ll round up the best of our posts and turn them into short items, with Facebook and Twitter buttons after each so you can instantly share them with friends and family as you go down the list.

Read through this week’s news, then do something about it:

 

Every day from now until November, there will be misleading news stories, attacks, and flat-out lies about the President’s record. It’s our job set to them straight — and nothing works better than the truth, backed by sound sources.

Fight back by spreading the word today.

Until next time,

Stephanie

I would have thought these people would have learned their lesson with attackwatch. Of course this time they are not asking people to snitch on “attackers”. You are just supposed to repeat the Obama campaign’s talking points to all your friends. I think I can do that.

Zombie at PJ Media has a humorous take on this, The Truth Team Comics. He should be careful though. Jack Chick is not amused by people who use his comics for parodies.

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• AttackWatch Returns: Obama Campaign Announces ‘Truth Team’ (mediaite.com)
• Obama campaign launches ‘Truth Teams’ to fight misinformation (thehill.com)
• | Ahem ~ Obama Campaign Launches ‘Truth Teams!’ Say, What? (truthaholics.wordpress.com)

As staunch Americans who believe in the fundamental and individual independence of citizens, my wife and I believe that each individual has the God-given right to practice their own religion according to the dictates of their own conscience.

History tells us that the founding of this great country was powerfully based on the freedom of religion. Remember, too, that the freedom of religion doesn’t just mean the freedom to practice your own religion(s). It also means the freedom from the practices of someone else’s religion.

As a married couple, we decided not to have children. This decision will cost us $38,000 (according to the numbers on birth control put forth by the White House recently, and our own calculations of actual birth control costs).

Religiously influenced legislation against free access to birth control currently being introduced into Congress abrogates our rights to practice our religious beliefs according to our own consciences, by enshrining one group’s religious-based arguments into law. Our religious beliefs do not agree with this attack on the health of women everywhere.

The Catholic Church should no more be allowed to dictate the availability of birth control, than imams should be allowed to dictate criminal case law. Rabbis should not be allowed to ban pork and shellfish to all Americans, nor should Methodists be allowed to ban bourbon from the shelves of every store in America.

But the Catholic Church is not dictating the availability of birth control. The Church simply does not wish to be obliged to violate its own doctrine by government fiat. The writer states that he and his wife believe in religious freedom, yet they would deny the Catholic Church the right to practice its beliefs. The more accurate similes would be an imam forbidden to preach Islam, a rabbi forced to provide ham sandwiches to his synagogue, or the Methodists required to support the local taverns.

I think that people on the Left simply have an immature concept of freedom. They seem to believe that they should be free to do whatever they want, and everyone else should be free to provide them what they want. Freedom for me but not for thee.

This is just unconscionable: Republicans in Congress are trying to make it legal for ANY employer to deny birth control coverage to their employees.

Yes, you read that right. Republicans are on track to give corporations the power to deny women access to health care.

The vote is set for this week — we must act IMMEDIATELY.

We must raise $50,000 by midnight tonight to get activists mobilized and ads up and running in Republican districts about this atrocious assault on women’s health care.

Will you contribute $3 or more right now to our urgent Women’s Health Rapid Response Fund?

We can’t afford to fall short and delay taking action for another day. Women across the country deserve to know that right-wing Republicans intend to take women’s health care back to the dark ages. Please give what you can today.

Because if the government doesn’t provide it, it must be unobtainable.I mean it’s not like people can get birth control on their own.

Here is the other one.

BREAKING NEWS: Senate Republicans are pushing the Blunt Amendment, a radical piece of legislation that would cannibalize health care reform by letting any employer deny any part of your heath care coverage due to “moral convictions.”

David, this goes way beyond taking away birth control coverage. An employer could decide that they couldn’t shell out the money necessary for your expensive cancer treatment because of their “moral convictions,” and you’d be out of luck. Their goal isn’t just to end contraception coverage. Their goal is to implode our entire health care system and strike a deadly blow to President Obama’s historic health care reform.

Republicans are going to try to bring this to a vote as early as today. Before the vote, I need you and 49,999 other people who value health care reform to take a strong stand against the Blunt Amendment.

Republicans are dead wrong on this. Employers should not be allowed to decide what health care you and your family can receive. They’ve been wanting to kill “Obamacare,” and this disgusting amendment would do just that.

