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It’s the memorial of St. Robert Bellarmine – go here for a little bit about him.
It’s also St. Hildegard of Bingen. Go here for more – and from the Loyola Kids Book of Saints.
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From Atlas Obscura, a tiny chapel in Pennsylvania:
LOCATED OFF OF A BUSY street, tiny Decker’s Chapel was built through divine intervention. Michael Decker, a German immigrant to a town heavily settled by German immigrants in the 19th century and originally called Marienstadt, injured his back when he fell from an apple tree in his orchard. The historical record says that Decker, a deeply religious man, promised God that, should he be healed, he would build a chapel. Decker did recover from his injuries, and he kept his promise.
Decker built the tiny church in 1856. The one-room chapel measures 12 feet by 18 feet and features a small steeple and belfry. Decker’s son, Michael Joseph Decker, entered the priesthood and eventually became Monsignor Decker. According to the Elk County Historical Society, the younger Decker practiced at his father’s chapel on his visits home
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“Lessons from a Failed Council and a Failed Reform” at the NLM is a succinct and useful presentation of a historical moment (Lateran V in case you’re curious) that might provide you with a helpful framework to understand the present moment and get past narratives and strawmen. I might write more about this later. It’s an invaluable piece.
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It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has “billions of books and no central filing system.” Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web.
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And…more from the Atlantic – along the same vein. A decent exploration of why, to some, e-readers are less satisfying an experience of reading than what is provided by an physical book. It’s a distinction I have explored a bit myself, concluding that for me, reading an e-book is a far less immersive experience, and consequently, less memorable – literally. (I alluded to this yesterday) This writer touches on one of the reasons why:
Ebooks of the Kindle or iPad sort don’t have facing pages either, eradicating the spatial immersion of print books. Random access, the ur-feature of the codex, isn’t possible, and search, bookmarking, and digital-annotation features can somehow make people with a predilection for skimming back and forth feel less oriented than they might in print. For those readers, ideas are attached to the physical memory of the book’s width and depth—a specific notion residing at the top of a recto halfway in, for example, like a friend lives around the block and halfway down.
His analysis is hostile, but also fair. He sorts out the various types of books that work better for the e-reader from those that are generally better suited for physical books – and his conclusions align with mine. I obviously read e-books when I must – if a print version isn’t available to me, either because the library doesn’t carry it, I don’t want to buy it or it’s just out of print and I can nab it on archive.org or Gutenburg. And there are certain genres I don’t mind reading on the e-reader at all – he cites genre books in the piece, and I’d agree with that – mysteries and pop fiction – all of those are more like watching a television show that doesn’t require much brain power. But more serious fiction? Non-fiction? Yikes. I can’t really function reading those on e-readers. I want to leaf back and forth, I want to feel a deeper sense of connection to what I’m reading – all of which happens, for me at least, with a physical book.
In short: my retention of what I read in an e-book is generally terrible.
(Which is why I’ve been a skeptic, since the beginning of the rush to e-textbooks. Awful idea.)
Oh, let’s end with something fun. I’ve been looking forward to this since last year. I am not a fan of the original movie version – it’s dated, too long, crucial miscasting and dubbed singing voices. But this? Gave me chills, I gotta say. I’m in.
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Thanks for No. 5, especially. I have noticed that with my blog, clicking on links from old posts, and finding them dead. But for the block quoting, there is no evidence they ever existed at all.