I’ve been highlighting aspects of my books that are Mary-related.
It’s May – the month of Mary. I’m sharing elements from my books related to the Blessed Mother. First was an entire book – Mary and the Christian Life.
As I said, they are random – just to give you a taste of the style of writing and the focus. The chapters in the book, each focused on a particular traditional Catholic prayer, are a mix of history and spiritual reflection.
It’s May – the month of Mary. I’m sharing elements from my books related to the Blessed Mother. First was an entire book – Mary and the Christian Life.
In this book, we walk the path of medieval science with a real-life guide, a fourteenth-century monk named John of Westwyk – inventor, astrologer, crusader – who was educated in England’s grandest monastery and exiled to a clifftop priory. Following the traces of his life, we learn to see the natural world through Brother John’s eyes: navigating by the stars, multiplying Roman numerals, curing disease and telling the time with an astrolabe.
We travel the length and breadth of England, from Saint Albans to Tynemouth, and venture far beyond the shores of Britain. On our way, we encounter a remarkable cast of characters: the clock-building English abbot with leprosy, the French craftsman-turned-spy and the Persian polymath who founded the world’s most advanced observatory.
An enthralling story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man and an extraordinary time, The Light Ages conjures up a vivid picture of the medieval world as we have never seen it before
Well, a bit overwrought, but if it enlightens folks, have at it!
Speaking of books, as I mentioned before, I’ve been tracking my book sales since the Covid-soused pre-Easter plunge. (Tracking in the only way I can, through the metric Amazon provides authors, which tracks…something. I really have no idea what. I think it’s more than Amazon sales, but I’m not sure).
The cratering reached its worst point the last week of April, when sales this year were about a tenth of what they were last year. Maybe an eighth. No First Communions, no Confirmations, not much Easter visiting and associated gifting from grannies. This year’s sales lagged behind last’s until the second week of May when the tables began to turn.
All summer, slowly but surely, this year’s sales started to surpass last year’s. By mid-summer this year’s cumulative sales of all my titles (as recorded by this metric) were regularly double or triple what they were last year each week.
It’s interesting to me because it’s my way of tracking parish life – obviously what was happening was that parishes were slowly opening back up and beginning to celebrate these sacramental milestones again. And then, as summer waned, folks started looking for religious education materials and supplements. This week’s big sellers wereProve It God, Prove it Prayer(both with sales about ten times the usual – it seems to me that they were required by some classes or schools) and the book of Heroes(sales 7 x what they were the same week last year) and Sign and Symbols (3 x this week last year).
It’s fascinating because at this rate, my sales during this six month royalty period are probably, after a disastrous start, going to even out and end up being commensurate with last year’s.
As I said, it’s mostly interesting to me as a sort-of concrete way to “measure” Catholic parish and catechetical life in these very weird times.
And guess what – you don’t even have to pay a dime for this title!
Speaking of Catholic parishes and the pandemic, if you know of a parish that’s truly worked hard to serve the needs of its people and the community during this time – nominate them to be recognized for this! Here’s an article about the effort, and here’s the site.
As much as I applaud him for bringing our Eucharistic Lord out onto the streets of the city…
As much as I thank him for taking the lead (when so many other prelates remain silent) in insisting that religious worship is “essential activity”…
As fully as I agree with him that the response from city officials—or rather, their failure to make any response—is an insult to Catholics…
Still I wonder: If the archbishop thinks that the city’s restrictions are unreasonable—if he thinks that it would be safe to celebrate Mass for a larger congregation in the city’s cathedral—why doesn’t he take the obvious action? Why doesn’t he go into his own cathedral, invite the public, and celebrate Mass?
Before I go any further let me emphasize that I do not mean to single out Archbishop Cordileone for criticism here. On the contrary, I mean to praise him. The question that I ask of him could apply, far more pointedly, to all the other bishops and priests who have meekly accepted unreasonable restrictions on the administration of the sacraments—to the bishops and priests who have not raised public objections, have not mobilized the faithful, have not organized Eucharistic processions.
But again: Why ask city officials to “free” the Mass? There is only one man who has the rightful authority to restrict and regulate the liturgy of the Catholic Church in San Francisco, and his name is Cordileone. If he wants to celebrate Mass for the public in his cathedral, he can do it.
But wait, you say. He can’t celebrate Mass for the public in his cathedral. It would be against the law.
