Isle of Palms, South Carolina.
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Moving through the Acts of the Apostles as we are doing in the Mass readings right now, today and tomorrow, we reach the narrative of Stephen and his martyrdom.
An essential reminder of what it means to be conformed to Christ – in every way.
Here are pages about Stephen from The Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories – from the “Easter Season” section and including the first and the last pages. From the last page, you can get a sense of the structure – telling the story, tying it into bigger Catholic themes, and then with reflection questions.
Stephen is also in the Loyola Kids Book of Heroes .
Here’s the table of contents, so you can see where he falls.
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I say…almost because of course the underlying issues and the consequences of Planned Parenthood’s…existence…are mostly tragic. And not funny at all.
But this?
What we have here is an amazing example of the twisting and flipping that’s happening in traditionally leftist movements because of the ultimately conflicting demands of intersectional identity politics and, most pointedly, trans ideology.
Quick summary:
We admit that Margaret Sanger was a racist eugenicist. We admit that our organization was built on a racist foundation. In reparation for this legacy, we will try to be better allies to racial equity and trans efforts.
We must take up less space, and lend more support. And we must put our time, energy, and resources into fights that advance an agenda other than our own.
As garbled and insulting (to feminists) as the op-ed is, it is undeniably enjoyable to see this in print from the current head of Planned Parenthood:
Margaret Sanger harmed generations with her beliefs
Well!
I couldn’t agree more!
The problem, of course, is that Johnson cannot even come close to comprehending the true issue with Sanger the Racist Eugenicist.
Sanger was a typical late 19th and early 20th century progressive, in that she was a nativist racist. Which meant that she wanted The Poors to stop reproducing so damn much. Her racism is not seen in her exclusion of minorities from “health care” – it’s in her determination that the “health care” she was trying to provide would serve minorities by making sure that fewer of them were born.
And ever since, the organization has remained true to Sanger’s vision by pouring its efforts into minority communities.
So yes, yes. Sanger and Planned Parenthood are racist! By george, I think she’s got it!
But no, she doesn’t. For she says, “What we have is a history focusing on white womanhood relentlessly.” By which she means, I suppose, elevating white womanhood as a normative, majoritarian reality to be privileged, protected and supported – which is true – and what it also true is that this goal was met in two ways:
First, by supporting the cause of affording birth control to white – WASP – women so they could have greater control over their fertility and assume a greater role in culture and society, unencumbered by the vagaries and uncertainties of non-contraceptive sexual life.
Secondly, by getting birth control into the lives of black, brown and unpleasantly non-WASPy immigrant women, so there would be fewer of their black, brown and unpleasantly non-WASPy children.
But Johnson is just unable, as we say these days, to say the quiet part out loud: that concentrating contraceptive and abortion services at “minority” populations is racist, not because of some amorphous goal of “equity,” but because it – that is the Planned Parenthood and population control mission since their beginnings – are rooted in the conviction that the fewer people of color in this world, the better.
Just a couple more points.
The women on gender-critical feminist sites are not pleased with Johnson putting their feminism in square quotes. But, as they also acknowledge, it’s totally predictable. PP has been on the Trans Train for a while and is undoubtedly seeing dollar signs from the provision of hormone therapy and such.
The dehumanization of transgender people whose health care and rights are being denied in states across the country, and who face attacks not just from the right but also from trans-exclusionary radical “feminists.”
Most shocking of all, to me at least, isn’t the tossing of Sanger under the bus, as much frisson as that affords. No, what’s startling in Johnson’s piece is her uncritical acceptance and use of the insulting misogynistic figure of a “Karen.”
What we don’t want to be, as an organization, is a Karen. You know Karen: She escalates small confrontations because of her own racial anxiety. She calls the manager. She calls the police. She stands with other white parents to maintain school segregation. And then there are the organizational Karens. The groups who show up, assert themselves, and tell you where to march. Those who pursue freedom and fairness, but also leverage their privilege in ways that are dehumanizing.
