May: Mary’s Month

From the Loyola Kids Book of Catholic Signs and Symbols– related to the Blessed Mother.

Remember the structure: Each entry has two pages. The left-side page features a beautiful illustration and a short definition. The facing page – which I don’t show here – features a longer explanation, suitable for older children.

Don’t you think every Catholic school classroom needs a copy?

There’s a section on Mary, of course:

Some of the entries (first page).

For more information.

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7 Quick Takes

—1 —

A bit of blogging this week. Perhaps of the most interest will be this post on the movie The Sound of Metal.

— 2 —

Pentecost is coming, of course.

• 

• 

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Pages above are (left) from the Loyola Kids Book of Catholic Signs and Symbols  and (right) from the Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories.  Click on images for larger versions. Remember that for the Signs and Symbols entry, there’s another page –  a full page of more detailed text.

— 3 —

Pentecost is one of the events in The Loyola Kids Book of Heroes. 

(The book is structured around the virtues. Each section begins with an event from Scripture that illustrates one of those virtues, followed by stories of people and events from church history that do so as well)

This hasn’t been published in a book – yet – but it’s a painting byAnn Engelhart, illustrator of several books, including four with my writing attached – all listed here. It’s a painting of the tradition of dropping rose petals through the oculus in the Pantheon in Rome.

(Our Cathedral here in Birmingham has also done this regularly over the past few years – it’s happening this coming Saturday for the Vigil of Pentecost, which will be livestreamed here.

For more on the Cathedral’s livestreaming, go here.

— 4 —

By the way, please follow Ann on Instagram. She features her beautiful art and regularly posts live painting sessions on Instagram Stories. 

— 5 –

Hopefully this weekend,  you’ll be hearing/singing/praying Veni Creator Spiritus.  I have a chapter on it in The Words We Pray. A sample:

— 6 —

Speaking of art, from Daniel Mitsui:

— 7 —

Daniel has designs available as wallpaper and fabric here. Gorgeous.

And finally, here’s an excerpt from a lecture he delivered earlier this year. Food for thought for artists of all kinds – and any of us, really.

So how does an artist who wants to make religious art, who wants to make it both beautiful and traditional, to glorify God and edify men through it, answer the challenge of doing that in a changing world?

He should choose his influences – both visual and intellectual – out of love. He should love them for what they are, rather than for what they are not.

No matter how devoted he is to a certain kind of art or school of thought, he should remember that it is incomplete and imperfect. He can and should try to make it better. This is an altogether traditional thing to do.

He should be open to whatever medium, whatever materials, whatever methods work best to express his artistry. A willingness to be bold, technically, is another altogether traditional thing to do.

He should not consider religious art to be a political tool, or encourage its use as such.

He should look to every kind of art – whether it comes from within the Church or without it – asking the questions: what works? and what can this teach me to make my art better? God is the author of all beauty; as Augustine says, the mines of his providence are everywhere scattered abroad.

He should ask the same question even of art that he considers generally bad: What works? What can this teach me? The answer may be: very little. But if it is anything at all, he should accept the lesson.

More.

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

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Thursday

Well, hello there. It’s been busy, hasn’t it? Click back for posts on various other subjects, including my tour of some different kind of Triduum moments here in Birmingham.  I’m just going to digest today. Maybe more later, but probably not.

Watching: We’ll get the negatives out of the way first. Against my better judgment and probably in violation of some moral code, I watched Veep again this week, and man, it just gets worse and worse. I don’t mean in terms of language and such – it’s always “bad” in that respect, but rather in terms of plotting and character and just the whole “humor” department, which is a problem when you’re a “comedy.” This was a total, uncomfortable mess, even more forced than usual. Bah.

Then, also against my better judgment, I finished off season 1 and the first three episodes of season 2 of Killing Eve, the trendy Show of the Moment. Why did I pick it up again after being not impressed the first time around? Well, probably because I didn’t have a book to grab me and after six days of Being With People I needed down time with fake people whose lives did not involve piano or organ lessons, thinking about exams, graduations or me preparing meals.

