Weekend Notes

• Current drink:  The rest of this bottle of Lambrusco that I bought fifteen months ago in Emilia-Romagna. I had sort of forgotten about it and thought for sure it would be undrinkable, but then needed some red for this Mexican Braised Beef recipe…and it was all I had. So I popped the cork, used a bunch, and gingerly tasted the archival remnants….not bad. 
• (I think it was something like 2 Euros – I bought it at the winery, the day we did the wonderful food tour of Parma…)
• Since the 7 Takes, what’s happened? I mean, in our house, not in the world. You all know all about that stuff.
• Older son had to work both Saturday and Sunday, so any gallivanting was limited and local.
• Last week saw a record three trips to the Zoo. Wednesday for the Zookeeper for a Day session, then Friday because of World Rhino Day, and then Saturday because of the Hispanic Celebration.
• Please note – the Zoo is about 10 minutes from my house, we have a membership, and so “going to the zoo” is not a big deal and somewhat akin to stopping at Target for a quick look around.
• So Friday – this will double as a Homeschool Daily Report –  we conquered Divisibility Rules, talked about the Autumnal Equinox, watched a video on that, looked up some stuff about hummingbird migration, watched this video on metamorphosis. He read in one of his library books about Assyrian royal culture. We read this article about some mesoAmerican cities. I would say Aztecs, but that would be wrong and I would be firmly corrected.
• Then to the Zoo for World Rhino Day – the end of it at least. We didn’t see much extra – just a short keeper talk on Rhinos, during which the two females got  very angry with the one male – and that was a bit of a show that we’d never seen before. Then a quick trip to Our Friends the Reptiles, during which I was given all the inside scoop the Zookeeper for a Day had learned.  He also took the camera and did some shooting for his homeschool photography class which meets on Thursdays.
• Saturday, the 16-year old headed to work at 7 am. The younger one’s main Saturday assignment was serving at a retreat Mass at the Sister Servants’ convent, which he did. After that, we headed out to the zoo again because they had designated it as a Hispanic Celebration Day, and we were up for that  – but as per usual with these kind of things, it seems (we found this the case at the art museum the previous week for their Hispanic celebration), the “Hispanic” focus was hard to find except for some bilingual keeper talks and flags of Latin and Central American nations stuck on the anaconda habitats and such. I probably should just be in charge of everything in the world, I think. Things would be much better.

• Next week should be fine, though. This is happening, and we’re excited. 
• By the time we were done at the zoo (after feeding Lorakeets and finding a small snake which I was repeatedly assured, Mom, it’s not a copperhead. No. I know it’s not a copperhead), 16-year old was home and wondering where the heck we were. The afternoon faded and it was time for Mass – the 12-year old’s second Mass within a 5-hour time span, but it really was for the best, considering the 16-year old’s schedule on Sunday.
• (Want to see more of this stuff on the day it happens? Check me out on Instagram…especially Stories)
• So off we went, to a parish that was not our usual, and at which we heard the usual good preaching for that parish and also the unfortunately usual horrendous music. I usually don’t outright refuse to sing things, but yeah, Sing a New Church? I don’t sing that crap.
• #resist
• Sunday – no zoo!
• But we did head to the wonderful and always free Birmingham Botanical Gardens, which was hosting the Alabama Orchid Society show – the flowers were quite lovely, although there were only five or six actual exhibitors. I was a little surprised at that. More opportunities to practice photography.
• And then over to the amazing huge Asian grocery store – we wanted to check for squid. As I’d mentioned, he dissected squid at the homeschool science lab the other day, but wasn’t satisfied with the experience, mostly because of other people’s….issues…and the fact that the squid was small. We found that yes, indeed, they carry fresh squid and they’re pretty honkin’ big, too. We’ll get one on another day when we are better prepared to haul a fresh squid home.

• Then to the library to get the next “school” book, following the last read of Animal Farm.  Of Mice and Men. Bad mother? Probably.
• Then to the pet store to get a medium feeder rat, please. You don’t want to know how that ended. Rocky was pleased. Does that make it better?
• Then a vigorous walk around the park that’s over the hill from our house, where I ran into a friend and former neighbor – it was great to see her and catch up.
• Working Son returned, ate food, and then One-episode-I’m-not-kidding-just-one-seriously-no-more-you-have-school-tomorrow. 
• Which is really hard when this is the last scene. But we stayed strong. Man, I love this show, and what a pleasure it is to rewatch it with these two, seeing it for the first time. That’s Blogpost-In-The-Making-#4502.

