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Working….well, I was going to say “hard,” but that would be a lie. I am working though. It looks like my Fall Project will definitely be a go – no contract yet, but as soon as I see that and get some feedback on the samples I will send next week, my days will be busy until 11/1 (my proposed turn-in date), so I’m feeling okay about taking it a little easy right now.
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I took a brief afternoon trip to our Birmingham Museum of Art earlier this week. It’s free, a few minutes from my house, so why not, right?
I was a little melancholy, though, because the BMA was such an important part of our homeschooling – it being free and all, did I mention? Something about going there, especially with my youngest, would prompt a flood of conversation, musing and wondering as we looked at new pieces and pieces we’d looked at many times before.
Well, buck up, I told myself. It’s not as if the place closes at 3 pm on Friday and you can never come here with the kids again. The moment reminded me once again that I can take the Homeschool Lifestyle (which is what it is) with us even now – I just have to be more intentional about it, that’s all.
Anyway, it was a pleasant hour. I took a pad of paper, intending to just find a place to sit and sketch out some ideas. Which I did. But only after turning a corner and being a little startled by this exhibit:
The US Embassy to the Holy See has put up a great-looking website on “Mother Teresa in the United States.”
How nice of them!
Now, when you think of Mother Teresa in the United States, what do you think of? What pops into my mind, right off, is her 1994 speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, the Clintons and Gores in attendance, in which she said,
But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.
And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.
By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems.
And, by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion.
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that for most people, this is the most well-remembered “Mother Teresa in America” moment.
Is it mentioned on this website produced by the US Embassy to the Vatican? Well, the speech at the prayer breakfast is on the timeline, but unlike the other events, the timeline does not offer hyperlinks to any contemporary news accounts of it, much less to the actual text of the speech or video , all of which are available.
Such a puzzle.
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As many of you know, Bishop Robert Barron has a new video series – Pivotal Players – coming out soon. I wrote a prayer book companion to the series – I assume it is coming out soon, but I don’t know. Here’s a bit of information on it.
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Really good article on the decline in translated children’s books. Those European comics have absorbed my boys’ attention for more time than I can recount. TinTin, Asterix & Lucky Luke are favorites.
Last year I published a reference book, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. When I set out, I knew I wanted to talk about a whole world of children’s books. But it turns out that most of the whole world is hard to find nowadays. I included entries on those foreign books that enriched the old canon: The Little Prince,Astrid Lindgren, the Brothers Grimm, and all the rest. They made us readers, these books—they made a lot of us writers, too. But they came to English 40, 60, 100 years ago—where’s all the stuff that’s happened since?
I recently went to a major London bookshop, a good one, and did some counting. I found 2,047 children’s books, of which 2,018 were by English-language writers and 29 were translations. Of those 29, the number of living writers represented was … 6.
Is this because nobody else in the world is writing anything for children worth reading? Well, even if you argue that the Anglophone world is atypical for the number and quality and—by some metrics—the variety of its children’s books, still it seems improbable. Six point seven billion people in the world whose first language isn’t English, and none of them are writing good children’s books? Nobody but us—however you choose to define that problematic “us”—has a story worth telling?
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Want to listen to podcasts about something other than people rambling on about their personal lives? Here’s a list of good history podcasts. I’d add – of course – In Our Time, which is by far the best, which I can say even though I’ve not listened to many of the others.
It’s always great to see others enjoying books you’ve recommended. That happened twice this week! Eve Tushnet had a great post on Muriel Sparks The Girls of Slender Means, and Jeff Miller tweeted on his enjoyment of the very funny and amazingly still timely The Sun-Cure.
Recently read The Sun Cure, a 1929 novel by Alfred Noyes. So good, fun, and wise. See @amywelborn2 review here.https://t.co/ZogimgWXLy
— Jeff Miller (@CurtJester) August 23, 2016
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