A real-life parable of what it looks like to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

Sometime in the mid-1950s, Edward Abbey—a young social radical and aspiring author from Pennsylvania—took a seasonal job as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in Moab, Utah.

Vacation as Sabbath, because you rarely know when your last time is your last time.

This song is brilliant, because there really is this malaise associated with the month of July, isn’t there.  Because you must now confront the fact that the year is not only half over but past half over.

Mournful ballad from her iconic 1996 album Boys for Pele.

Turning to face the strange…

We have noticed that in many corners of ye oulde Bloggernacle, there has lately emerged a growing consensus–likely fueled by Bob Wright and Gregory Princes’ otherwise outstanding “David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism”–that President Alvin R. Dyer of the Seventy’s 1960 address “The Challenging and Testifying Missionary” was one of the infernal catalysts for the high-baptism/low-retention approaches towards missionary work that have bedeviled the Church since at least the post-war period.