As someone on a feminist gender critical message board said:
Wtf.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading this crap. The US left has gone insane. I cringed so hard reading the Karen rant… holy shit, PP is going full on misogyny now I guess? How could they write that in good faith knowing that same meme is abused by MRA and incels constantly.
If they think suburban left leaning democrat women are going to keep donating to them with this type of language, they’re mistaken. The medicalization of children is a scandal in waiting and PP is in the center of it
I’m telling you, this is a fascinating moment. All of these truth bombs and lies and competing ideologies crashing into each other with more intensity every day….hard to imagine where it all will end….
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It’s time to get back to Mass!
Really?
Why?
The calls, framed with just a bit of anxiety, are beginning to come, aren’t they? This is Cardinal Dolan’s, but perhaps you’ve seen them in your own part of the woods. I have.
Every time I run up against it, my knee-jerk response is a simple, borderline obnoxious, Why?
Cardinal Dolan does answer it, in a way:
We need medicine!
We need food for the soul!
We need vaccination from sin, Satan and eternal death!
We need herd immunity as sheep under Christ our Good Shepherd.
All this we behold at Mass!
How can we stay away?
But I am thinking his answer is not that convincing to the audience to which he’s trying to appeal. As if that audience would even hear his invitation, anyway. They’re probably not reading Catholic New York on the regular.
There’s a second part to the why response. It’s related: What have you done over the past year to show me that this should be important to me? That you actually believe that what I’m missing vaccinates me from eternal death?
Catholic apologetics experienced a bit of a renaissance over the past couple of decades, for good and for ill, and much of the concern in apologetics efforts was centered on the issue of credibility.
We need to offer a credible account of the truth of faith to the world.
Much of the time, that sense of credibility was understood in intellectual terms: Our explanation of the faith needs to be credible in a philosophical sense. It needs to make sense to a materialist, scientifically-oriented and relativist world.
Perhaps this is a moment to think about the credibility of our witness in another way:
When the world looks at how we approach faith matters, do they see a body that acts as if it believes in the vital, life-changing and shaping importance of what it preaches?
There is, of course, another sense in which this “credible witness” issue is articulated today – that is, in the question, posed mostly on social media, in relation to politics, as pundits argue that there’s no worse damage done to the credibility of Catholic claims than that done by …that particular pundit’s political opponents.
There’s validity to that – it’s an argument as old as, say, what Harriet Beecher Stowe pointed out in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – but that’s not what I’m focusing on here.
Also, of course, the very profound issue of the credible witness of an institution that has a history of protecting abusers at every level. There’s an issue to deal with, if you’re serious about wondering why people might be staying away.
But at this moment, in this space, I’m writing very specifically about the core of what the Body of Christ is mandated to do here on earth, as articulated by Jesus himself in the Gospels and through the depth and breadth of Church tradition: bring his healing, reconciling, merciful presence to the world. Face-to-face, through the works of mercy and sacramental action.
It’s time to come back to Mass!
Really? Why?
What has your Church and its ministers, lay and ordained, done to show over the past year, that they really and truly believe that this suffering world needs Christ?
What images does the American Catholic Church leave us with from the past year? What impressions? Energy? Creativity? Courage? Conviction?
Or is more…this?
Perhaps it would be clearer if you look at the situation, not from the perspective of the administrator anxious about the bottom line, but from the outside.
Perhaps from the perspective of the average person, not “Involved” in much in the parish, who, pre-pandemic did make it to Mass most Sundays, got their kids through at least First Communion and maybe even Confirmation.
What has she been through this past year?
And what has the Church offered her in comfort and assistance, especially if she’s not a known quantity in the parish, if she was pre-pandemic “nothing more” than a name on a registration list? What wisdom, what outreach, what presence, what hint that in her and her family’s suffering, confusion and frustration, Jesus offers, still and now more than ever, his consolation and hope?
Anything?
Has anyone even called her?
Has anyone reached out in a personal way at all?
Or has her main communication been a link to a livestream and an online giving portal?