David Lean was a great filmmaker who grew up in the British studio system preceding the outbreak of World War II and became a director, hitched to Noel Coward, during the conflict. After working directly with Coward for four films, he broke out on his own and became one of the most important British filmmakers. His great epics tend to overshadow his smaller films, some of which are pretty much just as great, and that’s really why I do these exercises of running through entire filmographies.
For about five years now, Karen Langley (Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambles) and Simon Thomas (of Stuck in a Book) have instigated a semi-annual event in which people around the world take a week to read and write about books published during a particular year. The next round, coming up the week of 5-11 October, will look at books from the year 1956.
1956 was a terrific year for what I might call good but not stuffily great books. Perhaps the best example is Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, which won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and which is much loved for the spirit embodied in its opening line: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” This was Macaulay’s last novel; also appearing in 1956 is Anthony Burgess’s first novel Time for a Tiger, the first book in his Malayan Trilogy.
To encourage folks to take advantage of the #1956Club while also discovering something beyond what’s readily available for instant download or overnight delivery, I’ve put together this list of 10 long-forgotten and out of print books from 1956.
Very short takes this week. Look back over the course of the week for more posts on various things. Remember – if you’re thinking a lot about saints this week – as you might be – consider looking at my saints books, listed here.
I still have time to write. The same hours I had set aside when I was working my old side gig are as available now as they were before. I also find the creative juices get flowing during moments of solitude at work. I once experienced a wonderful creative rush while driving a truck through a mountain pass and had to immediately pull over and jot some sketches down. Many people say that the hours in the trades are long, and they sometimes are. But one of the benefits is that when I hang up my hard hat, I hang up the stress of my job with it. My work doesn’t follow me home. Instead, I go to choir practice, I open up a copy of The Well Tempered Clavier, I get out a pencil and some manuscript paper and dash some squiggles that will hopefully one day become something memorable.
Initially, I might have been resistant to heading into the trades because I was worried I would be giving up on music and my composition career would end with a resounding thud of failure. I was wrong. The only way you fail at art is if you stop doing it. There’s no reason a composer can’t be a plumber or an electrician instead of a teacher. All you have to do is keep writing.
The existing rule of unrestricted birthright citizenship has a number of advantages, as noted above. But it also opens the door to some practices (perhaps most notably, the various forms of “birth tourism”) that provocatively violate the consent principle at the heart of democratic government, as well as create perverse incentives for illegal entrants and overstays.
Altering the rule of birthright citizenship can be undertaken by congressional statute, as we have argued. But what kind of change would be reasonable? One of us (Schuck) has proposed a reform that promises to achieve a better combination of advantages and disadvantages. In place of automatic birthright citizenship, we could substitute retroactive-to-birth citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal-immigrant parents who demonstrate a substantial attachment to, and familiarity with, this country by satisfying two conditions: a certain period of residence here after the child’s birth, and a certain level of education of the child in our schools. (In almost every case, of course, the two conditions will overlap, and the schooling will assure at least a minimal level of proficiency in English and knowledge of American history and society.)
Reasonable people can differ about what the qualifying periods of residence and education should be, whether those periods must be continuous, and other conditions. (Australia’s 2007 citizenship law, for example, abolished birthright citizenship while creating an exception for a person “ordinarily resident in Australia throughout the period of 10 years” beginning at birth.) In Schuck’s view, completion of eighth grade should suffice for this limited purpose. Certifying compliance should be administratively simple. And during the interim period, the individual should have the legal status of presumptive citizen, with all of the attributes of citizenship for individuals of their age. The parents’ status would remain the same as under current law unless they can gain legal status through an expanded legalization program or otherwise.
One can easily imagine objections to this reform, especially by those who categorically reject birthright citizenship for this group on grounds discussed above. But two answers to such objections are compelling in our view. First, whether Americans like it or not, these children are now legal citizens at birth. The question, then, is whether an over-inclusive status quo should be retained. Second, the normative objections to their citizenship — that their connection to our country is imposed without our consent and is often adventitious, transient, and insubstantial — would be met by the proposed reform, whose enactment would provide the requisite consent to, and conditions for, their citizenship.
To be sure, the current climate presents the danger that political deliberations over any changes to current birthright-citizenship practices might lead to policies of heightened deportations of otherwise-law-abiding long-term residents, and of reduced legal immigration. We oppose both of these policies. But because controversies over immigration and birthright citizenship have only grown in recent decades and are likely to intensify further, we believe that the quest to find reasonable, humane compromises on these vital topics is more urgent than ever.