• BTW, Michael Emerson, while originally hailing from Ohio, did his graduate acting work right here in Alabama, right here at our Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Here’s a fun video in which he tells a story about understudying for Iago. 
• This week? A repeat of last week, without the Zookeeper-for-a-day, but with orthodontists’ appointments. So there’s that.

 

7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Guys, this is not a page from my  book of Bible stories.

In case you are confused the narrator is Adam, and the “thing I love most” that “God made just for me” is the Bratz doll  Eve.

 

  — 2 —

For some reason mentioning Bratz dolls reminded me of an old post I had on an old blog about a Bratz Advent calendar, which in turn reminded me of something I saw recently about a Trader Joe’s Wine Advent Calendar that’s apparently only available in the UK. I am usually very, very, very scrupulous and unbearably purist about Advent, but this one gave me pause. It’s pretty.

Now back to your regularly scheduled links.

(I have been blogging this week – mostly on homeschooling, but it’s something, folks. Just scroll back and you’ll see the posts.)

— 3 —

Here’s a great interview with Daniel Mitsui, the marvelous religious artist:

As a religious artist, Mitsui sees his efforts firmly planted within the tradition. 

“I want to make things that have this liturgical, traditional, patristic order,” he says. “I want to be able to say that this work of art would be approved of by the council fathers who laid down these principles in the Council of Nicea.”  

Taking the Second Council of Nicea as his north star, Mitsui refers to himself as “a Spirit of Nicea II Catholic.”  

“That is a joke,” he says. “Its point being that I keep that ecumenical council at the forefront of my mind, living as I do in a time similar to the iconoclastic crises. I do not seek to interpret its doctrine regarding art and tradition beyond what its words actually say; indeed, what they actually say is bold enough.” 

I recently received a copy of Daniel’s most recent coloring book for adults: Christian Labyrinths. You can read the introduction and see samples here – and I’d encourage you to do so. It’s really beautiful, as is all of Daniel’s work.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Daniel Mitsui’s website.

 

— 4

Speaking of art, and speaking of the Reformation, which we will be doing a lot of (unfortunately) over the next few weeks, Elizabeth Lev has an excellent article here about women, art and the Catholic Reformation:

In the Counter Reformation, women were not only exalted after their death as saints, but there was also room for women to lead in society. Beyond the stateswomen such as Mary Tudor of England and Mary of Scots, Catherine de’ Medici and Jeanne d’Albret, St. Angela Merici founded the Ursulines to offer solid Christian education for girls and young women, Victoria Colonna composed renowned poetry and debated theology, and art produced its first celebrated female painters.

On one hand, technological advances had opened the door for women painters. Oil painting permitted women to work alone (not with a team of male fresco artists) in an inexpensive and slow-drying medium. The Catholic Church, however, was looking for new ways to evangelize through art and was unafraid to give women a chance. Sofonisba Anguissola, Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi all had very successful careers working for both private and ecclesiastical patrons, but it was Lavinia Fontana who would burst the canvas ceiling when she was commissioned to produce the first Italian altarpiece to be painted by a woman.

(Here’s a link to my earlier CWR article on women and the Reformation.)

— 5 —

Speaking of history…and hurricanes, which we’ve been doing a lot of lately, here’s an interesting article about a hurricane that struck North America almost five hundred years ago this week, with a profound impact.

During the evening of Tuesday, September 19, 1559, some 458 years ago, strong winds from the north heralded the arrival of a great hurricane in Pensacola Bay.  The storm was not the first to assail the bay, nor would it be the last, but the 1559 hurricane did manage to change the course of human history by destroying a fleet of Spanish colonial ships riding at anchor off the newly-founded settlement called Santa María de Ochuse.

More links about the Spanish in the Southeast:

A website devoted to the missions of La Florida – with a comprehensive list. 

A recent article about a mission on a Georgia barrier island:

The Santa Catalina de Guale mission on St. Catherine’s Island was one of the oldest Catholic church sites in North America, founded more than 150 years before St. Junipero Serra arrived in California and just a few years after the founding of the mission at St. Augustine, Florida. In spite of this distinction, its history is not well known because, for centuries, the mission site on Catherine’s Island was considered “lost.”

