It could be that I’m miserably out-of-touch, as certainly some of my children might say, but when boys stand and cheer when girls walk in the room because their shorts are basically underwear, then those girls need to realize that those boys are looking at them not as people but as things. Slut-things in particular. Story about this over at Ann Arbor News, with this trenchant graf:

National Catholic Reporter has a story that’s generating a lot of traffic this morning about the first U.S. Catholic cemetery to offer a “green burial option.“

Mt. Carmel Cemetery near Detroit, has become the first U.S. Catholic cemetery to offer a green burial option. Technically, Mt. Carmel isn’t all green; it’s a “hybrid” cemetery because it offers the regular get-embalmed-get-laid-in-fancy-casket along with the natural, green method, by which the deceased is laid to rest “without embalmment, entombment or the use of non-biodegradable materials,” according to NCR.

Only one-half an acre of the 12.5 acre cemetery will be for green burials and in that section, the caskets will be biodegradable and families can substitute shrouds or blankets in place of that casket if they so choose. Another good thing about this green option is that it is a viable option to cremation, something the Catholic Church has allowed for a couple of decades but something that is still distasteful to many.

I got to go on a hike on Easter Sunday. Normally, we’d do the family food fest, but stress in the M-F world had me desperate for the outdoors. So I packed some ham sandwiches and apples, and headed to Sabino Canyon‘s Phoneline Trail with the amazing Clare and the equally amazing Hunt.

Hanging out with college kids to me is like what I imagine cocaine is for other people: I just feel better after I’ve gotten my “fix.” Not all college students, mind you; the banal and immature drain me and cause me to despair for the future of the world. But luckily, the college students I’m most frequently around are either from Student Leadership at the UA or young, thinking Catholics from the Newman Center. Students in these groups are the cream of the crop – intelligent, discerning individuals who want to make a difference and refuse to let their idealism be beat out of them by skeptics, cynics or the crass culture surrounding them.

And so it was, as demonstrated by this post’s picture, I found myself listening to Hunt explain how Martin Luther came up with his theology of salvation through grace alone. I’d gone to Easter Mass earlier that day — and I recall thinking at the time that the sermon was good. But what I remember of Easter now is not that sermon, but Hunt’s fervent explanation of Luther and his theology of salvation though grace alone. (As a fine philosophy and religious studies undergrad, Hunt prefaced his sharing with, “I’m not a Luther scholar, but….”). There’s something to be said for religion in the great outdoors. And, that very thing will be the subject of tomorrow’s post re: the 7th of the Top 10 reasons people leave the Catholic Church. So stay tuned.