And what about that stupid “youth” Synod? Yeah, that. A couple of good (if by “good” you mean…”I agree with them” – but isn’t that always the way it is?) pieces that summarize what happened and what might happen and what It Means.
Did you sense that people who were advocating more tradition and orthodoxy, like the Africans, were shut down, perhaps?
No, I don’t think it was just the more traditionally minded who were shut down: We all were. The fact was that after our initial short speeches, it was almost impossible for bishops to get a hearing again in the general assembly.
Even in the free discussions?
The free discussions were very few, usually in the last hour of a very long day. On at least one occasion, that time was taken up almost completely by speeches from ecumenical representatives. On other days, various announcements intruded. And when free discussion did happen, only cardinals and youth auditors were heard; no bishops at all. You got your little speech at the start, and that was about it, when it came to the general assembly.
In fairness to Francis, he’s been clear and fairly consistent with regard to himself and his habits and his tastes, right from the start. From his shoes (he has a guy back in B’Aires) to his decision to live in the Domus Sanctae Marthae (he likes being around people) to his habit of standing in the lunch line and chatting with people (he likes it that way), he’s been frank: he’s an old dog, unable and uninterested in learning new tricks — and as a leader, his established mode of leadership is a mercurial one that flies from extreme micromanagement to extreme laissez faire and rarely pauses anywhere in between.
His lieutenants and mouthpieces, however, promised an almost Aquarian age of transparency, listening, and participation: in a word, that the governance of the Church would finally be horizontal.
When Pope Francis promulgated the Apostolic Constitution, Episcopalis communio — the special law controlling the Synod of Bishops — one thing was clear when it came to the issue of any synod assembly conducted under the new legislation: the Pope would be in charge. As far as any final document on Francis’s watch is concerned, that meant the Synod Fathers would end up saying whatever this Pope will have decided to say they said:
If the new document makes anything clear, it is that Francis — whose “synodal” approach to governance has been the subject of much discussion — meant what he said when he told the participants in the III Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops that “synodality” means being with Peter, and that “being with Peter” means being under him. How “synodal” is the Church Francis envisions? One short answer might be: as synodal as Peter says it is.
So, there has been transparency. At any rate, folks have what they were promised. Assured they’d be able to take their place, the bishops have now learned what that place is, and been instructed to assume the position. The vast majority of the laity don’t care much what the Church’s hierarchical leadership have to say about young people anyway, certainly not in the present circumstances of massive and daily burgeoning global crisis that has left the credibility of the worldwide episcopate in tatters, from the Pope down to the last auxiliary.
When it comes to “synodality”, not even the professional Catholic scribbling and chattering class could manage more than perfunctory frustration on behalf of the bishops, who were happy to roll over.
On Friday afternoon, with only a few hours left to read the draft, account for the modi — proposed amendments — and finish the document, the synod fathers repaired to a makeshift theatre to watch a talent show the young people organised for them. As one Vatican official quipped to me on Friday afternoon, “They’re not taking this seriously.”
None of this contributes to comity or collegiality; and whatever “synodality” means, it isn’t advanced by such boorish behavior. The cardinal’s aggressive stubbornness is also an insult to bishops who are every bit as much successors of the apostles as Baldisseri, but whom he nonetheless treats as if they were refractory kindergarteners, especially when they insist that they know their situations better than Baldisseri does (as on the abuse crisis). If Pope Francis is serious about making the Synod of Bishops work better, he will thank Lorenzo Baldisseri for his services and bring in a new general secretary—right away.
After the Exhaustion
The Synod process seems designed to wear everyone down, thus making it easier for the Synod’s mandarins to get their way. So it’s not surprising that there’s a sense of deflation at the end of Synod-2018. There are also more than a few worries about how the Church is going to weather the rough seas into which it is being steered. Still, there was some very good work done here this past month. New networks of conversation and collaboration were built. Nothing completely egregious got into the Final Report, thanks to some hard and effective work. New Catholic leaders emerged on the world stage.
And there were, as always, many experiences of fellowship, and the grace that flows from the Holy Spirit through solidarity in a great cause. In that sense I’ve been glad to have been here. And like others, I suspect, I’m grateful that Synod-2018 has given me a clearer understanding that business-as-usual is not an adequate model for the next months and years of Catholic life.