The story is a tragic one – in 1597 all five friars living at the mission were brutally murdered by the Guale Indians. After the friars learned the Guale language, preached the Gospel, and lived peacefully with the native population, a rebellion was sparked when Friar Pedro de Corpa refused to allow a baptized Guale man to take a second wife.

Friar Pedro was slain on September 14, 1597, and his head was displayed on a pike at the mission landing. The four other Franciscans were killed in similar fashion. They have been proposed for sainthood, and cause for their canonization is underway.

By the mid-18th century, all traces of the mission’s existence had disappeared. Some 300 years later, a team of archaeologists began to excavate the area. In addition to Indian pots and arrowheads, researchers found rosary beads and Christian medals. Excavations revealed a rectangular plaza surrounded by the mission church and friary. By 2000, when excavations ceased, archaeologists had found over 2 million artifacts at the site.

— 6 —

An excellent article about the excellent Cristo Rey school network from City Journal – of which we have one in Birmingham.

When assigning internships, the school takes students’ long-term career goals into account, especially in their junior and senior years. Unlike traditional career and technical education programs, Cristo Rey’s is more about opening students’ eyes to the world of work than providing training in specific fields: the goal is not to produce, say, a technician or skilled tradesperson but to inspire poor kids to expand their horizons.

The schools’ board members make the work-study partnerships possible. Robert Catell is chairman of the board of Cristo Rey Brooklyn. He is a Brooklyn native raised by a single mother and attended public schools, including the City College of New York. Catell took a job at Brooklyn Union Gas in the meter-repair shop and rose to become CEO of National Grid. He sees parallels between his story and those of today’s students, and he cherishes the annual graduation ceremony. “You want to cry,” he says. “You see the families and their joy over their children going to the best schools in the country. . . . It’s a labor of love for me.”

— 7 —

Please take a look at Emily Stimpson Chapman’s searing, heartbreaking and prayer-inspiring blog post on infertility:

And, for a little while, I live in that hope. I start to relax. For a week or two, the sight of pregnancy announcements in my newsfeed and random babies and pregnant women on the street don’t make me burst into tears. Because maybe this month, God heard those prayers.

Then, on Day 28, the bleeding starts again. And hope dies. On that day, barren isn’t just the state of my womb. It’s the state of my soul.

The days that follow are my worst days. Those are the days all my years of waiting and longing for a baby really never prepared me for. They didn’t prepare me for the cruel 28-day cycle of trying, hoping, and failing. Simply desiring a baby and not being able to have one didn’t prepare me for monthly mourning. And it definitely didn’t prepare me for throwing all our efforts, all our prayers, and all our hopes, into the garbage can every few hours.

The initial cold shock of grief, of course, doesn’t last much longer than the false hope. At some point, it too passes and becomes something else. I’m not sure what it becomes for others, but for this redhead, it increasingly turns into a hot mess of flaming rage.

 

 

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

St. Matthew

A few St. Matthew links for you.

From B16,back in 2006:

On the basis of these simple observations that result from the Gospel, we can advance a pair of thoughts.

The first is that Jesus welcomes into the group of his close friends a man who, according to the concepts in vogue in Israel at that time, was regarded as a public sinner.

Matthew, in fact, not only handled money deemed impure because of its provenance from people foreign to thePeople of God, but he also collaborated with an alien and despicably greedy authority whose tributes moreover, could be arbitrarily determined.

This is why the Gospels several times link “tax collectors and sinners” (Mt 9: 10; Lk 15: 1), as well as “tax collectors and prostitutes” (Mt 21: 31).

Furthermore, they see publicans as an example of miserliness (cf. Mt 5: 46: they only like those who like them), and mention one of them, Zacchaeus, as “a chief tax collector, and rich” (Lk 19: 2), whereas popular opinion associated them with “extortioners, the unjust, adulterers” (Lk 18: 11).

A first fact strikes one based on these references: Jesus does not exclude anyone from his friendship. Indeed, precisely while he is at table in the home of Matthew-Levi, in response to those who expressed shock at the fact that he associated with people who had so little to recommend them, he made the important statement: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mk 2: 17).

The good news of the Gospel consists precisely in this: offering God’s grace to the sinner!

Elsewhere, with the famous words of the Pharisee and the publican who went up to the Temple to pray, Jesus actually indicates an anonymous tax collector as an appreciated example of humble trust in divine mercy: while the Pharisee is boasting of his own moral perfection, the “tax collector… would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!’”.

And Jesus comments: “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Lk 18: 13-14).

