Notes from all over:

Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex has a new series:

What is it about Sacraments that so many find difficult to accept? There are many issues I suppose. Some who come from a Sola Scriptura tradition don’t see them sufficiently expounded in Scripture to accept the Catholic teaching.

Others, even some malformed Catholics, reject the idea of matter mediating grace. In our In our culture matter is what seems most real to many. Nevertheless, an overriding Nominalism or Neo-Platonism in modern thinking seems to bring with it an implicit rejection of the idea that the non-material realm can affect (much less effect) the material world. At the ID lecture a couple of weeks ago (that I mentioned here), there was a biology graduate student who was interested in learning more about Aristotelian causality.  He had never heard of it before.  As formal causality was being explained to him, he would laugh out loud. This happened several times.  His laughs were not deriding but seemed more out of surprise, in the sense of asking ‘but how’? This is similar to the responses that I get when I teach this idea to my undergraduates, for those who actually grasp the implications any way.

….Over the next seven posts or so, I will try to address these erroneous presuppositions while showing why Sacraments are real, makes sense, and are exactly what one would expect given human nature.

Danielle Bean (who is expecting her 8th child!) has a new blog project

And finally….Jen Ambrose is in China – this promises to make her already excellent blog even more interesting, if it’s possible! We’re adding this one to the "Holy Blogs of Obligation" file. So far…adventures in Hong Kong, then the amazing variety of people at the visa office, what blogs she can and can’t read, adventures in "real" China…etc.

Also…feel free to plug your own latest blog stylings here!