Oh, but now, here’s something! ….A link to a video from the pastor, assuring this person, who, if we’re brutally honest here, wouldn’t have been “missed” on a typical pre-pandemic Sunday, because, you know, that doesn’t seem to be the charism of Catholic parishes in the best of times, oh, that he is so happy to welcome her back to the “parish family” because it’s just not the same without her there?
I’m telling you – I’m seeing some parishes where life does, indeed, seem to be back to pre-pandemic levels. I attended Holy Thursday and Good Friday at a parish where they were still doing limited, every-other row seating, they were packed, and I thought….how are they going to do Easter?
And the parishes that seem to have bounced back are those parishes that didn’t let pandemic measures stop them. Mass didn’t stop, even if congregations couldn’t be present or fully engaged – and those Masses weren’t bare bones run-throughs, either. Confessions didn’t stop. Ministry to the homebound and the hospitalized and the grieving didn’t stop. Bringing the Real Presence of Jesus into the community didn’t stop – because those pastors believed in the reality of this Real Presence, and all that it means.
They were safe. They were observant of civic regulations. But they were creative and energetic and even brave. They went to great lengths to continue to live out the Gospel in visible, helpful ways that ended up being a credible witness of the vital importance of that Gospel.
And their pews are full now. Or at least getting there!
How can we get them back? Is the question I’m sure being tossed about in countless chancery and parish meetings right now.
It’s the wrong question. It’s a clubby, cliquish, institutional question.
The right question is the same one it’s always been, in every era and situation Jesus’ friends have walked beginning with the era we’re focusing on right now in Easter Season. The apostles didn’t ask, How can we get everyone to join us in our upper room?
No, they left that room, unafraid, went out into the streets, face-to-face, and shared Good News. As Jesus says in Sunday’s Gospel reading:
‘So you see how it is written that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that, in his name, repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses to this.’
Witnesses. Credible witnesses who saw the mess of the past year, not as reason to retreat, but as the best reason in the world to go out to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem – that is, the streets outside their own front door.
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Today is Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s birthday. He’s 94.
If you would like an simple introduction to this thought written for a popular audience, try my Come Meet Jesus: An Invitation from Pope Benedict XVI.
It’s out of print, but you can find inexpensive used copies online.
AND you can download a free (pdf file) copy of it here.
This book is centered on Christ as the center of Pope Benedict’s thought and work as theologian and vocation as Pope. It seemed to me that he is “proposing Jesus Christ” both to the world and to the Church. He was about reweaving a tapestry that has been sorely frayed and tattered:
And of course, there are the children’s books – still timely, with the typical great quotes that offer the typical B16-ian reassurance and respectful nudge to something more.
Friendship with Jesus: An Invitation from Pope Benedict XVI
Still available from Ignatius Press.
In this painting from the book, Ann Engelhart superimposed an image of young Joseph Ratzinger, pulled from his First Communion photo, over a scene of contemporary Bavaria.
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WOW. What a loser of a week, blog-wise!
Just lazy homeschool-posting, etc.
Sorry about that.
I have no excuse! None!
I mean, I have reasons, but none of the reasons are excuses.
Anyway, if you have any interest at all in what we’ve been doing in the homeschool, what I’ve been reading or watching, just click back.
There are some upcoming travels, but those travels will involve responsibility for an almost 18-month old and a 7-year old, so don’t look for exotic adventures, just a change of scenery.
Anyway, let’s start with today’s saint. And there is a saint, even though it’s Easter Season:
St. Bernadette – you can read the entire entry on her from the Loyola Kids Book of Saints (soon coming in Spanish!) here.
You can learn more about the Loyola KIds Book of Saints here.
(Not an Amazon link, she virtue-signaled vociferously. Remember. I cancelled Amazon Prime. You can starve that particular beast, too!)
New York magazine is about 75% absolutely insufferable and 25% fantastic. I’ve gotten back into reading it of late both because the libraries have reopened with accessible hours and my rounds have taken me in their directions. (You can check out past issues of magazines from our libraries. It’s the staple of my summer: New York, the New Yorker, and whatever issues of the Atlantic and the New Republic that don’t drive me to screaming, a big ol’ diet coke and my lounger out on the patio. Almost – almost as good as the beach.)
