Happy Fourth!

So, ten-hour days of instruction (oh, and then there's PT before that....) at the chaplains school in Navsta Newport have left precious little time for reading anything. Wait, that's untrue. I have been reviewing SECNAVINST 1730 in all its beautiful iterations for a few hours each day. And if I tire of that, I can always turn to the Marine Corps or Coast Guard instructions as well. Or the MILPERSMAN. Sound off if you LMA. (love military acronyms). 

BUT we do get three day liberty this week so I've been sleeping and eating lots of fresh fish and catching up on some reading. 

I liked this piece on the sacred nature of marriage. 

Gardening Moms. Gave me a whole new appreciation of my own mom's masterful artwork in the yard. 

This review was pretty informative just on its own. It also stands in contrast to this. The latter, I thought, was not very well done at all - far too anecdotal, for one, without any real data to back it up. Because of that, it comes across as some cranky old guy who doesn't understand "young people today." Well, how is that anything new and/or interesting? 

I mentioned Kirsch's review here because I find it odd that Myers (the author of the second link) didn't seem to do very much extensive research. If he did, he might have mentioned Tablet's website. Are they all irreverent hipsters? 

And a saved round: Myers' mention of Matisyahu in the hipster context shows Myers' own ignorance. Matisyahu identifies himself as some sort of neo-Hasid and refrains from performing on the Sabbath. If Heeb magazine publishes borderline porn, they are not exactly the same sort. 

And I have to say I wasn't much impressed by this article, either. Just seemed sort of same old-same old. Furthermore, the trend that she examines has been going on for quite a while and has been described in the same way by many other publications. 

And maybe Roger Simon is just hanging with the wrong crowd? I agree that things look fantastically hopeless in the world of politics, but dude, spend some time on a military base. I hope (and think it's not entirely implausible) that the next generation of strong political leaders will be the set of young men and women who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom. For example, I'd vote for these guys. If you can make even a semi-functioning municipal government system work in Iraq, I have no doubts that you could repair whatever mess we get into in the next four years in Washington. 

Take some time to pray for all our troops. Pray especially hard. 

Definitely time to watch some of We Were Soldiers on the base tv channel before heading out to watch da booms, drink local brews, and look at fancy boats down in Newport! Happy Fourth of July!