Thus, in the figure of Matthew, the Gospels present to us a true and proper paradox: those who seem to be the farthest from holiness can even become a model of the acceptance of God’s mercy and offer a glimpse of its marvellous effects in their own lives.

This, of course, is from one of his GA talks on the apostles and which were collected in book form by various publishers, including OSV. Back in the day, I wrote a study guide for these collected talks to be used either by individuals or groups in parish discussion settings. Here’s the section on Matthew. Feel free to use!

 

 

Speaking of St. Matthew and speaking of parish adult religious education, maybe consider this Loyola Press Six Weeks with the Bible book on the Passion accounts in Matthew:

From today’s Office of Readings:

There is no reason for surprise that the tax collector abandoned earthly wealth as soon as the Lord commanded him. Nor should one be amazed that neglecting his wealth, he joined a band of men whose leader had, on Matthew’s assessment, no riches at all. Our Lord summoned Matthew by speaking to him in words. By an invisible, interior impulse flooding his mind with the light of grace, he instructed him to walk in his footsteps. In this way Matthew could understand that Christ, who was summoning him away from earthly possessions, had incorruptible treasures of heaven in his gift.

What strikes us about the story of Matthew is the immediacy of his response. Invited by Jesus, he simply leaves his sinful life behind. No ambiguity, no parsing of matters of subjectivity and objectivity. This perhaps is not something we are all capable of at every moment, but it is certainly a response we recognize as the ideal one, articulated by Jesus himself (Mark 10:29) and lived out by people like Matthew.

The spiritual life is a never-ending, fascinating and mysterious dynamic, it seems to me, between finding God in all things and if anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother…cannot be my disciple. 

 

“Home”schooling

There is so much going on in the world. The big world, the internet world, the Catholic internet world…How many times a day do I think, “I could engage in this Facebook conversation or think of a blog post on this matter or….I could watch Harpo Marx playing Rachmaninoff with my son?”

(How does one construct that last phrase to make sure I don’t give the impression that my son is a time-traveler? I’m stumped.)

Anyway, the answer is simple.

Just walk away from the “convo” and lean into the conversation with the real person in front of you.

Plus, it takes ten minutes to pull this blog post together, and once I get going on the other crap, it’s…all night. 

So…the past couple of days:

• Tuesday morning was science center class. This week was all about squid dissection. As I’d mentioned before, I had hoped to dissect a squid a couple of years ago when we were all in with such things, but I couldn’t find any fresh squid around here at the time. Since then, a yuge Asian grocery store has opened and the last time we were there I noticed fresh-ish squid. So since he’s now an expert, we will try it again at home. He enjoyed it and wants to do a repeat. He was pleased because even though the instructor didn’t give the most thorough instructions, he knew generally what to do from our previous dissections. I was pleased, too.
• Got home after that, did a bit of math – he did some Acumulus online at the Art of Problem Solving site.
• As I’d mentioned a couple of days ago, he finished Animal Farm and I’m waiting until next week to give him another novel. (For his “leisure” reading, he’s just finished all the Maze Runner books and is rereading Magnus Chase books in anticipation of a new release in a couple of weeks.) So I gave him “The Mouse” by Saki – which I thought we might have all three read together a few years ago, but wasn’t sure about. As he began, he thought it seemed a little familiar, but wasn’t sure until the end – at which point he was both surprised and not-surprised, because it’s a twist ending, as per usual with Saki, but once it hit, he realized that yes, he had read it before.
• His next big recital piece is Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor. You know that one. It goes like this. He basically knows it now and has about a month to nail it. We spent some time talking about it (Rachmaninoff was only 19 when he wrote it..but then, when you listen to it with that understanding you think…yeah…a 19 year old wrote that. Because DRAMA.) and then we watched this scene from A Day at the Races in which Harpo “plays” the piece and in the process explodes the piano, and then this video in which the piano plays both the Rachmaninoff and a rag it inspired – the “Russian Rag” – and tells the (supposed) story of the latter’s composition. I’d printed out The Russian Rag and we played around with it on the piano.
• Time for Homeschool Boxing Class! I’m telling you that last year when he was trying to decide whether or not to go back to brick-and-mortar school, the fact that if he did so, he wouldn’t be able to go to Juarez Boxing for this class anymore was an important vote against school So he’s super glad to be back for that.
• Squid-Rachmaninoff-Boxing. A good and rather typical homeschool day.
• Today was disrupted because I had a repair guy coming to replace a ceiling fan, patch a big hole in a wall made a while back by other repairmen (who made the hole to fix something, but only afterwards telling me that no, they couldn’t fix the hole they’d made) and rehanging a door. We did our best.
• Saints/Mass readings/prayer.
• He continued chapter 3 in the AOPS Art of Problem Solving, which today was all about divisibility rules. The great thing about this curriculum is that it doesn’t just toss the “rules” at you – if the units digit is even, it’s divisible by 2…if the last two digits are divisible by 4, the whole number is divisible by 4…it actually explains why all of this is so. So we read and watched Richard Videos on the matter, and figured it all out, thanks.
• He then fooled with the camera for a long time, in preparation for Thursday’s photography class.
• Then practiced piano.
• Then while I prepared his lunch he picked out one of his non-fiction library books and read from it. It was about Assyrians.
• And then…the highlight of the week and maybe the month and maybe even the year –  the “Zookeeper for a Day” session at the Birmingham Zoo, which is for three hours, which is maybe a day on Mercury, but that’s okay. As I wrote some time back, they’ve just added “reptiles” to the choices for this (not free) activity, and Reptiles Are Our Thing, so we were all in. He spent the afternoon there feeding, cleaning and learning. Very much worth the money, and hopefully next year, he can do this sort of thing as a volunteer, which is a lot cheaper.
• Thursday: Photography class and piano lesson, which is plenty for the day.

