The angel brings some tidings of joy. At 12F, the snow has stopped for now, but we hope the grey sky will repent of its recent stinginess.
Last night I tried Mark Bittman's suggestion of adding olive oil to the pizza dough and didn't care much for the results. It made the dough softer and, as you can see, the crust browned less well; I think that was attributable to the olive oil. (That's a cool link, btw.)
At the not so recent recommendation of Melissa, the blogger of A Contemplative Joy, I picked up Kathleen Norris' book, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life
. I'm fussy about not writing in books, so I ended up filling many Moleskine-pages with notes. And it amused me greatly that just as I was "under some conviction" (as was put in the tradition in which I was reared) as I made my way through the book, Melissa wrote a shiningly anti-acediacal entry.
The homily complemented the bracing cold of our early morning sojourn to Mass. Fr Andreas latched onto a phrase used recently by Judge Robert Bork, "happy go lucky nihilism", which Bork tied to consumerism. Something to think about on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. right: icon of Saint Paul by Theophanes the Cretan, c. 1546; at Stavronikita Monastery, Mount Athos
Having been reared in the Conservative Baptist denomination (I wouldn't bother with the "What Does Conservative Mean" link on that page; it isn't a good summary of the denomination's distinctives), there are still large chunks of the Pauline epistles in my aging memory. Philippians 4 has great meaning to me; I Corinthians 15 (v. 51-58) is not only the basis for the text of one of my favorite portions of the Messiah, it has the comforting words read at the gravesite of each of the people dearest to me who have died. So on this great feast, these and other great portions of the epistles come to mind.
And while we're at it, here's an old column by George Weigel, Heretical Hymns. It's a number of places on the Web, but the comments are especially funny here.
Finally, my beloved and not so much (working there in a little Pauline style, except for that last bit): Small Talk with a Web Designer. That's pretty much how it goes.