Lots of links :)

- Chartres Cathedral labyrinth (see below)

- Pope Francis appoints commission to reform Vatican media Not surprising, Antonio Spadaro SJ has been chosen to be on the committee. One will recall he was the Jesuit who wanted to have a presence for the order at Second Life and who gave a talk on the Spiritual Exercises and the virtual world. He blogs here - CyberTeologia

- How we e-laugh ... Hahaha vs. Hehehe :)

- I always criticize Pope Francis for his attitude towards women, but he actually said a good thing about them recently ... Pope Francis: It’s ‘pure scandal’ that women earn less than men for the same work

- Wearing a Suit Makes People Think Differently ... Formalwear elicits feelings of power, which change some mental processes. So what happens then when a man puts on priestly attire?

- Another group that will be helping the animal victims of Nepal earthquake (and of course, the people need help too).

- Supreme Court’s dopey anti-gay arguments: What’s so scary about tossing aside our worst traditions?

- The Labyrinth Revival

- David Bentley Hart's argument for animals - Vinculum Magnum Entis. Here's a bit of the article (I think you need a subscription to read it all) ....

[...] I was reading about a Christian ethicist so passionately committed to defending the (unmistakably) exceptional nature of human beings that he thinks it necessary to forbid his children any sentimental solicitude for the suffering of beasts, and to disabuse them of the least trace of the dangerous fantasy or pathetic fallacy that animals experience anything analogous to human emotions, motives, or needs; they cannot really, he insists, know anxiety, grief, regret, or disappointment, and so we should never allow them to divert our sympathies or ethical longings from their proper object. I really have no idea what to make of that.... Compassion, like any of love’s modalities—like any virtue—is not diminished in being extended, but be- comes an ever more deeply rooted habitus of the soul .....

If one adheres to, say, a particularly crude version of the Aristotelian or Thomistic picture of animate life, and thinks that the vegetal, animal, and rational functions of the soul must be segregated into strictly impermeable compartments, then one cannot regard the hierarchy of the nutritive, sensitive, and intellectual capacities of a rational being as anything but a composite series of suppositions and superpositions; then the rational soul is simply “something other” than all other aspects of natural life, inhabiting the physical world like a Cartesian ghost or angelic metic (an unsettlingly gnostic picture) .... I would rather defer the question to the end of days, when creation will be restored in the Kingdom, shadows in mirrors will yield to the light of clear knowledge, and (so I am reliably informed) the lion will lie down with the lamb.