 

And as for me? I’m getting work done. I hate to say it because I’m very superstitious about saying things and counting chickens, but it looks like finishing this book before the deadline will be a breeze. One of the things that has helped a great deal is that I insisted before we began that the publisher-side be very specific about word count for sections and chapters, and considering the format of this book, they were very open to doing so. We hammered it all out in a phone meeting and now I just spend a couple of hours a day happily and (hopefully) creatively filling in the boxes.

 

 

Homeschool Daily Report – Returns?

Remember when I used to do those? Well, maybe I’ll sort of start again. Sometimes.

This week is going to be pretty busy, and Monday and Friday would be the only two days in which there would be much uninterrupted actually-at-home time. Because:

• Tuesday is a two-hour science center class (squid dissection! Mom gets two hours to work on her next book at the trendy food court across the street!) and boxing class in the afternoon.
• Wednesday morning, a repair guy is coming to start the process of fixing the various broken things and places that have started piling up around here. Then Wednesday afternoon is Zookeeper-for –  (half) – a – day.
• Thursday morning is the two-hour photography class (2 more hours for mom to work!) and then piano.

So we tried to pack it in today – and we did – and still had time for an outing.

• Prayer: Saint of the day (John Cupertino), Mass readings, prayer, practice Pater Noster.  First reading was from 1 Timothy, so I spent a couple of minutes reviewing the Pauline epistles with him and the difference between the Pastoral Epistles and the others.
• Religion-related. Someone he knows a bit from the Catholic group Fraternus entered the Benedictine monastery up the road as a postulant this past weekend. We read about that on the monastery’s Facebook page and then watched the excellent video that was produced last year about St. Bernard’s with the added bonus that the (familial) brother of one of his friends who is a (religious) brother in formation there is in the video here and there.
• That was followed by a discussion of the stages in the monastic vocation, using the page from St. Bernard’s website. 
• Animal Farm. He has his leisure reading always going on, but he also will have “school” reading, assigned by me. Over the past couple of weeks it’s been this. I selected it because it’s short, interesting, accessible and a good way into discussions of history (which he wanted to emphasize this year)  and literature (allegory). He finished it over the weekend, so we went over the Sparknotes analyses of those chapters and reviewed some of the charts I’d printed out about the allegorical associations. Talked a bit about post World War-II Soviet expansion and watched a short video about the Berlin Wall.
• One of his own goals that he has set for himself this month is memorizing all the US presidents in order as a beginning framework for studying for the History Bee (exam coming in January – so this is just beginning). He recited what he knew and we had some random discussions about some of the presidents.
• Spanish: this was his desire – to start more serious work on Spanish. I’d purchased a curriculum (which I will be writing about soon – it has given me Food For Thought in a couple of areas). We’d been dipping in and out of the introductory chapter over the past couple of weeks and got serious today with the first actual chapter  – going over the vocabulary, watching the videos and doing the activities.
• Math: He’s on Chapter 3 of the Art of Problem Solving PreAlgebra book. Today he watched the video associated with the first section and then went over the material and did the set of problems – the topic is number theory and, more specifically, multiples.
• I showed him a form I’d printed out for him to log all the books he reads this year. I just think it will be good for him to have, and he’ll enjoy looking at it at the end of the year. And yes, we’ve been very good about my plan of recording learning instead of planning it. It works very well for us. We note every topic discussed/dealt with over the course of the week in a planner, and then at the end of very week, he fills out a log summarizing the week’s learning and activities.
• He got up around 9:30 and when we finished all this it was about 11:45. Yah. So there was time for a requested jaunt for him to finish his photography homework – made all the better now because his brother drives himself to school so we don’t have that upper boundary of a necessary return time. We do have the limitation of a car I’m still afraid to drive too far away, but maybe sometime soon I’ll actually take in the used car I bought for $2k to get checked out and get an assessment of whether it’s safe to drive. (It feels fine – I’m just a little skittish about taking it too far….)
• So the jaunt was to a “nature park” that’s about ten minutes from my house, but I had no idea existed until about two weeks ago when I was driving on the road and saw the sign for it. It’s on the side of a substantial hill in between a residential area and a commercial area of Irondale (where EWTN is located), and it doesn’t have amazing rock or water features, but it was a decent walk, with good trails, bright orange lichen and many spiders. Good subjects. (Photos below were taken by me with the phone – he had control of the camera, and I don’t know what he ended up taking photos of and keeping.)

