Round the Sphere Again

Once again, it's Christian Carnival time. This week's carnival can be found at Weapons of Mass Distraction.

Don't miss this week's New Christian Blog Showcase, either. And while you're over there, thank Nick Queen for providing this important service to new Christian bloggers.

Added as an update: All you poets (You know who you are!), why not enter the 2nd Poetry Carnival? Details for submissions are found here at Siris, where the carnival will be hosted.

Mission Safari has several compelling posts:

1. Check out this chart showing the changes in life expectancy in certain African nations over the past decade or so. Quite sobering.
2. Goodwill? shows us how our best intentions to help can have unintended negative consequences.
3. Treatment Guidlines is a follow-up to the previous post. It discusses what things we might need to consider in order to be wise in our approach to helping people and nations.

I hope that Terri Shiavo's passing will not end the discussions about how someone in her condition ought to be treated. Check out these posts for reasoned thoughts on the issues brought to our attention by Terri, who has, in her death and in her life, served us by causing us to grapple with these things.

1. From Christianity Today, an interview with Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity president John Kilner, who tells us that our intention should be to support and maintain life instead of intending someone's death. This link comes via Marla Swoffer.
2. From The Doctor Is In, Thoughts on a Life's End:

   The persistent vegetative state is very different from that in which the underlying disease is terminal or life-threatening, and poses a very difficult situation. The patient is physiologically alive, requiring no assisted ventilation or cardiac or vascular support to continue living -- in other words, their underlying disease will not kill them....
   
   The problem I have with stopping food and water is the great risk of crossing a very dangerous boundary. If we define life only by our mental state, rather than as a union of mental, physical, and the relationships of ourselves to other and of others to us, it seems dangerously easy to move this boundary based on a subjective judgment about which specific mental capabilities constitute a meaningful life.

   He discusses what is the ethical way to treat someone like Terri when they DO have a life threatening illness, and the ethical issues involved in the treatment of someone who IS in the process of dying, too, so you'll want to click on the link to read the whole piece.

And how can I not link to this from Violet? (Although, according to some, my page shows pink to them. I just hope it's a light pink!)

Another update: Go see Ian's photos of Rankin Inlet, Iqaluit, and more.

The award for most intriguing search query of the week goes to "cussedest definition". So were they looking for a definition of the word cussedest, or just searching for any old cantankerous definition? (The word cussedest can indeed be found here--thanks to the Yukon's own bard--in this post.)

Runners up in this award category included "jesus hell apostles creed calvinist", which I find curious simply because of the word "calvinist" in there, and "video clip of oil flowing anoint". (I'd like to see that video clip, too, although I'm not going to spend time searching for it.)

The search query that led to the most interesting find is "5% canadian tire money". Looking back through the results the searcher got with that query, I found this: a whole forum for discussing Canadian Tire Money, where you can ask your pressing Canadian Tire Money questions, like "What happened to the $2 denominations?"