Verdict? No change. Well – maybe a change, since I like it even less than I did after the first viewing chunk. I continue to like all of the actors very much, but the whole thing strikes me as a shallow exercise in (feeble) wit and style. In that way, it reminds me of House of Cards which I stopped watching after season 2 because in all of the conniving, there was never anything of moral consequence at stake.  How odd that this show – which revolves around the quest to find a professional assassin, for heaven’s sake – leaves me with the same feeling. In this case, it’s not that no one is trying to stop the evil (as was the case with House of Cards – everyone was a bad guy), it’s that the reasons they’re in pursuit of this killer are so ambiguous and weird, it becomes all just no more than a psycho-sexual game. Which perhaps is the point, and not something I have an inherent objection to. No, my problem is that the motives of the primary pursuer – Eve, played by Sandra Oh – have been, since the beginning, opaque. We know little about her past, why she’s in this line of work, what’s motivated her in the past, or even what her expertise is. Here she is, for some reason, fixated on this killer. I would imagine that the conceit of a cat-and-mouse game between killer and the law could be legitimately framed in a way to bring out themes of mutual obsession and a twisted sense of desire that in some way echoes a romantic pursuit, but my problem with Eve is that whatever is there seems to come from nowhere and is, as I said, all style and no substance.

If there’s nothing human at stake, it’s hard for humans to be truly interested, and not just entertained. 

Listening:

Finally got back into In Our Time after a winter’s hiatus. Yesterday was this episode on the Great Famine with lots of interesting and balanced discussion on how to deal with humanitarian crises and the complex causes of same.

Musically, a bunch of pieces tossed out by M’s piano teacher to consider for a next piece to work on, including this, this and this. He’s settled on this Prokofiev, which is pretty crazy, but I say that at the beginning of every new piece: No way he can play that. And somehow, every time, thanks to talent, (some) hard work and an excellent teacher,  he does.

Should I write a heartfelt Instagram microblog with a photo of him at the piano to inspire you to believe in yourself, overcome challenges and achieve your goals?

Nah. 

Also, as I’ve mentioned before, this organist. We listened to several of his performances, including this 1812 Overture, this very fun Pirates of the Caribbean and this duet with a pianist of Shostakovich’s Waltz #2, which we play on the piano together.

This evening, I listened to some John Fields Piano Sonatas, which I liked very much, and then a couple of Schubert lieder, including this – why? (Since I usually don’t listen to vocal music while I’m reading – can’t concentrate) – because it was part of the book I was reading, and I wanted to fill out the atmosphere. And the book?

Reading: Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather

The only other Cather books I’ve read are the obligatory-for-Catholic-literary-types Death Comes for the Archbishop a few times and then, a couple of years ago, The Professor’s House. You can read my post about it here. Re-reading it, I can see some of the same concerns in Lucy. It’s interesting.

So first, my denseness. I saw references to this as a “novella” and so knew it wouldn’t be very long. I read it on my Kindle , but not on an actual Kindle app – from this website, with continual scrolling. No pages, and no progress bar. So I’d been reading for a while, a lot had happened, and I got to the end of the current webpage. No more scrolling. Okay. It seemed like an abrupt ending, but perhaps that was the point? I shrugged. That was interesting,  I thought.

I then turned to an article I’d skimmed earlier – this one about Joanne Woodward (sorry, NYTimes, so yes, paywall..sometimes. I find that reading things on different devices can sometimes work around those limitations), who adored this book and always hoped to make a film about it. I got to the end of the article, which described the last sentence of the novel, and I thought, Wait, what? That wasn’t the end *I* read! 

So I returned to the book and sure enough, down there on the bottom was a “next” button. The book has three “books”  – and I’d only read the first!

But by that time, I was tired, so there we have this evening’s read. Which is good, because I wasn’t ready to leave that world quite yet.

