Afternoon Links — 10.19.10

“People apologize about four times a week,” but they apologize much more often to strangers (22% of the time) than to “romantic partners (11%) or family members (7%). The only folks we apologize to more? Friends (46%).”

In literary news, Alvaro Vargos Llosa discusses his father’s Nobel prize . Leftists in Sweden are not pleased with the choice.

In other literary news, Tony Blair’s autobiography is nominated by the Literary Review for its “bad sex award” and categorized as fiction to boot, while customers in English bookstores are reportedly moving it to the “True Crime” shelves.

Homosexual parents are more likely to raise homosexual children , reports a study by Walter Schumm of Kansas State University.

“God is alive, and he needs people to serve him and bring him to others. It does makes sense to become a priest: the world needs priests, pastors, today, tomorrow and always, until the end of time,” Pope Benedict XVI concluded a letter to seminarians about the priesthood . Media reports, like the one in the Wall Street Journal , have, of course, focussed almost entirely on what he said in support of celibacy in relation to the sex scandal.

Homer and Bart Simpson “are Catholics” , according to an article in the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Obsservatore Romano . ” The Simpsons are among the few TV programmes for children in which Christian faith, religion, and questions about God are recurrent themes.”

“For too many of us, Christianity is not a filial relationship with the living God, but a habit and an inheritance. We’ve become tepid in our beliefs and naive about the world,” Archbishop Charles Chaput observed , speaking at a recent conference. Partly because of that, young people have lost their “moral vocabulary.”

An interview with the head of Save the Monasteries, Elisabetta Valgiusti, about her new movies on Christians in the Middle East .

“As much as we might not want to admit it, many of us don’t think much about orphans because, frankly, we’re scared of them,” writes the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore in Is the Orphan My Neighbor? Quoted in a WSJ story on the subject, Moore wrote a long essay on the subject for Christianity Today .

Thanks to Mary Ellen Kelly, Dave Blum, the New Oxford Review , and Arts & Letters Daily for links. Speaking of links, p lease send links toarticles we might be able to use to tips@firstthings.com . We’re especially in need of links to stories on Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish issues and to good articles by writers from those groups. Catholic links we have coming out our ears.