I just realized that Living Faith publishes a lot, if not all of their daily devotionals on line. Had no idea. I don’t know how long they are available, but here are links to some of mine:
Tomorrow, of course, is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. I want to again, highly recommend Fr. Augustine Thompson, OP’s recent biography of the saint. There is now a more “popular” edition (not that the original, scholarly version was beyond a non-historian’s ability to understand) called Francis of Assisi: The Life. There’s no dearth of Francis (of Assisi) material out there, but since so many of the contemporary works have a personal agenda – and I don’t mean that in a negative way, but just that a lot of the modern stuff is of the “my engagement with Francis” genre – this biography is important and quite welcome.
In fact, reading this biography was one of the inspirations for Adventures in Assisi.
...as you can read here in this interview with Ann and me. Thanks, Lisa Hendey!!!
I’ve been a bit of a slacker on the exercise front this week, but I did get a bit of listening in early on: this series on the global popularity of western Classical music is fascinating. Really well done exploration of the growing interest in China, India, Turkey and other countries.
The injured finger has healed nicely. Many have told me that no, a 5-hour emergency room visit for a minor injury is not unusual. When we went to our pediatrician for the follow-up earlier this week, I asked her about what someone else had told me – that we should have called her and then received an admission to another’s hospital’s specialized children’s clinic nearby. She shook her head. “Nope,” she said, “because for every, single hand injury, no matter what, they call in a hand specialist, and they only have one. It’s crazy. It probably would have been worse.”
Well. That’s a mercy, anyway.
Oh, come on…you know you want more Assisi.
And here’s what homeschooling looked like today:
School performance of The Wind in the Willows at a local university. I just called up and said, “We homeschool.” They said, “What cover school?” I told them. They said, “Performance is at 10 am. See ya ” Easy. The show was, of course, aimed at a slightly younger audience than my almost 10-year old, but live theater is always entertaining, and it beats grammar and logic pages.
Although that was not avoided because he did some in the car. So.
Then an afternoon at Ruffner Mountain. In thinking about the day, I had anticipated the play being only about an hour, and thought we could work in a jaunt to a spot a little further away…but the play was actually about 90 minutes, so by the time we got to the car, we’d run out of time for that. So headed to this spot, which is a favorite of his because it has a quarry. Aside from me listening to him discourse about Star Wars and Lego sets, the primary educational activity was observing how the colors of the soil and rocks on the mountain changed – I had actually never noticed it before, but this time it struck me, and we really paid attention to the shift between browns, greys and almost bright , iron-rich red.
We also got some arts conversation in as he went on a mild rant about something he’d seen in, I think, one of the Star Wars-related cartoons. He said, “Then they cast a spell. That’s not right. It doesn’t fit what Star Wars is.” So, hand to God, we started talking about internal consistency of a created universe, suspension of disbelief and so on..and it made sense to him.
Later, after brother had been picked up from school, it was time for art class. This was super exciting because the technique of the day was clay work – for which he had been yearning ever since he started the classes.
Oh…here’s my favorite tangent of the week. I think this is a pretty good synopsis of how we roll here:
Last week, in the library run, I pulled this book on the Panama Canal off the shelf. Earlier this week, I had him read it. We talked about it. It led to geography discussions and discussions of presidents among other things.
Then I said, “Have you heard of ‘A man, a plan, a canal, Panama’?”
He said, “Oh, yeah, it was in the book.”
I wrote it on (of course) the white board along with various words like “sis” and “wow” and phrases like “Madam I’m Adam” and asked him to figure out what they all had in common. It took a while, but the light dawned, and so he learned about Palindromes.
Then I showed him this video, which has nothing to do with palindromes. I explained who Bob Dylan is. Etc.
(Oooookaaaaay..you’re saying)
Then I showed him this video – made by an artist he’s gone mad for this late summer and fall.
So….such is the life of the homeschooled kid with the INFP mom….pretty crazy. Yeah.
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Charlotte was Both 