1. Intellectual Key Stone:
Wealth is not money; wealth is what you own or can produce.

2. In 1856, the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party only carried Maryland, which had been founded as a Catholic colony, when it ran Millard Fillmore, the first major Presidential Candidate to have had a meeting with the Pope.

History is weird.

3. “His administration was the most oppressive, tyrannical, and iniquitous ever visited upon a free people.”
-Norman G. Kittrell (On Edmund Davis), Governors who have been, and other public men of Texas

You know, it’s not that I doubt that assessment, but as far as American historiography is concerned…

4. In Divine Comedy I’ve reached the central well: Cocytus, where traitors are held in ice. Reading this morning, it occurred to me that I would dispute with Dante on one minor point. Dante has the outermost region of the ice be traitors to kin, while the next is traitors to country. Me, I would have switched them around, since I would rank betraying family as worse than betraying country (though both obviously very bad), as the former is the older and deeper connection than the latter.

5. There’s a commonplace trope that, if you ever get sent to prison, the best thing to do is to find the biggest, toughest guy in the yard and beat him up to show everyone not to mess with you.

But really, if beating up the biggest, toughest guy in a maximum security prison is a viable option for you, is that likely to be a live issue?

6. I really wish someone somehow would standardize whether reversing ‘ctrl-z’ is done by ‘ctrl-shift-z’ or ‘ctrl-y’. I don’t really care which, but it’s annoying that it seems to vary from program to program.

7. In my book for Chief Truths of the Faith, the author recounts a story from the life of St. John Vianney. He used to notice a peasant farmer who never failed to stop in for Adoration, during which he would simply sit or kneel in silence before the Host for an hour or so before going on his way. One day Fr. Vianney asked him what he said to Jesus during those hours, to which the farmer answered, “I don’t say anything. I look at Him, and He looks at me.”

I thought that was profound when I read it, but saw it was even more so when I applied it in Adoration myself. It isn’t so much the seeing as the realization of being seen; of becoming aware of Another looking at me, of being known, taken in at a glance, as it were, by One infinitely superior, and yet Who is content to sit in my company.

The watershed moment of faith is when one ceases to think in terms of theory or formulae or abstract belief and becomes aware of God as Another: when one feels what I call ‘the pull from outside’.