Sign the petition, and forward this email on to friends and family who value comprehensive health care. Thanks for your help, and I’ll let you know what happens.

Guy Cecil
Executive Director, DSCC

 

Why should any employer be required to provide birth control if they don’t want to, regardless of the reasons? Why shouldn’t they be free to provide whatever coverage they want to? If an employee doesn’t like the coverage he is getting, he can go elsewhere. Since when are contraceptives considered health care anyway? They don’t cure any disease or promote good health. (I know that oral contraceptives are sometimes prescribed for medical reasons, but that is another issue.) Why shouldn’t people pay for them out of their own pockets.

The whole idea here is that the government should be able to coerce employers into providing what the government thinks they should. They ought not to have any say in managing their own affairs. In other words, the point of these e-mails is really to persuade the reader to assist them in the project of making other people government serfs with the promise of a share in the loot. Only a great fool would agree to this but unfortunately, as the King said to the Duke in Huckleberry Finn.

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?

Or in a country.

Related articles

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There was a time when Heather Kirchner thought mothers who home-schooled their children were only the types “who wore long skirts and praised Jesus and all that.”

That was before the New Jersey resident decided to home-school her own daughter, Anya.

Kirchner favors jeans, and like the two dozen other families that are part of the year-old Homeschool Village Co-op in central New Jersey, she doesn’t consider herself to be particularly religious. “I was definitely not ready to hand over to anybody my 5-year-old, my baby,” she says. “I would hate to miss this. They grow too quickly.”

The New Jersey co-op is among hundreds of secular and inclusive home-schooling groups in the USA aimed at providing opportunities for parents to network and for children to socialize, conduct science experiments, play sports and games and more, according to Homeschool World, the website of Practical Homeschooling Magazine.

Secular organizations across the country report their numbers are growing. Though government records indicate religion is still the driving force in home schooling, members of these organizations say the face of home schooling is changing, not because of faith, but because of what parents see as shortcomings in public and private schools.

She says her area near Baton Rouge has some of the lowest-scoring schools in the nation. “A lot of the children are just falling through the cracks,” Burges says. Her five children, ages 16 to 35, were home-schooled, says Burges, a Democrat running for City Council in Baker City, La. “Parents are struggling, trying to see what they can do.”

One obvious reason for the increase in home schooling is a concern over the quality of the education that students in public schools are receiving. Parents trapped in substandard school districts have long since become frustrated in making any improvements. But I think a more fundamental reason for the growth of home schooling is that many parents perceive that the schools are teaching values different from and even contrary to the values they would like their children to learn.

The 2007 survey showed 83.3% of home-schooling parents named “a desire to provide religious or moral instruction” as an important reason to home-school.

Susan Beatty, co-founder and general manager of the Christian Home Educators Association of California, who home-schooled three now-grown children, says most of her group’s members are looking to offer “a distinctly Christian education.”

Amy Wilson, 42, on the board of the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers, says the government statistics don’t paint a complete picture.

Wilson is an atheist and former senior research analyst for a nonprofit group. She home-schools her 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter in a state where home-school numbers are up from about 18,800 a decade ago to about 32,000 last year, according to the Virginia Department of Education.

“There are a lot of folks who choose home schooling, in part at least, because they’re concerned about transmitting their values,” Wilson said. “If someone answers (a survey question about morals) in the affirmative, it doesn’t mean they fit the stereotype of the evangelical Christian home-schooler.”

You don’t have to be very religious in order to believe that kindergarten is too early for children to learn about using condoms or that any age is inappropriate to learn about fisting.

The growth of the home schooling movement is a sign of our times. More than ever before people like choices and reject one size fits all institutions. Since every child in unique, shouldn’t each child have an education tailored to his or her needs. It seems to me that having twenty or thirty children in a classroom  all expected to learn at the same pace really isn’t a system that would work very well, even under the best of circumstances. When we have an educational system as consistently resistant to reform as our public school system is, the result can only be a disaster.

Valentine?

Today is Valentine’s Day, or St. Valentine‘s Day. Who was Valentine and why does he get a day named after him? The truth is, nobody really knows.Valentine or Valentinus was the name of an early Christian saint and martyr. The trouble is that nothing is known of him except his name. He may have been a Roman priest who was martyred in 269. There was a Valentine who was bishop of Terni who may have been the same man. St. Valentine was dropped from the Roman calendar of Saints in 1969 because of these uncertainties but local churches may still celebrate his day.

