Quotable & Notable

“I did it as a tribute to Galileo Galilei, who received a similar [three-year] sentence from the Catholic church for saying the earth rotates around the sun.”

-- Manuel Pérez, a judge in southern Chile, who sentenced Fr. José Cornejo to recite seven psalms daily for three months as punishment for illegal parking

“Unless Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain to tell us something different.”

-- Mike Huckabee, before he became an official presidential candidate, suggesting what might change his mind about opposing gay marriage

“Why do we confuse ‘facts’ with what is real?”

-- Religion News Service columnist Phyllis Zagano writing that scholars who try to disprove the Christmas story presented in scripture have misunderstood the story

Parents “might be surprised when they learn that it’s less like C.S. Lewis than Christopher Hitchens.”

-- Jesuit Fr. James Martin saying that The Golden Compass and other works of Philip Pullman are being marketed as if they were The Chronicles of Narnia but they are more like the best selling antireligion book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

National Catholic Reporter, December 21, 2007