Blogging Around: Diving Deeper Edition

This Just In — The Pope is Catholic

Which means he's not easy to define when you want to slap labels like conservative or liberal on him. As should be the case for any Catholic living the Church's teachings and following Jesus. GetReligion takes a look at the AP's Vatican correspondent's latest piece which someone summed up thusly:

Francis is a RADICAL – no, no, sorry about that–he is now a conservative who sounds just like Benedict -- NO, WAIT -- he really is a liberal at heart, but he is being FORCED by those evil, evil right-wing conservatives to cave--he is at WAR with his own CDF chief (you know, the one he re-confirmed -- but never mind) -- AT WAR, I TELL YOU!

This isn't news to many of us, but if you've been believing the main media headlines then this piece is a nice lesson in how to logically read a news story.

The Most Wrong Thing on the Internet Ever

Darwin Catholic points to a great review which will have Catholics and historians everywhere saying, "Finally!" At least those who know more about history than what "everyone knows." The book is God's Philosophers which I now want to read.

The review is by Tim O'Neill who is an atheist but one who cares passionately about truth. Which is my kind of atheist. One look at his piece Cartoons and Fables - How Cosmos Got the Story of Bruno Wrong made me want to kiss him. It was that very episode of Cosmos which made me vow never to watch again and also filled me with a deep distrust of Neil deGrasse Tyson. Anyone who gets the facts that wrong is trying to do so. And it makes me feel I can't trust him to tell me about science either.

Thinking About Interstellar

Now that I've seen the movie, I felt free to read the reviews and articles I'd been saving so I didn't encounter spoilers. The two that resonated most deeply and were the most interesting were both from Tor.com. The headlines sum up nicely and they are definitely worth reading. Beware: here there be spoilers.

• Why Do We Reject Love as a Powerful Force in Interstellar? (Speaking about the science fiction community's reaction to parts of the movie. I don't know what they were expecting. Didn't they all watch Inception?
• To Explore is to Take Care of Us All
  

  Because really, there will always be a time of crisis, won’t there? There will always be a need for caretakers and there will always be a need for explorers. They are, in fact, an inclusive concept. Exploring is caretaking and caretaking is exploring and Interstellar brings us a story about a family that boldly asserts the need for humanity to keep caretaking and exploring.