World Youth Day and Religious Freedom

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput's address at World Youth Day discusses what religious freedom really is and where one can get reliable information about the Catholic faith:

Religious freedom means being able to worship as we choose. It’s also the liberty to preach, teach, and practice our faith openly and without fear. But it involves even more than that. Religious freedom includes the right of religious believers, leaders, and communities to take part vigorously in a nation’s public life.

Punk Rock Operations Research

Laura McLay's blog on operations research.

Cooking for A.J.

Molly's cooking skills were featured in this article at Heavy Table. A.J. gets mentioned as well:

A.J. may even turn out to be a tastemaker like his mother. “He’s got this recipe he made up and wants to try: corn, barbecue sauce, and cucumber,” Herrmann says. “I said sure, and we’ve got all the ingredients. He eventually forgot about it, but when he remembers and wants to make it, I’m ready for him. If we’re asking kids to be adventurous, we should be, too.”

A Perfect Game

David B. Hart's article, A Perfect Game (First Things, August, 2010) is an ode to baseball and an effort to describe why it is perfect.

[Baseball] requires a whole constellation of seemingly bizarre physical and mental skills that, through countless barren millennia, were not only unrealized but also unsuspected potencies of human nature, silently awaiting the formal cause from beyond that would make them actual. So much of what a batter, pitcher, or fielder does is astonishingly improbable, and yet—it turns out—entirely natural. Clearly, baseball was always intended in our very essence; without it, our humanity was incomplete. Willie Mays was an avatar of the divine capacities that lie within our animal frames. Bob Feller’s fastball was Jovian lightning at the command of mortal clay.

He also compares it to the oblong game (football, soccer, basketball, etc.): "a contest played out on a rectangle between two sides, each attempting to penetrate the other’s territory to deposit some small object in the other’s goal or end zone."

Comparing baseball to even the most complex versions of the oblong game is like comparing chess to tiddlywinks.

Loving your car

Brigid Schulte writes about her love for her old Volvo (and others who love their cars).