Lucy Gayheart is a young woman from a small Nebraska town who is a music student, teacher and accompanist in Chicago. The book opens with Lucy on break back home and then we quickly hop on the train with her an travel back to Chicago. I’ll write a full post on it when I finish, but for now, I’ll mention a few things:

Yes, Willa Cather was a woman, a female writer, but even so, reading a book like this is a useful corrective to the narrow-mindedness of the present, a constrained and ignorant vision of the past in which we imagine a world peopled with gender stereotypes all happily lived and perpetuated by stock male and female characters, waiting for Betty and Gloria to liberate them.

No. Lucy is a person  – fully drawn, person who has an independent life there in the early 20th century, living on her own in the big city, earning her keep – and it’s fine. Yes, there is a sense, hovering here and there, that after this little adventure, she’ll end up back home, domesticated, giving lessons to children in the front parlor – but that’s of a piece, really, with the life trajectories of all the characters, male and female. I don’t know how the book ends yet (I keep reading “sad” in reviews, so….) but I’m going to guess that many of the characters are going to be bumping up against disappointment and constraints – not just the women.

Secondly, a few passages that were striking and beautiful. This one took my breath away, as Cather describes an experience in which Lucy catches a hint of the transcendent on one cold, crisp night:

Lucy felt drowsy and dreamy, glad to be warm. The sleigh was such a tiny moving spot on that still white country settling into shadow and silence. Suddenly Lucy started and struggled under the tight blankets. In the darkening sky she had seen the first star come out; it brought her heart into her throat. That point of silver light spoke to her like a signal, released another kind of life and feeling which did not belong here. It overpowered her. With a mere thought she had reached that star and it had answered, recognition had flashed between. Something knew, then, in the unknowing waste: something had always known, forever! That joy of saluting what is far above one was an eternal thing, not merely something that had happened to her ignorance and her foolish heart.

The flash of understanding lasted but a moment. Then everything was confused again. Lucy shut her eyes and leaned on Harry’s shoulder to escape from what she had gone so far to snatch. It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost.

On the train, on the way to Chicago:

Lucy undressed quickly, got into her berth, and turned off the lights. At last she was alone, lying still in the dark, and could give herself up to the vibration of the train, — a rhythm that had to do with escape, change, chance, with life hurrying forward. That sense of release and surrender went all over her body; she seemed to lie in it as in a warm bath. Tomorrow night at this time she would be coming home from Clement Sebastian’s recital. In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.

Finally, this – a passage in which, to use the current lingo, I felt seen. I mean – that feeling of having one’s own life, of being able to set things right without being bothered. That’s everyone’s notion of paradise, right? Right? 

The next morning Lucy was in Chicago, in her own room, unpacking and putting her things to rights. She lived in a somewhat unusual manner; had a room two flights up over a bakery, in one of the grimy streets off the river.

When she first came to Chicago she had stayed at a students’ boarding-house, but she didn’t like the pervasive informality of the place, nor the Southern gentlewoman of fallen fortunes who conducted it. She told her teacher, Professor Auerbach, that she would never get on unless she could live alone with her piano, where there would be no gay voices in the hall or friendly taps at her door. Auerbach took her out to his house, and they consulted with his wife. Mrs. Auerbach knew exactly what to do. She and Lucy went to see Mrs. Schneff and her bakery.

The Schneff bakery was an old German landmark in that part of the city. On the ground floor was the bake shop, and a homely restaurant specializing in German dishes, conducted by Mrs. Schneff. On the top floor was a glove factory. The three floors between, the Schneffs rented to people who did not want to take long leases; travelling salesmen, clerks, railroad men who must be near the station. The food in the bakery downstairs was good enough, and there were no table companions or table jokes. Everyone had his own little table, attended to his own business, and read his paper. Lucy had taken a room here at once, and for the first time in her life she could come and go like a boy; no one fussing about, no one hovering over her. There were inconveniences, to be sure. The lodgers came and went by an open stairway which led up from the street beside the front door of the restaurant; the winter winds blew up through the halls — burglars might come, too, but so far they never had. There was no parlour in which Lucy could receive callers. When she went anywhere with one of Auerbach’s students, the young man waited for her on the stairway, or met her in the restaurant below.