Other than Writing Things (look for me in Living Faith on Monday, by the way) – a music-heavy week around here. The big state competition is Friday – and may even be over as you read this. So there’s been a lot of practicing, especially of the Kabalevsky concerto movement that he is playing with his teacher.
I’ll have more to say after it’s over. I’m superstitious that way.
It’s not that I’m any kind of stage or Tiger Mom as far as this business goes. It’s simply this: He’s been working on these four pieces for almost a year. He’s performed them in various settings (including retirement homes and a temporary residence for cancer patients as part of the requirements for being in the Honors Ensemble). I don’t give a flip whether or not he “wins” – I simply don’t want him to walk into this, bearing the fruit of a year’s worth of hard work, and then blunder in a way that throws him off and then throws off the piece – the consequence being that in this particular setting, the fruit of his work won’t be evident.
The work is bearing fruit in other ways, to be sure. He’s just begun taking jazz piano, which is coming fairly easily to him – but only because of the kind of work he’s been doing in classical piano for three years. Same with rock – his friend down the street takes rock guitar lessons, and they’ve invited M to play with the band for the recital – and he can pull it off with not much time because of Beethoven and Kabalevsky.
But still….dozens, if not hundreds of hours on this Kabalevsky, in particular….it sure would be nice….
So there’s that. Stress levels have also been heightened this week because of
AP Physics exam
The end of the 2nd year of law school
Ready for the school year to be over. Oh, and you know how parents of older children always say to parents of younger kids: You’ll look back to the years of no sleep and potty training and think…that was easy.
There’s a reason. It’s true. Cleaning up a puddle of urine on three hours of sleep is nothing compared to the stress of giving counsel to young adults worried about the course of the rest of their lives and their relationships and then watching them drive away in 2-ton death machines.
And then there’s son #2 who has his own news – a writer of many stories and a few novels, all unpublished, he has decided to go the e-book route, and going about it in a very methodical way. He’s publishing short collections of stories over the next few months, and then releasing a novel in the fall.
Founded in 1997 by Catholic scholars at the University of Chicago, the Lumen Christi Institute brings together thoughtful Catholics and others interested in the Catholic tradition and makes available to them the wisdom of the Catholic spiritual, intellectual, and cultural heritage.
Gift time. Guess what? None of the links below go to Amazon. They either go to the publisher or my bookstore. All the books are on Amazon, of course, but most should also be in your local Catholic bookstore or an online Catholic store. Start there. And if they’re not…request them.
I have some of these books available in my bookstore – I will ship and sign! Those I have in stock are indicated with a * . If you have any questions, contact me at amywelborn60 AT gmail.
And yes, there is a new book forthcoming this summer – information about that should be available in a couple of weeks. Check back for more soon!
We’re back! Life has slipped and tumbled back into the normal paradigm: school, sort-of-homeschooling (Hey, there was a lot of learning that happened in Mexico, wasn’t there?), work, music….etc.
Brother Bronislaus Luszcz, a native of Poland, spent 23 years building this collection of large grottos. He used local Missouri tiff rock to create beautiful statues and mosaics freckled with found and donated objects like seashells and costume jewelry. He began the work in 1937, though the seeds of his endeavor were planted long before.
While Brother Bronislaus was growing up in Poland, he would watch as pilgrims trekked through his home village on their way to a shrine for the Virgin Mary. The memory of the pilgrims lingered in his mind even after he moved to the United States and inspired him to begin constructing his own shrine.
–6–
In an era in which the only movies that seem to make it to the screen are remakes and comic book-based…you read a tale like this and you wonder…why not this story? Wouldn’t this be a fantastic movie – or even television series? Let’s do lunch and make it happen!
She zoomed over forlorn dusty roads, responding to the beckoning call of new adventures. The airborne sensation and the freedom of the road ensured that she climbed on her trusty Harley-Davidson time and time again. Long before the hashtag #CarefreeBlackGirl was coined, Bessie Stringfield was living her life freely on her own terms—riding her motorcycle across the United States solo.
