On the Square Today

Peter J. Leithart on Babel, Pentecost, and the Church :

Though opposed to Babel, Pentecost simultaneously realizes Babel’s frustrated aspirations. Babel is an effort to arrest the scattering of humanity; Pentecost gathers. Babel aims to preserve the unity of human language and faith; Pentecost reunites. Babel’s builders want to link heaven and earth, precisely what the Spirit accomplishes.

Also today, Micah Mattix ponders what we can learn from the most highlighted passages in Kindle books :

Some of the highlighted passages  are  very “American” in the stereotypical sense Noreen Malone suggests (such as Malcolm Gladwell’s recommendation in  Outliers  that “three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying”). But most of the first fifty deal with love or fate, two of the most common subjects of all literature from Homer to the present.

And in a third feature, Filip Mazurczak describes the priest who stood up to the mafia :

Don Pino Puglisi’s courageous stance against the mafia signaled a strong break with previous Brancaccio pastors’ practices. Whereas his predecessors at St. Gaetano grudgingly accepted the influence of the mafia, Puglisi refused money from Mafiosi. However, like many great Christian witnesses courageous enough to deplore injustice, Don Puglisi paid the ultimate price.