An old friend, and a new one

Until recently, the way that I did my weblog reading was to click on Rex Olendi, Rex Cledendi, and hit his links buttons. That worked pretty well for a time. Unfortunately, Paul Rex has not been doing much posting lately, which is a great pity; he has both written and linked to interesting things. Nonetheless, now that I've grown to a man's estate (or more to the point, have figured out how to diddle with my weblog template and am learning to read html protocols), I have my own links page. Don't worry, though: as the reader may see, I still have Paul's weblog linked.

That said, I must say that the metaphor of the internet as a World Wide Web is a very accurate one: one starts with one page, starts traveling down the links which it provides, which lead to yet further links, with more information and people, and. . . Sometimes one can get lost in all the reticulation. Or trapped, like poor Frodo in Shelob's web.

But returning to the metaphor of the Web, sometimes one finds treasures down the next strand. One such is Pontifications. This has been and is a wonderful commonplace book, filled with quotations from Anglican divines, The Latin and Greek church fathers, and modern Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox theologians. Sometimes the web author, Fr. Al Kimel (formerly of the Episcopal Church), will open his own thoughts to the reader, and they are as good as just about anything he quotes. When one combines this with the hundreds of comments that each entry seems to have, just about all of them as thoughtful and well-informed as Fr. Kimel is, one is almost overwhelmed with the feast of faith and reason displayed there.

I looked recently at my links list, and found that Pontifications was not on it. Foolish me! However, one can see that that omission has been corrected. I do not think that I can more highly recommend a web page than this one.

Another web page, which is perhaps as loaded with interesting entries as Pontifications, is Bearing Blog. Its author, a PhD in Engineering and the mother of two homeschooled children, has a perspective, a broad and deep knowledge of many subjects (literary, historical, scientific and mathematical), and a pellucid and humorous writing style that must be seen to be believed. I must thank DarwinCatholic for linking to it. I am doing the same myself.

To quote the last line of the motion picture, (and as regards these two most worthy webpages) Casablanca, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And the continuation of an old one.