Born in 1911, Stringfield got her first motorcycle, a 1928 Indian Scout, while she was still in her teens and taught herself how to ride it. As chronicled in the 1993 book Hear Me Roar: Women, Motorcycles and the Rapture of the Road by Stringfield’s protégé and eventual biographer Ann Ferrar, at the age of 19, young Stringfield flipped a penny onto a map of the US then ventured out on her bike alone. Interstate highways didn’t yet exist at the time, but the rough, unpaved roads didn’t deter her. In 1930, she became the first Black woman to ride a motorcycle in every one of the connected 48 states—a solo cross-country ride she undertook eight times during her lifetime. But not even that satisfied her wanderlust. Eventually, she went abroad to Haiti, Brazil, and parts of Europe.
And you just wonder….how many other stories are there?
What I like about these – and why I share them with you – is that they challenge the assumption that before Vatican II, Catholicism offered nothing but legalistic rules-based externals to its adherents, particularly the young. Obviously not so
I also appreciate the assumption of maturity and spiritual responsibility. Remember, this is a 7th grade textbook, which means it was for twelve and thirteen-year olds at most. A child reading this was encouraged to think of him or herself, not as a customer to be placated or attracted, but as a member of the Body of Christ – a full member who can experience deep joy, peace and has a mission.
Are you getting ready for school? Catechists, homeschoolers and Catholic school teachers are. Pastors and principals, too. If you are a mind to, please take a look at all the resources I have available for catechesis.
Are you teaching religion to elementary age students? Friendship with Jesus, Be Saints, Bambinelli Sunday, Adventures in Assisi, The Loyola Kids’ Book of Saints, The Loyola Kids’ Book of Heroes.
Note: the Amazon listing indicates it will be released tomorrow. This isn’t correct. It will be 9/1, according to Loyola.
Can you help catechists, Catholic schools and parish programs? Consider gifting your parish, school or favorite catechist with copies of these books. Click on the covers for more information.
I have copies of some of these – the Prove it books, the Catholic Woman’s Book of Days and the Book of Heroes as well as the Prove It Bible – available in my bookstore.
Again – even if catechesis isn’t something you are personally involved in, any catechist, parish school, library or program would welcome a donation as a beginning-of-the-year (no matter when it begins…) gift.
Also: Did you know that public libraries accept suggestions for books to purchase? Usually you have to have a library card in their system to be able to recommend a book – but do look into that – you could give a boost to a lot of Catholic authors in this way.
Earlier this week, the local Fraternus chapter celebrated the end of the year with a ceremony, a Mass and dinner. It was at the Cathedral, where Mass on this occasion was celebrated ad orientem – with an excellent pre-Mass explanation from the Rector.
Everyone survived, and no one mentioned feeling excluded or marginalized by rigidity or walls, but then I didn’t talk to everyone, so you never know.
Although the Salve Regina is not the Easter Season Marian hymn, since singing Compline is such a special part of the Fraternus meetings and most of the year it ends with the Salve, on this night, that’s what they did, and as it always is – it was stirring.
Eh. Tried to crop the video so I wouldn’t be posting images of other people’s kids, but it’s too much trouble. Trust me. It was nice.
It has been estimated that over 90 per cent of England’s figurative medieval art was obliterated in the image destruction of the Reformation. Medieval angel roofs, timber structures with spectacular and ornate carvings of angels, with a peculiar preponderance in East Anglia, were simply too difficult for Reformation iconoclasts to reach. Angel roof carvings comprise the largest surviving body of major English medieval wood sculpture. Though they are both masterpieces of sculpture and engineering, angel roofs have been almost completely neglected by academics and art historians, because they are inaccessible, fixed and challenging to photograph.
The Angel Roofs of East Anglia is the first detailed historical and photographic study of the region’s many medieval angel roofs.
Written by Donna Marie Cooper O’Boyle and published by Sophia, Ann was brought in to do the illustrations, so let’s give her due credit, shall we? Isn’t that a nice cover? I don’t have a copy of the book, nor can I access illustrated pages online, so I don’t know how the interior illustrations were actually used, but here are some samples Ann sent me:
Last week saw the nation’s eyes turned on the fertility industry, as the Daily Mail has revealed, on the front page, the results of their full scale investigation. Their allegations of vulnerable women being convinced to donate their eggs in return for free treatment, and women being given false hope over the efficacy of egg freezing were shocking enough. Then came the claim that IVF clinics were covering up the scale of the potentially fatal side effects of egg harvesting. Reporters found that 800 women a year are taken to hospital with ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, a sometimes deadly condition caused by the egg harvesting process – but clinics have been reporting numbers as low as 16.