(Oh, and yes, it was in the 80’s here last week. So yes, in a way, “summer.”)
ANYWAY, that is only to point you a decent little article in a recent issue of New York . Every issue features an interior design piece, and it’s usually some ridiculous multimillionaire spending zillions redoing a space that housed a dozen immigrants a century ago (the insufferable part of this magazine and others like it being the faux liberal crying about injustice and poverty alongside ads for designer clothing and multi-million dollar condos).
But this one was lovely. It was about a woman who’s kept her mother’s small apartment in a Broooklyn high rise and done some practical and artsy renovations, and in the process, both made it her own and honored her family.
Speaking of New York magazine, here’s an interesting article on one of the candidates for mayor. I’m interested in the race, not only because I’m interested in politics, generally, but also because this is an important election, my oldest lives in NYC and I definitely hope to live there part time at some point in the future. Of course Andrew Yang is running, but here’s a bit about Maya Wiley. Not that this qualifies her to be mayor, but it’s startling and tragic, and just goes to show, once again, what surprising sadness is at the core of most of our lives:
Maya Wiley’s parents, both activists, raised her and her brother, Dan, to be resilient. In 1973, when Maya was 9 and her brother 10, their father, George Wiley, bought a small boat. On their first day out on Chesapeake Bay, he insisted that his children learn how to drive it and drop the anchor in case they ever encountered an emergency.
The next day, Maya and Dan went out with him again. As their father, a big and exuberant man, traversed a narrow wooden walkway on his new boat, the rusted screws holding the walkway in place gave way and he fell backward into the water. His life preserver ripped, and Wiley remembers seeing it float away. She and her brother tried to circle the boat around him to no avail, and they watched him drown.
The siblings managed to drive the boat close enough to shore to drop anchor and swam in to a white beach community, where they ran screaming from house to house and were rebuffed by the first family they tried before someone finally took them in and called the police.
I can’t even imagine.
A couple of takes ago, I highlighted an Instagram post from Evangeline Lily, who played Kate on Lost. I recommended her to you as far more wise and insightful than the slew of striving You go girl Follow your dreams “influencers” out there. Here’s another one:
Growing up hurts. We are little unconditional beings who enter into a VERY conditional world and we are given two broken grown-up kids to be our guides. Their job is to prepare us for the billions of conditions we will meet “out there” everyday, more and more as we get older, while somehow trying to keep our innocence, joy and love in-tact. This is literally an impossible job. We all attempt this impossible task differently and should have a lot of grace for each other and for ourselves when it comes to the ways we fall-short.
I really think that the bolded sentence is, of course related to the article on Wiley, and even though most of us haven’t had experiences that tragic in our childhood, is still an accurate a summary of parenting and family as I’ve ever read.
On a much lighter, but just as truthful note, a while back, I pointed you to Drew Talbert. Originally from Nashville, now in LA, he has spent decades in the restaurant business as a server, as well as developing his comedic and acting skills. It’s all coming together in his restaurant-based skits in which he brilliantly plays all the characters, servers and guests alike. It’s always a good day when Drew Talbert has a new post on Instagram. Or TikTok. Or YouTube. You can find him on all of those platforms. Don’t miss the exciting 4-part saga of Bridgette in Vegas, in particular!
I mean, I had a nice cocktail this week, but Debra really has my number, to be honest.
From the New Yorker, a piece about one corner of the Cuban revolution:
In May, my mother boarded a Greyhound bus at Port Authority and travelled to Miami, then caught a ride to Key West. She feared the sea and couldn’t swim, but found a boat that was taking Cuban-Americans to Mariel, and paid the captain in cash. She spent the duration of the voyage, ten or twelve hours, clutching her purse and pretending to sleep. At one point, she told me, the captain had misgivings and announced that he was turning around. A passenger took a machete out of his duffel and threatened to kill him if he didn’t continue on to Mariel. My mother reached for the rosary beads in her bag and led some of the passengers in prayer.
