This will be a catch-all post, added to throughout the day…
First, I’m going to pretty much insist that you go vist Jen Ambrose’s blog for her photos and videos of the Holy Week services she’s attended in China. It’s so moving – especially the brief video of a congregation singing Stabat Mater, but in (I presume?) Mandarin.
Fr. Edward Oakes, SJ on atonement…and Atonement.
 David Scott takes on Bart Ehrman’s latest – on theodicy – at Godspy

Ehrman, for all his talent and training as textual critic, never rises to the task of a biblical study of evil and innocent suffering. Instead, he builds God’s Problem to his own alternative to theodicy. Call it the Testament of Bart.
It goes something like this: There’s only this one life to live, hence we should live life to the fullest, seeking to avoid pain and to pursue the simple joys and pleasures of “living for the moment” and working to make the world a better place for ourselves and others.
He even offers a helpful checklist for how we can make the world a better place. We should fight poverty, genocide, bigotry, racism, discrimination “on the basis of gender or sexual orientation,” and we should stop spending “millions on wars [the U.S.] cannot win to empower regimes that cannot survive.”
Professor Bart claims his philosophy is that espoused in the Book of Ecclesiastes. It wouldn’t do any good to try to convince him he’s wrong.
He seems genuinely unaware that his philosophy is actually based on materialism and consumerism and defines happiness according to a bourgeoisie lifestyle unimaginable for most of the world’s inhabitants: “We should make money and spend money. . . . We should enjoy food and drink. We should eat out and order unhealthy desserts, and we should cook steaks on the grill and drink Bordeaux. . . We should travel . . . ”
His speech continues in this mid-life wish-listing vein for many more lines. These are the last words of God’s Problem. 
One wants to be sympathetic to such a sincere cry of the heart. But one can’t help wondering: Is this all there is to life—pursuing a liberal social agenda while eating, drinking, and making merry?
What happens when we suffer, when people do us wrong, when we face persecution or attack for what we believe in, or for no reason at all? What happens when we age and realize that this is all we’ve done with our lives? How would Ehrman’s neo-Epicurean platitudes pull us through?

A nice NYTimes piece on a program providing teachers for inner-city Catholic schools.

In 1970, more than half the teachers and administrators at Catholic elementary and secondary schools were unpaid clergy members. As of 2008, Ms. Helm said, clergy members account for about 5 percent of teachers. At the same time that nonwhite and often non-Catholic pupils are increasingly seeking out Catholic schools, the number of such schools in cities has been shrinking in the face of rising costs and insufficient revenue.
St. Patrick’s, where Mr. Encarnacion teaches, offers an archetypal example. The school, which runs from prekindergarten through eighth grade, is actually a merger of three schools. Roughly two-thirds of its 440 students are black Protestants. Of 26 full-time teachers and administrators, one is a member of the clergy.
All of which helps explain how Mr. Encarnacion wound up on the third floor, teaching classes in both religion and science, toggling from the prophets to water pollution on any given day and throwing in vocabulary words and spelling quizzes in the process. He moves around his classroom in perpetual, purposeful motion, and the straining hands and quivering fingers of pupils waiting to answer his questions attest to his success.

Mr. Encarnacion came to the Seton Hall program more experienced than many other participants. After graduating from the university in 2005, he both taught and managed in a chain of learning centers, until he grew miserable at spending his time meeting income targets and laying off staff members rather than working his magic with children.
Under the Epics program, he receives a 50 percent discount on tuition at Seton Hall while he earns a required master’s degree in education. Although he chose not to use it, he also was eligible for subsidized housing at a rectory in Jersey City. He is paid at the normal rate for teachers in the Newark Archdiocese, which starts in the low $30,000s.
The inspiration and template for Epics — and for the similar programs at Catholic institutions like Boston College and the University of San Francisco — is the Alliance for Catholic Education, based at Notre Dame. It began in 1994 with a political science professor, the Rev. Timothy R. Scully, who festooned the campus with fliers provocatively asking: “Tired of getting homework? Then give some. Be a teacher.”
Some 200 students were curious enough to show up for an initial meeting. By now, the Notre Dame program draws applicants from 140 universities, some as far away as Ireland and Australia, and sends about 90 new teachers a year to Catholic schools, according to John Staud, director of pastoral formation and administration at Notre Dame. Seventy percent of the alliance program’s teachers remain in Catholic education after concluding their required two-year stint.