A weak attempt at cutesy honesty, or just bad copyediting?

55 square feet. That’s 5′ by 11′. I mean, sure, it’s on the Piazza di Sant’ Ignazio, but $69,000?

I’d trust the story a little more, if it didn’t come from the Telegraph, where another featured story today is headlined: “Aliens have deactivated British and US nuclear missiles, say US military pilots.”

Maybe the tiny visitors wanted to be sure their Roman apartments weren’t destroyed.

Lebrecht is convinced that Mahler is more than a great artist. His symphonies are also prognostications of war, modern technology, and environmental degradation. “In his Third and Seventh symphonies he hinted at a future ecological disaster; in the Sixth he warned of imminent world war,” Lebrecht writes. “His First Symphony tackled child mortality,” and “his Second denied church dogma on the afterlife.” The Fourth symphony not only “proclaimed racial equality,” it also made “a case for animal rights.

A case for animal rights, no less. Because, you see, Lebrecht endorses animal rights, and Lebrecht endorses GustavMahler, so, by a perfectly obvious syllogism, one must express the other.

Why Mahler, indeed? Why poor Mahler?

One candidate’s adult life has been spent in a profession in which testosterone-infused alpha male types engage in well-choreographed bombast for the benefit of the credulous masses.

And the other has spent her career in professional wrestling.

Doesn’t that have the shape of a Will Rogers’ line?

In the little parlour of the Convent, Hercule Poirot told his story and restored the chalice to the Mother Superior.
She murmured: “Tell him we thank him and we will pray for him.”
Hercule Poirot said gently: “He needs your prayers.”
“Is he then an unhappy man?”
Poirot said: “So unhappy that he has forgotten what happiness means. So unhappy that he does not know he is unhappy.”
The nun said softly: “Ah, a rich man . . . ”
Hercule Poirot said nothing—for he knew there was nothing to say.

And it reminded me of an enormous list of religious-themed mysteries and detective stories I built some years ago. Christie, for instance, also has the Miss Marple story “Sanctuary” and, of course, Murder in the Vicarage.

But I thought I ‘d ask our readers what they’ve enjoyed. Leave aside G.K. Chesterton and Melville Davisson Post. Others abide our question; they are free.

What other stories and novels are your favorites in the genre?

UPDATE:

Let me give some examples, to show what I mean.

Chesterton has it all in the Fr. Brown stories: a writer who, in other works, writes on religion and here, in his mysteries, is using a religious detective solving religious-themed mysteries with distinctly religious reasoning. Post belongs here, too, although his other, non-mystery religious writing is thin.

That’s distinct from Knox and Sayers: religious writers who wrote nonreligious mysteries. And who else belongs in that camp?

Ralph McInerny and Andrew Greeley, like Eco in Name of the Rose, may be yet different. They have religious detectives, yes, but are the mysteries themselves actually religious—or just regular mysteries into which a cleric wanders?

Christie has such stories as “Sanctuary” and “Apples of the Hesperides,” but is the religion in them just background noise, the stuff present at that moment in the culture and grabbed momentarily by a busy writer, as it clearly is in, say, the Nero Wolfe mystery story “Easter Parade,” which turns on a character’s unwillingness to denounce another character on Good Friday?

And then there are the ever-popular historical mysteries, Peters et al., which require as much religion as was culturally present at the time in which they’re set. Which of those are genuinely religious, in theme and puzzle and solution, and which are only incidentally so?

In other words, you’re religious people. What mysteries do you like?

Don’t you feel better now that you know this—and know that the great American press is there to safeguard our freedom?

My, my, my, my.

Forget the politics for a minute. The line just has that kind of Web-perfect construction that keeps me reading online.

Instapundit’s funny snark: “SHOCKINGLY, NOT MICHAEL BELLESILES.”

Policy leader, maybe, although I prefer Bobby Jindal. Or electoral leader, although the rising star of Chris Christie seems to be showing conservative candidates the way to go. But spiritual leader? This is the man who called for pro-life voters to put their concerns away and declare a truce—because the economic issues are more important than any social or moral issues.

Spiritual isn’t exactly the word for it. And the reaction to Daniel’s “truce” comment suggests that this isn’t the way to win the G.O.P. presidential nomination.

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan adds: “Whatever stand you take on the social issues, you have to be blind to think they will make a big difference this year.” Now, she’s writing in the context of answering the claim of the White House’s David Axelrod that abortion will “certainly be an issue” for Democrats and will be raised “across the country.” And she’s right that, in people’s minds, the economic issues loom—as they must—very large.

So I think I agree with Peggy. But the Republican candidates would be mad to imagine that they can therefore put away or hide from abortion. The base of the party is energized and angry. A non-pro-life candidate, or a constant drumbeat of claims that abortion doesn’t matter, will only leave them demoralized. Still angry, of course, but no longer determined to use the ballot box to change the course of the country. If your voters don’t show up, how are you going to win?

Half our readers love it. Of course, the other half are utterly indifferent when they’re not openly hostile, but the ones who are interested in the topic must read this long essay in the London Review of Books: 5,000 words on the history of naming—prompted, improbably, by the author’s being asked to review Volume 5 of an Ancient Greek lexicon.