I don't really need to comment on this story, do I?
A vial containing blood drawn from Pope John Paul II shortly before he died will be installed as a relic in a Polish church soon after his beatification this year.
It's as if they aren't even trying to avoid the connection to voodoo, vampirism, and blood magic.
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Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner is 70 today. To celebrate here is his poem "Strange Fruit," one of a series of poems about bog-bodies.
Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.
I've been a bit quiet over the past few days - primarily due to a writing deadline that I need to hit. (Who says academics have the summer off!) While today would look like an ideal day to get some blogging done, instead I'm just going to kick back and celebrate my birthday with family.
The TED folks are sponsoring a disturbingly vacuous call for a Charter for Compassion, which they claim is an attempt to rescue religion from an aberrant fundamentalism by emphasizing the goodness of faith. I don't see it.