Oh lordy, it’s Cathy Lynn Grossman again. Again? Yes, there was once before. She’s a Templeton “Fellow,” too, class of 2005. Her schtick is to point in horror at some gnu atheist or other and say how shocking and evil it all is. This time it’s PZ. She’s hoping there’s going to be a Great Cracking of the Whip.

Now that online provocateur PZ Myers, the biologist whose popular Pharyngula blog features profane attacks on religion, is part of the ScienceBlogs lineup coming under National Geographic’s editorial control, will Myers have to evolve to new standards?

Ah the voice of censorious respectability and majority opinion – will someone at last be able to make PZ Myers stop saying … Read the rest

Hemant Mehta interviewed Damon and Jerrett Fowler a few days ago. Jerrett wants people not to forget about it and move on to the next thing.

My biggest fear is that, since this is the Internet, people will find other places to focus their attention. This is going to be a long and drawn out battle and there is little we can do to make it go faster.

The support so far is amazing, more than I could have ever imagined, however, I hope that the support doesn’t go away. We need the community behind us so that we have the strength to follow this through. This isn’t just for us, this is for everyone out there as well. Anyone

Well here is something I would love to know more about – the early history of the Home of the Good Shepherd in Wallingford, in Seattle. I’ve been familiar with the building that housed it for years, indeed decades. It belongs to the city now, and houses various organizations; the grounds around it are a city park. I think I always vaguely knew it had been some kind of “homeforunmarriedmothers”…but I’ve been learning to treat that archaic term with more suspicion, plus “Good Shepherd” is one of the four orders that ran those houses of horror the Magdalene laundries, so…

So I finally got around to looking it up, and sure enough.

The Home of the Good Shepherd, located at

I’m reading Sikivu Hutchinson’s wonderful new book Moral Combat. There’s an apposite passage about Jim Wallis in the first chapter:

Wallis argues that America is suffering from a crisis of values. Progressive religious belief is the antidote to this crisis because “history is most changed by social movements with a spiritual foundation.” [Wallis, God’s Politics, p 24] This view fails to consider the extent to which American social movements – from the white supremacist imperialist spiritual foundations of the Revolutionary War to the patriarchal and heterosexist spiritual foundations of the modern civil rights movement – have been hindered by their “spiritual” foundations. By romanticizing the spiritual foundations of social movements, Wallis demonstrates that he is unwilling to interrogate how