I've been offline for a while because I've been up on Whidbey Island, WA with the MFA students in the creative writing program I direct. In a low-residency program like ours, students spend most of the year at home writing and sending packets via e-mail to their mentors, but we do come together each year for two intensive but exhilarating 10-day residencies.As I struggle to catch up, I thought I'd just a short tidbit from our time together.I teach a seminar at the residencies called "Art and Faith." It's a way of reflecting on writing in the light of faith and I usually assign a mixture of contemporary and classic works to feed our discussions.For this residency I used two texts to talk about "Christianity and Comedy" -- Erasmus's The Praise of Folly and Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins.I taught Percy's novel not only because it is a riotously funny satire (which still feels contemporary, though it was published in 1971) but because his protagonist is "Dr. Thomas More," which ties him back to the Christian Humanism of Erasmus.Anyway, here's the tidbit:In the novel the Catholic Church has split into 3 sects: the American Catholic Church, headquartered in Cicero, Illinois, where the Star Spangled Banner is sung at the elevation; the Dutch Church, filled with ex-priests and ex-nuns; and the remnant ragtag Roman church.Part of the novel is set in a sex research laboratory called the Love Clinic and one of its staff members is an ex-priest from the Dutch Church, yielding this immortal line:"Father Kev Kevin sits reading Commonweal at his console of vaginal indicators."Just thought this would brighten your morning.