Genuinely Disturbing

This story about a Catholic bishop from Nova Scotia who has been charged with possession of child pornography is news most of this week and it's genuinely shocking.

I would imagine that the Canadian Conference of Catholic bishops are involved in serious discussions of contingency plans in the event of massive, angry yet quiet backlash on the part of Canadian Catholics. One would think anyway..

Update: some interesting commentary here

And here, at the comment left on Oct. 2, 10:07 by L. Podles, are startling hints that the RCMP knows far more than the Vatican, to which Canadian Catholics might reasonably respond with astonished outrage over why Lahey was ever appointed bishop in the first place.

Roman Surreal Polanski

Are you in shock over the media's and Hollywood's ho-hum sympathy for a prominent ... rapist? Well, we're not alone apparently.

Checking in

Not so much activity around this blog lately, which I regret, since I want to ramp up the writing here as a series of test run bits for various other more official writing projects. But .... I am Interim chair of our department at the moment, and so I'm preoccupied with the minutiae of department life in addition to teaching and everything else.

However, some things have not gone unobserved!
For starters, have a chuckle at this witty and fairly accurate account of theological dialectics by Kim Fabricius - probably more descriptively true than many of us in the 'profession' care to admit: The Divine Flu

And just now, I have begun to read this serious review of a book on secularism and religion. The reviewer is David Martin whose reviews over at the TLS are often brilliant: Post-Secular? It depends on what you mean and where you look.