I’m going to start sharing links and quotes here again.

Blessings to all of my friends on World Down Syndrome Day. May the slaughter of the unborn cease. May the systematic destruction of Down Syndrome children in the womb be utterly abandoned and repented of by all of us. -a unique counter-testimony that the church is able to offer in this moment is that putatively ‘un-productive’ human life is of irreducible worth.

TWO new essays from Alan Jacobs. -A humanism that goes beyond dark humanism, that disdains the manipulatory and seeks the convivial, must, I think, worry less about articulating a doctrine and more about cultivating the proper focal practices, a certain habitus that is rooted always in sitting it out, in waiting for an answer—even from our enemies.

A Theopolis Conversation on Poetry begins here. -Poetry is the enigma at the beginning of every history and culture.

Jon Nelson’s Lafferty blog is always essential reading. Here are a few recent posts that I have read and re-read. -Of course, it is all more complicated than that because Lafferty thought the novel form was long dead. He was writing something else, something extraordinary in the literal sense, that could be packaged like a novel. -Resource: Novel Dates -That is really this hobby blog in a nutshell: just an ongoing collection of evidence that Lafferty can and should be read in exactly that way. I try to show how his work is a designed total artifact whose details repay construal, and how his body of writing is organized by serious thematic concerns rather than by disposable plot premises, and how he is driven by a mania for formal innovation.

Quotes

At least in this one tract, Calvin clearly grounds infant baptism in the promise of God (to you and to your children) and nothing else.

Before proceeding, however, it may be worth while briefly to observe in regard to Baptism that what they say of its absolute necessity might better have been omitted. For, besides tying down the salvation of men to external signs, no small injustice is done to the promise, as if it were unable to give the salvation which it offers unless its sufficiency were aided from another quarter. The offspring of believers is born holy, because their children, while yet in the womb, before they breathe the vital air, are included in the covenant of eternal life. Nor, indeed, are they admitted into the Church by baptism on any other ground than that they belonged to the body of Christ before they were born. [all emphasis mine-jro] He who admits any others to baptism profanes it. Now, then, when they make baptism to be so necessary that they exclude all who have not been dipped with it from the hope of salvation, they both insult God and also involve themselves in great absurdity. For how could it be lawful to put the sacred impress of Christ on strangers? Baptism must, therefore, be preceded by the gift of adoption, which is not the cause merely of a partial salvation, but bestows salvation entire, and is afterwards ratified by baptism. -John Calvin, from “On the True Method of Giving Peace to Christendom and Reforming the Church”

Friday brought going-home time, and Mr. Barry drove in for the girls. “Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves,” said Miss Barry, as she bade them goodbye. “Indeed we have,” said Diana. “And you, Anne-girl?” “I’ve enjoyed every minute of the time,” said Anne, throwing her arms impulsively about the old woman’s neck and kissing her wrinkled cheek. Diana would never have dared to do such a thing, and felt rather aghast at Anne’s freedom. But Miss Barry was pleased, and she stood on her veranda and watched the buggy out of sight. Then she went back into her big house with a sigh. It seemed very lonely, lacking those fresh young lives. Miss Barry was a rather selfish old lady, if the truth must be told, and had never cared much for anybody but herself. She valued people only as they were of service to her or amused her. Anne had amused her, and consequently stood high in the old lady’s good graces. But Miss Barry found herself thinking less about Anne’s quaint speeches than of her fresh enthusiasms, her transparent emotions, her little winning ways, and the sweetness of her eyes and lips. “I thought Marilla Cuthbert was an old fool when I heard she’d adopted a girl out of an orphan asylum,” she said to herself, “but I guess she didn’t make much of a mistake after all. If I’d a child like Anne in the house all the time I’d be a better and happier woman.” -L. M. Montgomery, from Anne of Green Gables