It is also not certain how Valentine’s day became associated with love. Some have speculated that the holiday was a Christian substitute for the Roman festival of Lupercalia. However, there is no hint of any association of Valentine’s Day with romance until the time of Chauncer. The holiday seems to have really taken off with the invention of greeting cards.

.

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In case you’re wondering, it was this article I read in Big Journalism that brought on that rant. Here are a few excerpts, but you have to read it all.

With the recent news of a 19 year old White House intern having her virginity taken by the 45 year old JFK, the apologists were lined up on NBC’s Rock Center (the show has now moved to Wednesday’s because the Monday ratings were horrible—perhaps they should bring Leno back to do it.)

“John Fitzgerald Kennedy remains a mythic figure in American public life and in the memories of so many of us,” said host Brian Williams. Mythic? Is that the word you use after broadcasting an hour of Mimi Alford’s account of the trysts in the White House that included oral sex with at least one member of Kennedy’s Cabinet while JFK watched? “Mythic”? Perverted might be a better word (Alford also claims JFK wanted her to “service” little brother Teddy, but she said no to that; so at there was some decency here).

Say what you will about Clinton, but he never tried to share Monica Lewinsky with any members of his cabinet, or with his brother. And, I am positive that none of the women Clinton slept with was actually a spy.

The news that before the embargo of Cuban products JFK asked Pierre Salinger to buy him as many Cuban cigars as he could. Salinger got 1,200 of them and when they were brought into the Oval Office, Kennedy immediately signed the embargo that is still in place today. Quite the leader there, once he had his Cuban cigars, he was good to go. Regardless of what you think of the embargo, this is a classic abuse of power that is not surprising now that we know the real JFK. Maybe the Rushmore likeness can have him smoking one of those cigars.

Also, while we’re talking legacy here, did you know JFK was the guy who, with his brother Bobby, illegally wiretapped Martin Luther King and that both sat in the White House during the famous “I Have A Dream” speech because they were worried about the political ramifications had they gone to it? Probably didn’t know that, did ya? Hard to see through the aura of Camelot.

“He did what he wanted to do regardless of other people’s feelings and I think that made him strong,” added Matthews. Amazing, ignoring others feelings is now a sign of strength in a President. We’ll expect you to use that same standard on the Republican candidates during this campaign cycle when you spew your venom towards them on MSNBC. Ignoring others feelings is now a sign of strength (when it’s JFK.)  Brilliant. Love to see you mention that when you accuse Mitt Romney of being out of touch. Also—help me out here—were the Kennedy’s wealthy? I forget. Oh ya, that’s right, pops made money as an illegal bootlegger and passed it on to his boys. Camelot.

Yes, at least Romney made his money legally. By the way, why do we still have an embargo against Cuba? If we can trade with Communist China, why not with Communist Cuba?

In a way, being assassinated was the best thing that could have happened to Kennedy, in that it made him a martyr of sorts and beyond criticism for at least two decades. If he had survived, he almost certainly would have been re-elected to a second term and I have a feeling that some of the sordidness of Camelot would have leaked out despite the efforts of the media to protect him, not to mention the troubles that our increasing involvement in Vietnam would have brought.

Related articles

• Mimi Alford, JFK Affair: Six Other Alleged Mistresses (huffingtonpost.com)
• Once Upon a Secret: My Hidden Affair with JFK by Mimi Alford – review (guardian.co.uk)
• Sex, drugs and JFK: memoir of a White House intern (independent.co.uk)
• Ah, Camelot….: (brothersjuddblog.com)

There is some question whether or not this long, hard-fought primary campaign is good or bad for the GOP. I have a feeling that the millions of dollars these candidates are spending to attack each other might be better spent against Obama. Still, it’s a whole lot more interesting this way.

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Mitt Romney must be getting some idea of how Tantalus must have felt. Everytime it looks as if he is finally on the road to clinching the nomination, something happens to take it out of his grasp. Santorum won the contests in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota, by fairly wide margins. Santorum won 55% of the vote in Missouri, 45% in Minnesota, and 40% in Colorado. Romney was actually in third place in Minnesota, behind Ron Paul.

This is turning out to be the most exciting primary season since, well, since Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama fought it out in 2008. Just when we thought it would be a two man race between Romney and Gingrich, Santorum revives and Gingrich fades. What’s next? A Ron Paul victory?

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