 

And back home, we discovered that the moon had apparently fallen to earth:

Weekend Report

FYI – I got Mary and the Christian Life for sale up on Kindle this weekend. .99!

 

Next up: How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist. 

Festival time has arrived – not only here, I’m sure, but all over. Just too much to do, every single weekend.

This past weekend, we spent some time at the St. George Melkite Greek-Catholic Church Middle Eastern Food Festival – got it?

As I’ve noted before, some are surprised that there is such a deeply rooted Middle-Eastern presence in Birmingham. The Jewish community is well-established, and there are both Melkite and Maronite Rite churches. Well, it all goes back to the beginning of the city’s history, in the mid/late 19th century as well as its 20th century growth. Mining operations, the steel industry and the railroads all brought immigrants – and they stayed.

There’s a good bit of cross-pollination and integration between Latin and Eastern Catholics here. It’s small Catholic community, historically, and so it’s natural that over the decades, Greek Catholics, Maronites, and then the Latin Rite Italians (the major early Catholic immigrant group) would eventually intermarry or at least intermingle.

This isn’t uncommon in the south. I one gave a talk to a Catholic woman’s group in Mississippi, and I asked the women how many of them had Lebanese roots, and at least half raised their hands. Again – it was a part of the state through which the railroads had come, and as immigrants came to build the railroads, they stayed.

In both of the Catholic elementary schools my children have attended, regularly scheduled Maronite liturgies are part of the school year and just last week – always planned to coincide with St. George’s festival – my son who is a student in the Catholic high school went, with the rest of the whole junior class – on the annual field trip, sponsored by the theology department – in which the kids go to St. George first and go to a Divine Liturgy celebration – it was the Feast of the Holy Cross – then eat lunch at the festival, and then go to St. Elias, the Maronite church – for a tour and a talk.

 

Church tours were a part of St. George’s festival too, of course. They were very well done – continually going on with small groups gathered in front of icons or the ritual vessels, hearing explanations and asking questions. I’ll never stop saying it – Catholic church buildings are more than structures. They stand in witness to the Faith, and we should see them as such. Standing in the midst of the community, grounded on earth, pointing to heaven, when we bring people in and tell them about the altar, the images, the vessels and vestments – we evangelize.  Does your parish have a fall festival? Are church tours part of the event?

The church was built in 1957, and shows it. It’s striking because it has without doubt the most self-consciously modernistic design of any Catholic church in Birmingham. The docent leading our tour said, though, that when it was built, the Melkites were still under the authority of the Latin Rite Bishop, who would not give them permission to build a dome – I have no idea why that would be.

 

(Remember, if you’d like to see more of this – as it happens! – follow me on Instagram.)

7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Get your travel bug on: The family of Bearing Blog is in Europe at the moment, and the mom is doing a fabulous job blogging it, and just as fabulous a job of feeding her large family while on vacation. I always have such big plans and high hopes for cooking interesting things with new, fascinating ingredients when I’m in a new place, but somehow…takeout always beckons. (Although in my own defense…the takeout can be pretty good….) 