This morning Lucy was glad as never before to be back with her own things and her own will. After she had unpacked, she arranged and rearranged; nothing was too much trouble. The moment she had shut the door upon the baggage man, she seemed to find herself again. Out there in Haverford she had scarcely been herself at all; she had been trying to feel and behave like someone she no longer was; as children go on playing the old games to please their elders, after they have ceased to be children at heart.

Oh, yes, the Melville – The Confidence-Man.  I read two or three chapters and then put it down. I read a few articles about the book and decided that was good enough. I could see that if my interests were slightly different, it would be worth my time, but as such – it’s not right now. 

 

Writing: Not very productive, other than blog posts. Unfortunately. Well, writing-related – it’s my Black Friday season, the time in which my author sales ranking reaches its peak for the year – between Easter and Mother’s Day, essentially. 

 

I did start collating book-related posts on this page. 

Also writing: Movie and fiction-writing son. Lots of posts here, including thoughts on silent comedies, as well as the French film Jean de Florette. 

Today’s the feast of St. Mark. We’re obviously still within the Easter Octave, so we don’t commemorate in liturgically, but here’s the page on the symbols for the four evangelists from The Loyola Kids Book of Catholic Signs and Symbols anyway:

 

Cooking! 

No big Easter dinner here. I didn’t cook – we went to Buffalo Wild Wings. Yup! No shame.

But I did contribute to the cause by spending a lot of time making a pound cake on Saturday, for post-Vigil celebration. It was a great pound cake – I followed the recipe exactly and it worked well. 

Also did some Chicken Tinga from this recipe – I think last Thursday. 

Monday night: Flank steak using this rub (and steak just a bit more expensive, from Fresh Market rather than the regular grocery story. So much more flavor) and these potatoes, which are a favorite around here. 

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

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 don’t have many of those on hand here, but what I do have are loads of copies of the Bible Stories book and the Signs and Symbols book – as well as the Book of Days. If you’re starting to think Christmas gifts….check it out. 

— 2 —

So let’s get going with random articles on random subjects. Perhaps something will catch your interest. First, the secret lives of composers who work in trades:

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.

— 3 —

John Taylor Gatto passed away this week. He was an essential critic of American education and an inspiration for many educational reformers, including those in homeschooling/unschooling. 

— 4 —

All of sudden this week, everyone was an expert on the 14th amendment!

Well, the good thing is that at least a lot of people got interested in learning more about the issue of birthright citizenship. If you want a balanced look at the issue, I can’t think of a better place than this lengthy article. 

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.

— 5 —

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.

From Australian Archbishop Anthony Fisher:

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.

— 6 —

From Christopher Altieri:

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.”

— 7 —

And then, George Weigel:

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.

 

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

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First Look!

Click on cover for more information.

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Some you might have seen my earlier post about our Bishop Emeritus David Foley, who passed away Tuesday evening. Go there to read a bit of a personal reminiscence. I’ll add a summary of a story told by our music director, who posted that a few months ago, he encountered Bishop Foley at the Cathedral, stocking up on his oils because he was headed to a prison to say Mass and celebrate some confirmations. At the age of 88.

— 2 —

EWTN will be broadcasting both the Vespers and the Funeral Mass – Sunday night and Monday.  Even if you don’t know anything about Bishop Foley – if you are in the least interested hearing some of the finest sacred music in any Catholic church in this country – tune in.

