Tuesday

Received in an Email

I guess it's from 2003, but the link is making its email rounds and the Catholic Online published it earlier this year: Treatment of Catholic Church 'Kangaroo Journalism'. It's by a prominent Jewish businessman in Cleveland, Sam Miller. My apologies if you've already seen it a dozen times, but I figure that, if this is the first I've seen it, there must be others out there who haven't seen it. Excerpt: "In a 1990 study by the United Methodist Church, 41.8% of clergywomen reported unwanted sexual behavior by a colleague; 17% of laywomen said that their own pastors had sexually harassed them. Phillip Jenkins concludes in his book "Pedophiles and Priests" that while 1.7% of the Catholic clergy has been found guilty of pedophilia, 10% of Protestant ministers have been found guilty of pedophilia. This is not a Catholic problem. This is a problem of pure prejudice. Why the papers, day after day, week after week, month after month, see fit to do nothing but come out with these scurrilous stories?"

Drinking Corner: First Review

Michelle at Rosetta Stone has published the (to my knowledge) first review of The Adventures of Beer Man. It's a favorable review, for which I'm grateful, and it's insightful. Heck, she may have grasped the book's meaning better than I did. Excerpt:

This is not a message in favor of hedonism, a self-gratifying indulgence. Rather, Beer Man shows that the art of drinking leads to good for others as well. Drinking a few beers will make you more charitable, less likely to quarrel with your neighbor, more likely to sit a spell and have a pleasant conversation, and more likely to be friendly with strangers you would otherwise ignore. In other words, proper drinking makes you more sociable and being more sociable means being a better neighbor and being a better neighbor means being more the way God intended us to be. Drinking makes us virtuous.