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Welcome to Coffee Hour! Pull up a chair, pour your favorite beverage, and tell us about your day!

I'm up to my eyeballs choral music this week -– even more than I usually am, given that I sing in two choral groups and direct another! All of those choral planets are aligning this week, and especially this weekend. It's not a great weekend to be losing an hour of sleep... oh well...

Originally posted at Talk to Action.

It's been a year since President Obama lifted the Bush administration's restrictions on the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.  Nevertheless, religious opponents of the research still claim that embryonic stem cells have yet to yield any treatments. They insist that adult stem cell research will render embryonic stem cell research unnecessary.

Well, guess what?

I'm going to see the new Alice in Wonderland movie tonight with some friends, and I read up a bit on the original work the other day...

It was a phenomenon when published in 1865, popular with children and adults alike, and has never been out of print and has been translated into 125 languages.  It has so permeated the culture that many people reference it in conversation without even realizing it.  

Fun stuff after the fold...

Welcome to Coffee Hour! Pull up a chair, pour your favorite beverage, and tell us about your day!

It's a blustery day where I am, and it can't really decide whether it wants to snow or rain. We've felt a few tiny stirrings of what might be starting to be Spring, which is a good thing, I suppose, but winter and I had a pretty good thing going, so I find myself resisting any and all change to that situation.

"This one is juuust right!"

From the Ministry Institute at Mater Dei ( Full post )

As I've blogged here in years past, we always got the day after Halloween off. As young kids, we thought it might be to recover from the fun of the night before and have a day to barter candy from siblings. We thought this even though the nuns told us again and again the reason we had it off was because it was a feast day (and the mandatory Mass was a reminder it wasn't just a fun, fun day.) ( Full post )

Father Dan's Jubilee homily contained some great Jesuit history. And now the big challenge facing the Jesuits is lower numbers than the society once had. Interesting side note: California politico Jerry Brown was a year ahead of Father in the Society. He left in his fourth year. ( Full post )

From Britain's newspaper The Telegraph: ( Full post )

Blog reader Kipling L. McVay was in search of information about Mary Magdalene and her condemnation by Pope Gregory. (See post below.) ( Full post )

When Jesuit Dan Kendall was a novitiate in 1957 in California, the young men worked the seminary's vineyards. ( Full post )

The last Catholicism for a New Millennium lecture for the Fall will be this Thursday, November 29, at 7:30 at the Gonzaga Law School. John Perry SJ, from the University of Manitoba speaking on “Torture: Religious Ethics and National Security” ( Full post )

Monk and mystic Thomas Merton wrote these words in his 1949 book Seeds of Contemplation. See any parallels to today's world? ( Full post )

Took a long weekend to fly to San Francisco to celebrate Jesuit Dan Kendall's 50th year as a Jesuit. ( Full post )

Beliefnet has a cute cover story today reviewing 10 religious Halloween candies, representing a variety of faith traditions. (These are actual candies, mostly available through religious Web sites.) ( Full post )

I'm shuttering Journey to Vatican III today. It was a bit of a tough decision for me, because the blog has been a way to research Catholic issues and I've "met" Catholics from around the world who e-mailed me after reading blog items. ( Full post )

(This post is being simulblogged at Matter of Opinion. Go there if you do know some of the pioneers mentioned below. Almost all of them are well-known to people in regional Catholic Land.) ( Full post )

John Allen's weekly column in National Catholic Reporter had an interesting analysis of the pope's relationship with Latin American bishops. Liberation theology is always a sticking point. ( Full post )

My life goes in cycles when I'm around groups of people or in social situations when no one -- but me, usually -- is asking any questions. ( Full post )

This is not an original thought I'm presenting here. I heard it Monday morning on MSNBC when a Catholic commentator said he wished the Catholic clergy had been so open and accepting responsibility of the sex-abuse scandal in the church as Oprah has been about the sex-abuse scandal in her South African school.
As CBS/AP reported:
Oprah Winfrey said Monday she was not responsible for hiring at her school for disadvantaged South African girls but that the screening process was inadequate and "the buck always stops with me." ( Full post )

Just discovered a wonderful Web site which I should have uncovered long ago. It's the Woodstock Theological Center which describes itself as "an independent nonprofit institute at Georgetown University that engages in theological and ethical reflection on topics of social, economic, business, scientific, cultural, religious, and political importance." ( Full post )