—3–

No adventures this week to speak of. It’s been about music lessons (X3), a teenager looking at a car, mom losing sleep over the prospect of this teenager buying this car, and waiting for the weather to finally warm up in a permanent, serious way. Friday is often an adventure day, but won’t be this week because, well, there’s that patio door that is finally going to get replaced – an errant stone flung from a weedeater was the culprit – several weeks ago, and it took this long to get the door and get the guy to come take care of it. But finally, I can get the plywood and tarp out of my living room. (And yes, it was that way while we were in Mexico – obviously super secure plywood and tarp, right?)

Oh – I was in Living Faith on Sunday. Another one coming soon. 

 

–4––

Speaking of the Cathedral – which we were, just a minute ago –

My youngest takes organ lessons at the Cathedral, and during his lesson this week, a class of some sort – they looked to be either high school seniors or younger college students – filed in, sat, listened to a short presentation, and then scattered about the church, sitting with handouts, looking and writing.

I never did find out where they were from or what their class was about, but just remember that the next time someone tries to tell you that there’s a conflict or dichotomy between taking care to construct beautiful and substantive churches and a “simple”  – implication – better  – faith.

A beautiful church building is a witness to Christ in the midst of the city surrounding it.

–5 —

 

Tomorrow (April 21) is the memorial of St. Anselm. This is from a blog post from last year:

I will always, always remember St. Anselm because he was the first Christian philosopher/theologian I encountered in a serious way.

As a Catholic high school student in the 70’s, of course we met no such personages – only the likes of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Man of La Mancha.

(That was a project senior year – do a visual project matching up the lyrics of “Impossible Dream” with the Beatitudes. JLS had been Sophomore year. It was a text in the class. It was  also the year my religion teacher remarked on my report card, “Amy is a good student, but she spends class time sitting in the back of the room reading novels.” )

Anyway, upon entering the University of Tennessee, I claimed a major of Honors History and a minor of religious studies. (Instapundit’s dad, Dr. Charles Reynolds, was one of my professors). One of the classes was in medieval church history, and yup, we plunged into Anselm, and I was introduced to thinking about the one of whom no greater can be thought, although more of the focus was on his atonement theory. So Anselm and his tight logic always makes me sit up and take notice.

–6–

If you want a good modern translation of Anselm’s Proslogion – I dug this one up. It’s a pdf.  

I like the way it begins. Anselm shares some good advice:

Come now, insignificant man, leave behind for a time your preoccupations;
seclude yourself for a while from your disquieting
thoughts. Turn aside now from heavy cares, and set aside your
wearisome tasks. Make time for God, and rest a while in Him.
Enter into the inner chamber of your mind; shut out everything
except God and what is of aid to you in seeking Him; after closing
the chamber door, seek Him out.

 

–7–

Seeking gifts for First Communion, Confirmation, Mother’s Day…etc?

Try one of these!

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

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It’s that time of the year

 

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! 

First Communion:

(Painting from Friendship with Jesus)

The Loyola Kids’ Book of Saints

The Loyola Kids’ Book of Heroes *

Be Saints! *

Friendship with Jesus 

Adventures in Assisi *

Bambinelli Sunday *

Confirmation/Graduation:

Any of the Prove It books. *

The Prove It Catholic Teen Bible *

The How to Book of the Mass *

New Catholic? Inquirer?

The How to Book of the Mass

The Words We Pray *

Praying with the Pivotal Players

Mother’s Day

The Catholic Woman’s Book of Days *

End of Year Teacher/Catechist Gifts

Any of the above…..

 

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Went to the movies, saw A Quiet Place. If you can handle a bit of a scare and some earned sadness based on themes of love and sacrifice – go see it, too. I wrote about it here. 

