Favorite schmalzy love song(s)? Think “I’ll Be” by Edwin McCain

I’m just saying that i got 20 years of practice ignoring people’s implied disapproval, so declare or STFU.

If you leverage it right, growing up going to church can make you immune to passive aggressive social condemnation.

Funny Numbers xkcd.com/3184/

I've been thinking about this sign for 6 months. a phrase I'll treasure forever. a metaphor with boundless potential

“They parted my garments among them” is just too on the nose.

Great Grandma’s cardamom Swedish coffee bread recipe 🧵

This is my Swedish great grandmother’s cardamom coffee bread recipe I just make once a year. Usually I’ll coat it in cinnamon sugar but I was tight on time today:

Christmas continues to be merry:

In case you’re watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the umpteenth time today, here’s this great essay about Mary Bailey from a few years back that always makes me cry: www.thebulwark.com/p/there-is-n...

Oskar hard at work on his Christmas Legos

Is that…

My kids in general are just as excited to give presents this year as they are to open their own and yes I’m bragging.

Very proud of my son (10). He spent a lot of his own money to get presents for his family even tho he very much did not have to.

Merry Christmas from the Heaps-onados:

Pope Leo on Christmas Eve: “On earth, there is no room for God if there is no room for the human person. To refuse one is to refuse the other.”

Annie goes, “sounds like you!”

Annie is now 15 minutes into a late-night, holiday-vacation effort to explain to her Boomer parents both polyamory and non-binary gender identity. Say a prayer.

«For Balthasar, Jesus’ willingness to experience the vicissitudes of human life tells us something about who God is in eternity. The all-powerful God shows himself to us through the medium of vulnerability.» Excellent essay, rigorous, charitably feisty.

If we get to reality beyond appearances by following our desire for the truth to adequate understanding, then our native notion of being is also of the good & the true. Consequently, being indifferent to the good also makes you indifferent to the truth, & so evil is always also stupid.

Mr. Potter went to Seton Hall? Legendary actor Lionel Barrymore attended Seton Hall College in the 1890s and remembered it as, “among the happiest days of my life.” He later starred in classic films such as his role as the villainous Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

If you’re ever in Austin, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is not to be missed

Tapping in @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social to explain why evil is always stupid.

Relatedly, there’s a passage @catholickungfu.bsky.social quotes where he’s clearly taking a shot at Heidegger on metaphysics

The list of things I miss about Texas is short, but HEB, you are on it

I confess that when I say “personalism,” I generally mean “what if existentialism still had a normative scale of values,” which is… look, not wrong

Texas Costco acquisition: jalapeño bacon. Do they sell this in other states? I can’t recall if I’ve see it in NJ

My editor asked me to go look at Balthasar's original text. So I got the German, read through it, double-checked with a fluent German-speaker. We use the word "swastika" in English but Germans say "Hakenkreuz" (hooked cross). Balthasar is playing on words and reminding German-speakers of the Nazis.

Can we do an Olivia Rodrigo spoof about MAHA called “(Not) Good 4 You” that includes the line “like a damn homeopath!”

Omg this one is even better

There is nestled in here a species of my ongoing questions: what makes the difference between an intelligent process and a merely intelligible one?

Also, holy crap this quotation from Balthasar: “(The Church) runs with equal blindness into a cross… that is dislocated and perverse as a result of her own guilt, a cross with hooks (swastika) [ein Hakenkreuz] on which she is entangled and remains hanging.”

My friend @catholickungfu.bsky.social’s feature in @commonweal.bsky.social presents a compelling example of what I might call “theological liberalism” that isn’t necessarily therefore “liberal theology.” And it’s just damn good public theology too. www.commonwealmagazine.org/carpenter-an...

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Former CIA Director Brennan asks Chief Judge in SDFla to stop govt from steering grand jury probe to Judge Aileen Cannon, citing "irregular activity" & Cannon's "demonstrated pattern of favoring ... Trump's litigation positions." By @charliesavage.bsky.social . (gift) www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/u...

It’s “no cheeses for us meeces” season

I’ve heard firsthand about detectives in NJ losing cooperating witnesses to the mindless deportation machine as well

I visited a church in Portland once where the pastor said “graduated into the presence of the Lord” and I almost shattered my orbital socket rolling my eyes

Re-upping the back page of the current @theonion.com print edition in light of Bari’s new explanation below

The feeling of having hot black coffee with a spicy breakfast (a little like stepping out into the desert sun) I will now always associate with Texas

"Present perceptiveness is to be enlarged, and the enlargement is not perceptible to present perceptiveness. Present desires and fears have to be transmuted, and the transmutation is not desirable to present desire but fearful to present fear." Lonergan

It's a shame that—after Bari Weiss pulled the 60 Minutes segment—tonight the public won't get to learn about the vital work that @hrcberkeley.bsky.social Investigations Lab students have done using OSINT research to document abuses suffered by migrants the U.S. government sent to CECOT.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Mutatis mutandis, higher education

I want to be clear: 60 Minutes has mot been as relevant in the past 15 years as it has been on the CECOT story. It has been leading coverage since MARCH.

"But to the degree the absurd creeps in, love is replaced by hatred, virtue by vice, good institutions by instruments of wickedness, cooperation by strife, action by inertia... This is why St. Augustine referred to great empires as larceny on a grand scale." Bernard Lonergan

I don’t think I have much of a residual California accent but show me a video of someone doing something amazing on a skateboard and, bang, out it comes

Sunday Lunch Update: huge steak burrito smothered in a Hatch green chili sauce #TexMex