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Well, welcome 2018!
Holiday travels completed without too much hassle – NYC for the three of us (first post here, and then just follow along), then Florida for the boys and Charleston for me (Charleston Before the Snow, that is).
School for the high schooler began on Thursday, and so the homeschooling 7th grader and I began very slowly on the same day – very slowly mostly because he came down with a fluish/cold type thing at the end of vacation, and is still in recovery. So after sleeping until 11 or so, we said our prayers, learned about St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, then went over the music we’ll be hearing at the Alabama Symphony Orchestra concert on Friday morning – watched this video on the counterpoint in the last movement of the Jupiter symphony, for example. Then we talked about the qualifying test for the National History Bee, which he’ll be taking at some point over the next week. We did a bunch of practice quizzes and he settled on a date when he wants to take the test.
Then, for the first time in over a week, he practiced piano…and we called it a day.
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Here’s a review of the Loyola Kids’ Book of Bible Stories. Thanks to the reviewer who nicely expresses what I was trying to do with the book!
The Book of Bible Stories by Amy Welborn is one of the most unusual and helpful presentation I’ve seen among the many editions for children. Published by Loyola Press, who kindly sent me a copy to review, this collection
opens with stories relevant to Advent – the beginning of the liturgical church year – and ends with stories of Christ’s resurrection, Saul’s conversion, and “The Life of the Early Christians” while including Old Testament stories that foreshadow Easter in the redemptive tales of Noah, Moses and the Exodus, and “Ezekiel and the Dry Bones.”
Not only does this unique presentation of Bible stories give readers a clearer living portrait of God’s people – from Genesis through now, the author skillfully weaves in “various aspects of Catholic life that are informed by (the) Scripture passage: prayers, devotions, sacraments, teachings, and the lives of the saints.”
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Ross, who is a doctor for Novant Health during the rest of the week, serves as medical director at the new Catholic Charities clinic, which opened this month and operates only on Wednesday nights. He said he hopes to recruit more volunteer providers so that the clinic can operate more than four hours a week, and to strike more agreements with neighboring medical providers so that patients who need more help than what the free clinic can provide can access care.
More please. Of both – closed abortuaries and free medical care provided by the Church.
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Richard Rodriguez on St. Junipero Serra, in First Things:
Serra’s route trespassed upon the prelapsarian myth of the Indian as pacific, living in harmony with nature. Spanish priests taught the Indians to plant the seeds of Spain (grapes, dates, figs, architecture, music, shade). By teaching the Indian to cultivate a garden, Serra removed the Indians from paradise, from the provender of nature. Fred Collins, administrator of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, was quoted in the San Luis Obispo Tribune on the occasion of Fr. Serra’s canonization in 2015: “Serra was sent here as part of a group of emissaries who treated indigenous people here as if they were animals, people who enjoyed the beauty of simplicity and were caring of mother Earth.”
Serra became the postlapsarian prophet of a coming age. The overall instruction was to settle. Serra understood the Indians would be decimated if they were unprepared for the settlers’ ways. He was not protecting the indigenous people from Spanish civilization so much as preparing the Indians to live in communion with the Spaniards. To that extent, the Catholic purpose in California was impure from the beginning—it envisioned cultural and racial mixture, a mestizaje that would bewilder the puritan imagination.
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Would you like to read a lot about Muriel Spark? Here you go – an issue of The Bottle Imp (a Scottish literary journal, it seems?) – dedicated to her.
