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Group singing is cheaper than therapy, healthier than drinking, and certainly more fun than working out. It is the one thing in life where feeling better is pretty much guaranteed. Stacy Horn, “Singing Changes Your Brain” http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/16/singing-changes-your-brain/#ixzz2i6Jiv3NA
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Almighty and most wrathful God, who hate nothing You have made but sometimes repent of having made Man; we thank you this day for the life and work of Your faithful servant Jonathan Swift, who constantly imitated and occasionally exceeded Your own anger at the folly of sin, and who…
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The Whole Package
Go YouTube a few Super Bowl commercials and see if you recognize these “types.” This year’s “winning” Super Bowl ad featured an unmarried couple locked in a stereotypical gender/relationship conflict. In this commercial, a “loser” man, in couch-potato posture and engrossed in televised sports, is unresponsive to a strikingly beautiful…
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The diabolical imagination
I would suggest that there are two particular strains of the diabolic imagination in modern society: sentimentality and obscenity, as defined by Flannery O’Connor in her excellent book Mystery and Manners. Both sentimentality and obscenity result from the separation of aesthetic and virtue. Sentimentality is “an excess, a distortion of…
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Love as gift
As I read the interview, I didn’t think to myself, “John Mayer is doing something sinful,” or “Why doesn’t he realize that what he’s doing is wrong?” My only thought was, John Mayer has habituated himself such that he is incapable of loving someone and receiving her love. His addiction…
Backward Mutters 