— 2 —

Various activities this week:

• A Piano Honors Ensemble Recital on Sunday
• Went and watched our young mayor whom I don’t think anyone hates yet jump out of a plane on Monday afternoon – story here. It was a fun community moment out there in our lovely Railroad Park.
• Monday evening, we attended a recital of organ students, including the daughter of a friend of ours. Here’s hoping that our keyboardist will be performing in it next year…
• Homeschool trip/activity at the Birmingham Museum of Art. I always like going to our fine, free museum, but I think we might have aged out of activities like this…even if it was geared towards teens.
• Two music lessons this week – one classical, one jazz.
• Friday promises good weather, so M and will probably go check out what’s blooming in the Botanical Gardens and try out our finally reopened Vulcan Trail. Fascinating updates will probably be posted on Instagram. I thought I had recorded the plane-jumping, but got home and discovered that my phone video wasn’t recording for some reason. A restart fixed it.

 

—3–

And here you go, Friday: A morning with math (getting through that Art of Problem Solving Pre-Algebra – we’ll finish by mid-May!), some Spanish, some history reading. Then we set out to visit our just re-opened Vulcan Trail. It’s been closed for probably close to a year as they did something that’s been needed for a while – joining the Vulcan park to the trail below.

If you want to read about who this Vulcan fellow is, go here. He made his first formal appearance at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, representing the city.

Then to the (also free) wonderful Birmingham Botanical Gardens to see what’s in bloom. Not anything at the Zen spot, obviously – except enlightenment. 

 

–4––

 

This weekend:

• Mass serving
• District piano competition (to qualify to play at state in May)
• 17-year old taking the ACT
• 17-year old working
• 17-year old prepping for a college visit to Auburn Sunday night and Monday.
• Oh, and someone looking at a car he’s hankering to buy with his hard-earned grocery bagging cash. My philosophy is: you have use of a car you don’t have to pay for. Why buy one? His philosophy is different. The whole things make me nervous, but the car he wants has excellent reviews and is by a carmaker I trust, so….
• You’d think I’d be used to this by now. But I’m not. Parents of potty-training kids who think it can’t get worse? Oh, yes, it can. Everything about parenting older kids is great and fantastic except the driving part. That’s awful. And it’s awful because it’s not a joke. You don’t want your child to be hurt or killed. You don’t want them hurting or, God forbid being responsible for the death of another person. Over-dramatic? Nope. My prayer life gets a daily revival twice a day – once from 7:15-7:30 and then again from 3:15-3:45. Double revival when I hear sirens during that half-hour.

 

–5 —

I somehow missed this earlier in the year, but…you know those podcast series centered on a mysterious crime? Like Serial and S-Town (which was centered not too far from here – closer to Tuscaloosa)? I listened to part of Serial, then got impatient with it and fed up with the centrality of the podcaster to the story.

Very dependably, The Onion has come through with its own version: A Very Fatal Murder. It’s in six parts, which total about an hour. It’s pretty funny and absolutely -spot on in the satire of the self-important podcaster, the subtext of contempt for “ordinary” people and the ultimate sense you get of human lives being valuable only insofar as they serve a narrative.

It’s the kind of school where the football field is bigger than the chemistry lab, and kids learn to throw a baseball before they take the SAT’s.

After all, most of the people who lived here had never met a podcast host. Let alone a podcast host from New York City. They weren’t used to stuff like this.

 

–6–

Speaking of contempt for The Rest of Us, let’s turn to the pages of The New Yorker and “Chick-Fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City.” 

 

Defenders of Chick-fil-A point out that the company donates thousands of pounds of food to New York Common Pantry, and that its expansion creates jobs. The more fatalistic will add that hypocrisy is baked, or fried, into every consumer experience—that unbridled corporate power makes it impossible to bring your wallet in line with your morals. Still, there’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety. A representative of the Richards Group once told Adweek, “People root for the low-status character, and the Cows are low status. They’re the underdog.” That may have been true in 1995, when Chick-fil-A was a lowly mall brand struggling to find its footing against the burger juggernauts. Today, the Cows’ “guerrilla insurgency” is more of a carpet bombing. New Yorkers are under no obligation to repeat what they say. Enough, we can tell them. NO MOR.

My pleasure. 