Of course unplanned pregnancy presents challenges. But it doesn’t have to lead to economic failure. Abortion is society’s easy way out — its way of avoiding grappling with the fundamental injustices driving women to abortion clinics.
I know, because that’s my story, and the story of countless mothers I have helped confront similar challenges.
When I became pregnant at the beginning of my senior year in high school, my community pressured me to abort. I grew up in a single-parent, working-class family that barely had the resources to send me to college. Doing that, and helping me raise a child, seemed out of the question. Feeling that a birth would make a mess of my future, I scheduled an abortion.
This week’s good podcast listen was In Our Time’s program (or should I say programme) on Emily Dickinson. I’m sure there are Dickinson fanatics out there to whom none of what was said was new, but it was an excellent introduction with some illuminating angles. Since the structure of In Our Time involves bringing in three scholars to discuss the topic at hand, it is always interesting to me to pick up on disagreements and differences of approach. What I hear more and more frequently is a quiet but steady pushback against older assumptions and paradigms, and what’s possibly surprising is that those older assumptions tend to be rooted in anti-transcendent materialism, gender/racial/class politics and an essentialist trope of artist-as-self-expressing-revolutionary. Younger scholars – at least those that appear on this program – can sometimes be rather dismissive of these assumptions, clearly impatient with the restrictive and predictable endpoints to those trains of thought.
Not that this seems to have much traction in the American academy right now….
Secondly, since May is Mary’s month, it’s a good time to read a free book about her, originally published by Word Among Us, now out of print and available in a pdf version here.
Oh, my word, this In Our Time podcast on Mary, Queen of Scots was fantastic.Fast-paced, but thorough (up until the end, when they ran out of time), typically fair-minded and balanced. If you have any interest in this period of history, do listen.
Earlier in the week I caught up with another earlier episode, this one on John Dalton. The content gibes nicely with last week’s commentary on the IOT episode on Roger Bacon. Dalton, like Bacon, was a devoutly religious man of science – in Dalton’s case, an observant Quaker until the day he died. It’s another very useful antidote to the current and very stupid conviction that Science and Religion are AT WAR.
One of the points in the broadcast that interested me the most was this:
Dalton was a Quaker and as a dissenter (like Unitarians, Methodists…Catholics) was prohibited from studying at Oxford or Cambridge (he could have studied at Scottish universities however).
At the same time, as the industrial revolution changed the social and cultural landscape of England, particularly the north, the rising classes began to shape new ways of discovering and sharing knowledge that were 1)outside the established educational structures of the south and 2) reflective of their particular priorities: commerce, technology, industry, practical science and their hope for their children to be able to fit into traditional educational paradigms as well.
And so Dalton, both self-taught and the product of an alternative network of Quaker tutors and schools, lived, worked and researched.
(We remember him today for many things, but most commonly his contribution to atomic theory.)
One of the presenters made the very interesting point that if Dalton had come from a more privileged background, had been Anglican his path of study would have been far more traditional and circumscribed and not as amenable to outside-the-box thinking.
Of course this resonated with matters I often contemplate and prompts me to wonder, once again, why those who like to present themselves as progressive advocates of the individual tend to be such advocates of pedagogical groupthink and homogeneous mandatory educational programs?
Saturday-Sunday do not for a Christian constitute the end of the week, but the end-and-beginning. Most calendars reflect that too; Sunday appears at the head of the week.
Does it matter? Supremely so. How we mark time shapes everything that we do, for it is the context in which we do it. Time is the first “thing” God creates. In creating things outside of Himself, God introduces a before and an after, which means time has come into being.
A Labour government will seek to create four new UK-wide bank holidays on the patron saint’s day of each of the home nations, Jeremy Corbyn has announced. The Labour leader said the move would bring together England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, while giving workers a well-deserved break.
The plan would mean public holidays on St David’s Day (1 March), St Patrick’s Day (17 March), St George’s Day (23 April) and St Andrew’s Day (30 November).
So interesting to see the stubborn persistence, in whatever form, of religious foundations…
Speaking of books, again – a few lists if you are poking around for something to read either now or in the future. 
I’ll have more to say after it’s over. I’m superstitious that way.
Note: the Amazon listing indicates it will be released tomorrow. This isn’t correct. It will be 9/1, according to Loyola. 
Charlotte was Both 