 — 2 —

Most entertaining part of my Thursday was, as I was waiting for piano to be over, standing in a hallway of a college classroom building and watching as successive groups of students approach a door and learn that their scheduled exam had been moved to next week.

Much leaping, skipping, and, since this is a Baptist school, praising of Jesus!

 

— 3 —

I remember a time when the notion of applying to Duke Divinity School would have been akin to applying to Harvard.

Here’s the subject header of an advertising email I received yesterday:

Duke Divinity School: Apply Using Discount Code DukeCT

???

 

 

— 4

Worth a read: “The Borromeo Option”

Despite his importance, Charles Borromeo is little known and appreciated within the English-speaking world, primarily because few of his works have been translated. This lacuna has now been filled with the publication of Charles Borromeo: Selected Orations, Homilies and Writings. J.R. Cihak and A. Santogrossi have furnished us with a superb edition and translation of some of Charles’s most significant texts.

Cihak’s introduction provides a short, but splendid, biography of Charles, and a guide to the historical, ecclesial, and pastoral setting for his writings. There follow four sections, which highlight various aspects of Charles’s work.

The first presents orations that Charles gave at his provincial councils. Here he articulates the need for reform and the nature of the reform. Charles notes that the true bishop “is frequently at prayer and in contemplation of heavenly things.” He is “regularly present in the episcopal residence, and likewise totally dedicated and given over to his episcopal duties.” He is “a true father and pastor of the poor, widows and orphans, a patron of the holy places and assiduous in promoting holy observances.”

There is, however, “another bishop.” He “is remiss or negligent in all of these things, or what is worse, does the opposite.” For Charles, his fellow bishops and priests are to be men of the Gospel who love the Church and the people they serve. Above all, they are to be holy shepherds after the manner their supreme Shepherd – Jesus Himself.

Thus, Charles displays both his love for his fellow bishops and priests as well as the need to challenge them if the Church and people of God are to grow in holiness.

 

— 5 —

From the UK Catholic Herald, “Stop Teaching Our Children Lazy Anti-Catholic Myths:”

Saying that medieval peasants were “extremely superstitious” is one thing; it’s easy to sneer at abstractions. But if you read medieval records of sick people visiting holy shrines, those involved emerge not as stereotypes but as real human beings: men and women from all classes of society, seeking aid in the extremes of pain and suffering, with stories of self-sacrifice and deep personal faith. From a modern viewpoint, some of their beliefs might seem alien, but their fears and hopes are not. These people and their beliefs deserve respect, and at least an attempt at understanding. All this was a sanctification of the everyday, a vision of a world charged with power and meaning – and for medieval scholars, none of it was incompatible with science or learning.

No one would pretend that the medieval period was perfect or that the medieval Church did not have some serious flaws. What’s needed today is a more balanced view, appreciating that the Middle Ages was as complex as any other period in history, and avoiding judgmental, emotive language like “stagnation” and “superstition”. There’s no excuse for it any more.

It has never been easier to access information about the medieval past, especially when a few minutes on Google will lead you to accessible websites written by experts on medieval science and religion, not only debunking myths but also providing more accurate information.

It’s past time for educators and journalists to move beyond the lazy stereotypes about the Middle Ages. The truth is far more interesting.

 

— 6 —

Homeschooling? Going well, with a couple of interruptions this week. Schools were cancelled here on Monday, and my older son had a delayed opening on Tuesday. The public schools were also closed on Tuesday (it had been a proactive decision handed down Sunday night when no one knew if Irma would impact us – it didn’t much), so the science center homeschool class was cancelled, and then the homeschooler had two teeth extracted on Wednesday….so…scattered.

But we did discover this set of fun videos – they are pitched a little younger, but the fact that they’re British evens that out so that they’re quite entertaining to watch for any age:

The Magic of Making:

 

 

— 7 —

Book talk!

As I noted earlier in the week, my old booklet on St. Nicholas has been brought back into print. Get ready for Christmas – especially if you’re a parish or school coordinator of such things!

Celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows with a (still) free download of my book, Mary and the Christian Life.

Get a cheap e-book on Mary Magdalene here – Mary Magdalene: Truth, Legends and Lies.

As I mentioned last week, The Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories is available.It looks like it’s finally shipping from Amazon in a timely manner…

 But you can also certainly order it from Loyola, request it from your local bookstore, or, if you like, from me – I have limited quantities available. Go here for that.

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!