This blog now features gravatar support. A gravatar is a small icon that appears next to your comments to identify you. (The word avatar comes from Hinduism, but it has no Hindu connotations in this case.) You can see my gravatar to the right. Fun, isn’t it? Don’t you want one too?

If you want one because you comment on this blog or others, here’s what to do. First, pick an image (a photo, an icon, a nice design, whatever your little heart desires) and make an 80 pixel by 80 pixel image (GIF, JPEG, or PNG). If you need help doing that, just email me the image that you want and I’ll make it for you. Second, go to www.gravatar.com and create an account. It’s free, and I haven’t received any spam from them. Upload your image, wait for them to approve it, and you’re done. The gravatar website and this blog will work together to recognize the email address that you submit with your comment, and your gravatar will start showing up next to your comments. It will even work for all your past comments. Otherwise, you’re going to end up having the little silhouette man associated with your comments, just like everyone else.

Now wasn’t that fun? Aren’t you glad you participated? I look forward to seeing your gravatars.

I can’t claim to remember much detail about the holidays of years past, and New Year’s Eve barely seems like a holiday to me. But one past New Year’s Eve does stick vividly in my memory.

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I hadn’t realized it, but the Supreme Court might soon have a Catholic majority in Justices Thomas, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Alito. Christianity Today has an article discussing reactions to the Catholic majority. Some of the reaction is the predictable cry that this is a violation of the “separation of church and state” or that all religions aren’t adequately represented. But more interesting is the charge that evangelicals are using Catholic intellectual heft to mask their own judicial activism.

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This blog has needed an overhaul for sometime. Most of the code for the old theme was jerry-rigged, so some parts didn’t look right, but they couldn’t be changed without breaking other parts. I modified the theme “Audyasha” by Nofie Iman, which is itself a modification of “Kubrick.” “Audyasha” is well-written: it took me about a quarter of the time to modify it that it took me to modify “Blix” for the church weblog. Using “Ayudasha” adds a navigation bar, a search box that actually works, a link to a random post in the sidebar, and an archives page. Besides surface modifications, I added a list of recent comments to the sidebar and made the header image randomly selected. I hope you like the new design.

Wordpress just released v. 2.0, so I’ll install that tomorrow and have a shiny new back end to go with the new design.

Please practice this New Year’s resolution: Use fewer words. I will too.

by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

I recently read the Confessions of Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in the fifth century. The majority of the autobiographical work is a continuous prayer to God, in which Augustine confesses his sins from his infancy to his conversion and confesses the workings of God’s grace in his life. I’ll mention only a few things that impressed me:

• One must develop a sensitivity to sin, so that every sin rankles and hurts sharply until it is confessed.
• A sensitivity to sin produces a sensitivity to God’s grace. Grace is meaningless if sin is unconfessed; confession of sin is meaningless if there is no grace.
• It is good to be the son of a praying mother.

In his book Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck writes, “In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won’t happen.” So it seemed on the final day of the semester to students anxious to go home.

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