At Mariel, hundreds of boats jockeyed for position. Every captain was to give the Cuban officials a list of the people his passengers wanted to pick up. It took time for the government to locate them, and the boats sometimes had to wait for days, even weeks. A night club was set up aboard a government-owned ship to entertain impatient sailors. Other vessels patrolled the harbor while guards on the shore pointed their weapons toward the water. At night, floodlights illuminated the scene. My mother managed to disembark, find a phone, and call the house to let Poly know that she had come to collect him. My aunt answered and told her that he had already left. It had not been hard for Poly to convince someone that he should be banished. My mother returned to the crowded pier and talked her way onto a boat back to the U.S.
This coming Sunday’s Gospel is part of the narrative of Jesus’ appearance on the road to Emmaus. Here’s a glimpse from the Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories.
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I was actually looking for something else – something completely different, as in books by noir author Alfred Hayes – on archive.org, when I ran across this.
Published in 1965. I’m linking to it here, and publishing screenshots of the table of contents. So at the end of the Second Vatican Council, this was where we stood, generally. Interesting. What the literate Catholic might be aware of and be informed by. There’s not a lot of fiction. Really, only The Woman Who was Poor and Dante. Of course, in 1965, even though they’d been published for a few decades, one didn’t presume to put Waugh or even Chesterton’s fiction in the “masterpiece” category. It’s interesting to see a bit of aggiornamento creeping in, in a title like Zen Catholicism.
Click on images for readable versions.
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I don’t know how you do it. Here’s what’s going on here these days.
(Subject-by-subject survey of the present moment here.)
I’ll take a 36-hour period, beginning with this past Monday evening.
Remember: Alabama has no homeschooling regulations other than…spend 180 days doing whatever you call school.
Monday
During the day he’d done his usual reading, plus he’d done his math for Tuesday and gone to the church that employs him as organist and practiced for this coming Sunday.
5:30-6:30pm Boxing boot camp. Drives self. Picks up friend who has a guitar lesson, and they go on to the gym.
(Me: Help serve dinner at woman’s shelter, then a social gathering with another group after.)
9-10:30 or so: I return home, he’s reading Fellowship of the Ring. I turn on the Criterion Channel and we watch about half of The Buena Vista Social Club before we both get tired.
(The first Buena Vista Social Club is on frequent rotation here. He says Silencio is his favorite from that album.)
Tuesday:
He rises about 9:30.
Wake-up/transition time. Prayer. I do a quick reminder of what he’s got “due” for me that day.
10-12:30. He reads literature (Cather) /history (Herodotus – this version)/religion. Practices piano. Eats lunch.
1-2 Math (Algebra II/Trig) tutoring at the school where his tutor teaches.
2:30-3:00 We talk about what he’d read earlier:
Willa Cather’s story “The Enchanted Bluff” – found here. Focused on the theme of the sense of the young that the world is theirs for the taking and the reality of adulthood. He dug out those themes without my prompting.
The symbol of the phoenix in Christianity, as explained in this book and a couple of other sites, with images. We’re working our way through the book for the spring.
The prologue to John’s gospel. Using the Word on Fire Bible. So after I gave him a brief overview of the Synoptic Gospels and John, and various scholarly approaches to them, we moved to discuss the material, focusing on Logos, connecting it to the Old Testament expression of God’s Wisdom.
3-3:30 ACT Science practice questions
3:45-7 He was gone, biking with his friends through town – up to the Vulcan, around UAB, to Railroad park. Then he returned to tell me about it. Took a shower, played video games with the same friends for a little over an hour, then read for a while, then to sleep…
Wednesday: 5-7:15 AM Boxing boot camp w/friends, then to Chick-Fil-A to pick up breakfast. Back home, shower, then…it’s quiet, so I’m guessing he’s asleep. He’ll wake up in an hour or so, then back to work. Focus of today: read excerpts from My Antonia, continue whatever history he’s doing, a bit of Latin, more ACT science practice (he takes it Saturday), religion (dolphin symbol, rest of chapter 1 of John), piano practice. Fraternus tonight. Tomorrow: piano lesson.
