* A lovely post on Euripides' play, Iphigenia among the Taurians at "Seoul Hero". Actually, I think it's the other Iphigenia play by Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, that makes for the most interesting comparisons and contrasts with the Akedah or Binding of Isaac, but I can see the point with this one.
* Speaking of the Akedah, the poem On Abraham and Isaac, usually attributed to St. Ephrem the Syrian, is an interesting rendition, which reads the Binding of Isaac Christologically.
* Allen Wood has a lovely paper on the subject of Kant on Conscience (PDF).
* Eric Schwitzgobel muses on The Problem of the Ethics Professors at "The Splintered Mind" (HT: Matthew Mullins)
* Fr. Tucker's sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter at "Dappled Things" is worth reading.
* Miriam Burstein has a great list of links on Gustave Doré.
* I missed the Feast of St. Catherine of Siena (April 29), and by quite a bit, since it slipped my mind entirely. But Catherine's letters are worth reading.
* I was at Lake Brownwood this weekend, where there was a big storm; and it has put me in mind of St. Columban's Boat Song.
* Mark Steyn has a biting -- and very Canadian -- critique of certain forms of Canadian anti-Americanism at Macleans.ca.
* The BBC has an informal poll of people's 'intuitions' about ethical thought experiments. I'm not a big fan of this sort of thing -- polls about ethical thought experiments are useful, I think, primarily for seeing how morally stunted people's moral 'intuitions' are -- but it certainly makes interesting reading. There's some discussion of it at TAR, particularly about how the particular ways the open-ended word problems (which is a more accurate name for these so-called 'thought experiments') are phrased might be affecting answers. I agree with Mike Almeida that it's unfortunate that they don't ask the questions for Judith Jarvis Thompson's violinist that Thompson herself asked; one of the strengths of the word problem is that it admits of a lot of variation.
* The ever-likable Rex Murphy reflects on rock icon Keith Richards. (HT: Magic Statistics)
* UPDATE: Was John Home a better playwright than William Shakespeare? David Hume thought so. Of course, Home was Hume's cousin -- le bon David changed the spelling in an effort to get the English to pronounce it correctly, and he and Home often had friendly arguments about who was spelling it correctly. One suspects there may have been a little familial bias in Hume's comment to Smith. It's perhaps worth noting, by the way, that Home's tragedy, Douglas, sparked a major battle between the Moderate Party and the Evangelical Party of the Church of Scotland: Home was a churchman of the Moderate Party, and Evangelicals like Witherspoon didn't think it was appropriate for good Christians, and especially not appropriate for ministers, to go around indulging in the immorality of the theater. Witherspoon wrote a tract on the evils of stageplays. Through the comic sensibilities of providence, Witherspoon (who went on to become president of Princeton and to sign the Declaration of Independence) is the direct ancestor of Reese Witherspoon.
