Links: prayer, American Catholics, "The Casual Vacancy", and more!

"Praying With Children":

Its so important to pray with children, just like it is to do other hard things with them like Cook and Eat Dinner, Carry on a Conversation, Fold a Single Solitary Basket of Laundry, Pick Up the Blocks, Remember What It Was You Came Into This Room For Will You Stop Screaming So I Can Think For A Minute. And so on and so forth. Prayer, as many of us might remember, is a foundational part of the Christian Life and children should be included in it, even if it kills you.

"Where I'm Coming From":

But now the shadows of the past are looming large over Catholics in America again, and the battle to redefine marriage has become the weapon of choice for those who would really prefer it if Catholics went back to their little Catholic ghettos and didn't mix much with the "real" Americans, or expect to be able to hold certain public offices (anything pertaining to marriage, for instance) or jobs (anything where you have to sign a "diversity statement" that is actually a denial of your faith) or own businesses (anything where you have to maintain the fiction that two men or two women are a "marriage") or run adoption agencies or charities where they will be forced to repeat the lie that it is bigoted and hateful to claim that marriage is one man and one woman or that children need a mother and a father...

...and pointing any of this out at all is "uncivil," or so I'm told.

 "J. K. Rowling's 'The Casual Vacancy'":

The catalyst of the story is the death of a good man. He leaves a vacancy. His death is the casual vacancy, which is a phrase used to describe the opening created by the death of a local councilor. The book is about the void left by the death of a man who was his brother’s keeper, and the story shows that the main reason others can’t fill the void he leaves is because they don’t love like he did.

"10 Questions a Pro-Choice Candidate Is Never Asked by the Media":

4. If you do not believe that human life begins at conception, when do you believe it begins? At what stage of development should an unborn child have human rights?

5. Currently, when genetic testing reveals an unborn child has Down Syndrome, most women choose to abort. How do you answer the charge that this phenomenon resembles the “eugenics” movement a century ago – the slow, but deliberate “weeding out” of those our society would deem “unfit” to live?

"A Beautiful Testimony from a Christian About His Wife’s Death":

Was this a good life, NO. But this is what God had prepared for us to go through together. 

"How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day":

When I told people at ConCarolinas that I'd gone from writing 2k to 10k per day, I got a huge response. Everyone wanted to know how I'd done it, and I finally got so sick of telling the same story over and over again that I decided to write it down here.

So, once and for all, here's the story of how I went from writing 500 words an hour to over 1500, and (hopefully) how you can too

"Beer for beginners, part VII: Stouts and other British stuff":

I tried Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout and liked that very much. It seemed almost thick and viscous. "It's not, and you should know better," scolded Mark, "the viscosity of beer can't possibly be much different from water. It's not like it has a significant fraction of polymer suspended in it or something."

"Then what makes it that way?" I asked. "I can see when I pour it that it's not obviously viscous, but it feels that way in the mouth. Like cream." I took another pull and thought. "Could it be the bubbles?" I asked, beginning to ponder the Stokes-Einstein equation, but mostly I just wanted to drink the beer.