Plus whatever else we watch/dream up to do.
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Digesting, with more to come later.
Writing: Not much, unfortunately, except blog posts here. I finished and submitted a small project last week, got good feedback.
Related – I was on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning at 6:20 AM Central, talking about this post and this one. Dic Nobis, Maria.
Hopefully, this week will be more fruitful.
Reading: Last night I read A High Wind in Jamaica, which I’d wanted to read for a while, but kept forgetting about, until I was in a library last week, looking for Hemingway, marveling that they only had The Old Man and the Sea, and then saw this because the author is one Richard Hughes.
It was an interesting, if not exactly enjoyable read. A Lord of the Flies type of experience in which children out of their element are used as meditations on human nature.
Also last week was The Custom of the Country by Wharton. I will definitely be writing more about this one. Very good – although I still prefer The House of Mirth – and more than suitable for a television treatment.
Watching: From Stalker, we went in the other direction on the one evening we had for movies – The Fly – the Jeff Goldblum version, which is rather 80’s, but still very good, for what it is.
Cooking: Not much, because of people’s schedules. I did do this quick shrimp scampi on Saturday night, and earlier in the week had done a chicken stir-fry.
Listening: This also falls into “Watching,” since we were actually in a live audience to see it happen.
The Opera Birmingham production of The Pirates of Penzance.
Live and in person! Outdoors and in masks, including the performers, which was idiotic, but we’ll take what we can get.
The bonus is that the amphitheater in which the performance was held is in the park across the street from our house, so all it took was a stroll over the hill to the venue.
It was a fun performance, with strong vocalists. It was also stripped down, not only in terms of the set, but in the script as well – most of the dialogue was replaced by narration, so it was really 50 minutes of the music, which is fine. For an outdoor production in sketchy spring weather, it was probably the safest choice.
Also a bonus for us – my son’s piano teacher was the music director, so my son served as his page-turner during one of the performances.
To see more video, go to the Opera Birmingham Instagram page.
Oh, one more note: At the end of the show, the British flag is raised, and they did so at half-mast in honor of Prince Philip.
Wearing: Not so many masks anymore.
Alabama’s state mask mandate expired on Friday. Birmingham city stepped in and imposed its own immediately, in the name of keeping the citizens of a city in which people are being shot in park gatherings on Easter Sunday – “safe.” Whatever, guys.
And of course many businesses, especially national chains are keeping mask…requirements? The wording is often vague. But anyway, I noticed PPE starting to go on sale a couple of weeks ago, and now, well…fire sale.
Times change. Remember when you couldn’t get this stuff?
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Today is, of course, Divine Mercy Sunday.
A while back, I posted on an interesting fresco in Florence – an “Allegory of Mercy.” Here’s that post, and here’s the image and a bit about it.
In the fresco, a large frontally-posed female figure, a personification of the Lord’s Mercy, towers over smaller kneeling male (to her right, the position of privilege) and female figures (to her left). Eleven historiated roundels depicting the six canonical works of mercy, plus the non-canonical seventh, burial of the dead, decorate her cope. An early-Florentine cityscape, with Santa Croce and the Cathedral still under construction, is at the base of the fresco. The entire composition is framed by a decorative border representing the personified virtues; interspersed herein are an image of a stork defending its nest against a serpent and a pelican piercing its breast to feed its young. While similar in composition to the popular Madonna of Mercy image-type, the painting’s central figure is commonly believed to be an allegorical representation of the Lord’s Mercy rather than the Virgin Mary; on her crown are inscribed the words “Misericordia domini.”
Related to today’s Gospel, here’s a page or two from The Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories.
The story includes most of the post-Resurrection appearances, including the Thomas narrative, the focus of Sunday’s gospel.
Arranged, as I have mentioned before, according to the point in the liturgical year one would be most likely to hear that passage proclaimed in Mass (most Catholic’s point of encounter with Scripture).
And then, St. Faustina from The Loyola Kids Book of Heroes.
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Crafts & Vintage