From “Ghost Writing: The Work of Muriel Spark:”
The over-reading of sexuality, both in Spark’s oeuvre and in Spark herself (a predominant critical failing in the twenty-first century, I would argue), runs the danger of blinding critics and readers to the fact that in Spark sex is small potatoes. If we humans are moved by sexual longing at all this is only part of a deeper and spiritual yearning, in Spark’s signature outlook. In one sense quite a Freudian writer, where she is precisely attuned to the stories we tell about ourselves and others, Spark in another way is deeply resistant to the ultimately materialist nature of Freudian thought. Whether framed in the context of her Catholicism or not (and it might also be seen amid a stubborn post-Romantic outlook in the author or even as part of her deconstructionist, existentialist mentality), Spark’s critique of materialism has it that our crass, selfish, greed in pursuit of mere bodily comforts and pleasures has denuded modern western society of higher moral and aesthetic sensibilities. We should not treat the lives of others as inferior or to be appropriated by our own selfish needs, either individually or as a society (where, for instance, the advocacy of contraception for the working classes in the 1930s Edinburgh grocer’s shop comes perilously close to a Eugenics programme). The ‘only problem’ as Spark knows with her near obsession with The Book of Job is that of human suffering. And that problem is made, in one sense obviously enough, by other human beings. Most essentially, the mortal sin of humanity is to interfere (or attempt to interfere) with the innocent free will of our fellow human beings (and this might be seen as nefarious at least, even without Spark’s own theological frame of reference that impeding human free will is wicked because this free will is God-given and is a reflection of His own centre of being).
I last wrote about Spark here, after read The Girls of Slender Means.
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Today’s the feastday of St. John Neumann:
He’s a saint who was a strong leader….the first page of the entry in The Loyola Kids’ Book of Saints.
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Oh, hey, remember how we spent a good chunk of the fall watching (or rewatching, depending on who you were) Lost? We pushed finishing it, not only because of the coming holidays and travel, but because we learned early in December that Netflix was discontinuing Lost after 1/4/2018. We did, indeed finish it a couple of weeks ago, but that didn’t stop me from spending part of the morning of 1/3 rewatching favorite scenes (mostly scenes that ended and began seasons…no one ever did it better) and even one whole episode (“Tricia Tanaka is Dead” – Let’s go look death in the face and say, ‘whatever, man.'”).
Well, guess what – the very next day, Lost moved to Hulu! Not that it matters to me – I don’t subscribe to Hulu, and have no plans to, and have no need to rewatch Lost again anytime soon aside from scenes I can find on YouTube, but just in case you do the Hulu thing and are fondly remembering Lost …it’s there now.
Celebrate!
Oh, and we got a new television. It was my big Christmas gift to them. They’d been complaining for a while about how small ours was – I always thought it was big. but maybe not? I don’t even remember buying it, so I guess that means that Mike bought it, and he died almost nine years ago, so yeah. Maybe it wasn’t the top-of-the-line tech I’d been arguing it was.
…which I now understand, since we are now three days with this 50-inch smart tv, which is…amazing. I won’t cut the cord completely until after March Madness (although yes, I know he could watch All The Games without DirectTV, but it’s just easier to keep the status quo and figure it out afterwards), but being at my Charleston son’s house and getting a Smart-TV in-service from him and my daughter-in-law helped me understand all the options, and assure me that yes, I will be able to watch the one remaining show I’m interested in – Better Call Saul – when it returns.
And guys, I know I’m supposed to be all No….we don’t own a television. We prefer to read Aquinas and, er, prayerfully discern, er, our smartphone/tablet/laptop/PC use. But mostly read Aquinas…promise. But I’m not. Most television is trash, sure, but since there’s an “off” button and the “change channel” button, that means that – get this – you don’t have to watch the trash. And you can control what your kids watch, especially if you’re a fascist like me who doesn’t allow kids to have screens in their rooms unless the door is open and they’ve earned it in some way.
Film – and even some television – is an important art form and can be a deeply engaging and meaningful way to spend time. It’s a blessing, not a curse, that the other night, we could watch The Thirty-Nine Steps on a big, clear screen, and talk about the Hitchcock trope of ordinary-man-thrust-in-threatening-situations we’d just seen and seen in other Hitchcock films, and that I can figure out that Alfred Hitchcock Presents is available on http://www.archive.org, and can do a search of what folks think are the top ten episodes and plan some cold-weather viewing for the next week or so via the browser on the television…and the picture is just fine. I’m sitting here pretty amazed at that. And I’m not apologizing, either.
Not until September….gah….
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Charlotte was Both 