These cartoons, at “Man Overboard” at https://www.facebook.com/InkwellForest/ on Facebook, are becoming one of the bright points in my day. Click on pix to read the dialog bubbles.
<b>Index (kinda):
— Christ … reaching out today — in Jesuit magazine
— Cromwell on Catholics, karma and mosquitoes</b>
“Christ continues to challenge, reaching out today through the sacraments, the Scriptures, the church and the poor. In each case, the call requires conversion of heart.” — Michael Simone, S.j. “Send Down Your Fire,” America, Aug. 5, 2019, p. 45. Lectionary for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time Luke 12:49-53. [“I have come to set the earth of fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” Lk 12:49.]
Military strategists, from Saladin to the Nazis, used mosquitoes as direct weapons of war. At Walcheren, Napoleon breached dikes to create a brackish flood—the ensuing malaria epidemic killed four thousand English soldiers—and declared, “We must oppose the English with nothing but fever, which will soon devour them all.” Often, of course, malaria exacted a toll on both sides. It pushed English Protestants into Catholic Ireland, setting the stage for the Troubles centuries later. But Oliver Cromwell, the Englishman who conquered Ireland, died of malaria, in 1658, rather than take quinine, the only known treatment, because he associated it with its Catholic discoverers, making him a victim of both parasitosis and sectarianism. — Brooke Jarvis, “How Mosquitoes Changed Everything,” The New Yorker, July 29, 2019 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/how-mosquitoes-changed-everything
Ordinary Time 