Quotable & Notable

Catholic Rock Band Has Mass Appeal

-- Headline in the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer above a feature about the religious rock band Friday Mourning

“What the voters are looking for is a candidate who pledges to wind down the war [in Iraq] in a way that spares America from humiliation.”

-- Newsday columnist James P. Pinkerton musing on the presidential election of 2008 while remembering the presidential election of 1968

God wants spiritual fruits not religious nuts.

-- Seen on a bumpersticker

“Some conflicts are best left to their participants to resolve, however brutally. ... The unthinkable must sometimes be thought.”

-- Simon Jenkins, columnist for the British newspaper the Guardian , on the war in southern Lebanon

“Every day we begin a fast that lasts from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and pray for the situation to end.”

-- The Rev. Bilal Hibiby, the pastor of St. Savior’s Anglican Church in Kfar Yasif, northern Israel, whose congregation gathers nightly at 9 p.m. “to pray for peace for all the victims: Christian, Muslim and Jewish”

“It helps you with the moral high ground problem.”

-- Washington Post Pentagon reporter and author of Fiasco Thomas Ricks telling CNN that he has been told that Israel purposely left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon “because as long as they’re being rocketed they can continue to have some sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon”

National Catholic Reporter, August 25, 2006