Jonathan Chait on what's really at stake in today's midterm elections:

The race to control the Senate is not about legislation, because the pivotal negotiations on any legislation involve Obama and the House. Appointments are a different story, because the House has no power over appointments. The Senate has power over appointments. And this is the power that lies on the razor’s edge.

Ross Douthat on the synod and the single Catholic:

[T]he official/orthodox Catholic message often seems to boil down to something like: “Hurry up and find a mate (of the opposite sex) and don’t have sex until you do!” Which represents, to put it mildly, a kind of falling-off from the broad Christian, and particularly Catholic, history of both valorizing the unmarried state, the celibate vocation, and building rich institutions and networks designed to offer non-marital community and care in all kinds of varied forms.

Kenneth L. Woodward remembers the late Fr. Benedict Groeschel:

My memory of Fr. Benedict Groeschel goes back to 1964, when he was the Catholic chaplain at Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, New York.... Friends told us we should attend his Masses there if we wanted to hear good preaching. The children, orphans all, loved him, of course. But what I remember are the times when Benedict would clear the altar of its Catholic liturgical artifacts and preach the Protestant service as well whenever the Protestant chaplain was unable to do it himself. When our new house was finished, Benedict spent a day helping us move our furniture.

At that time, Benedict was an activist with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the interfaith peace and justice group headquartered across the river in Nyack. In 1964 Benedict was instrumental in providing a used car for Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, the three young civil rights workers beaten and murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.—the most notorious crime committed during the Sixties’ voting rights drive across the deep south.

Requiescat in pace.