"Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom infinite. And Thee would man praise; man, but a particle of Thy creation; man, that bears about him his mortality, the witness of his sin…Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee."

Thus begins Saint Augustines’ Confessions, and these lines are among the most well-known ever written. I came returned to them after reflecting a bit on Mrs Jennifer Fulwiler’s discussion of Catholic misconceptions about atheists. Specifically, she notes that few if any atheists feel that they are “missing something” in their lives, and that few recognize the “God-shaped hole” in their hearts. Most atheists I’ve known, including those who are among my friends, would concur with this analysis, given that they reject the existence of said holes in their hearts. For her part, Mrs Fulwiler states that she only recognized that she was missing something after she had found it.

The National Catholic Register has a short blog entry about Dan Merchant's new documentary, Lord, Save Us From Your Followers. According to NCR, the documentary purports to take "a look at the often divisive and angry rhetoric that’s come to characterize religious media coverage."

My own thoughts on this--in brief--are that there is a tendency of thinking that if an idea can be expressed on a bumper sticker then the entire dialogue concerning that idea should be reduced to bumper-sticker slogans. There are, of course, at least two problems with this.