As someone on Twitter said, I thought New Yorkers were supposed to be tough. So why are they so scared of a chicken sandwich?

And let’s imagine the outcry if the Nashville Tenessean or Knoxville News-Sentinel had run a piece fretting about the infiltration of halal or kosher food on the local menu.

Save yourself time – don’t read the article. Just scroll through “chick-fil-a New Yorker” on Twitter and enjoy yourself on this Friday afternoon, maybe with a side order of waffle fries.

Dearest Maude,
The days grow longer, the nights more weary.
A fortnight from now we expect to be besieged by delicious chicken, politely delivered by kind laborers. The horrors are unspeakable.
I dare say we won't make it out alive.
Avenge me,
Williamhttps://t.co/ovHY181nUK

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

–7–

 

Next Monday, April 16, is the memorial of St. Bernadette.

Today  (April 16)  is her memorial.  Loyola has the entry I wrote on St. Bernadette for The Loyola Kids Book of Saints up on their website – you can read the whole thing here. 

Bernadette’s life wasn’t easy to begin with. She and her family lived in terrible poverty in a village in France called Lourdes. By the time she was 14, Bernadette had been sick so often that she hadn’t grown properly. She was the size of a much younger girl. She, her parents, and her younger brothers and sisters all lived in a tiny room at the back of someone else’s house, a building that had actually been a prison many years before.

They slept on three beds: one for the parents, one for the boys, and one for the girls. Every night they battled mice and rats. Every morning, they woke up, put their feet on cold stone floors, and dressed in clothes that had been mended more times than anyone could count. Each day they hoped the work they could find would bring them enough bread to live on that day.

Bernadette’s life was terribly difficult, but she wasn’t a miserable girl. She had a deep, simple faith in God. She didn’t mind any of the work she had to do, whether it was helping her mother cook or taking care of her younger brothers and sisters. There was, though, one thing that bothered her. She hadn’t been able to attend school very often, and she didn’t know how to read. Because of that, she had never learned enough about her faith to be able to receive her first Communion. Bernadette wanted to receive Jesus in the Eucharist, but her days, which were full of hard work, left little time for learning

Like other girls, Bernadette had many friends. She spent time with them in the countryside, playing and gathering wood for their families’ fireplaces and stoves. One cold February day, Bernadette was out with her sister and a friend, doing just that. They wandered along the river until they came to a spot where a large, shallow cave called a grotto had formed in the hilly bank. Bernadette’s sister and friend decided to take off their shoes and cross the stream.

Because she was so sickly, Bernadette knew her mother would be angry if she plunged her thin legs into the icy water, so she stayed behind. But after a few minutes, she grew tired of waiting for her companions to return. She took off her stockings and crossed the stream herself.

What happened then was very strange. The bushes that grew out of the grotto walls started blowing around as if they were being blown by a strong wind. Bernadette looked up. High above her in the grotto stood a gi

 

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

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.

— 2 —

Here’s a post I pulled together with links to all the entries on the trip to Mexico, with some thoughts on safety and links to our accommodations. It’s called I went to Mexico and didn’t die. 

—3–

This coming Sunday is, of course, Divine Mercy Sunday. St. Faustina is in the Loyola Kids Book of Heroes. Here’s a page:

–4––

In case you didn’t know it (er…I didn’t) – the Feast of the Annunciation is being celebrated on Monday – (because the actual date fell on Palm Sunday)  You can download a free pdf of my Mary and the Christian Life at this page (scroll down a bit). If you want to spring .99 for a Kindle e-reader copy, go here. 

And hey – with First Communion/Confirmation/Mother’s Day/Graduation season coming up – check out my books for gifts! 

–5 —

From Atlas Obscura – I’d never heard of this – it sounds similar to our local Ave Maria Grotto. The grace in the found object. 

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?

And the answer…one for every person. 

At least. 

–7–

It’s Easter Season! Below are related excerpts from our favorite vintage 7th grade Catholic textbook, part of the Christ-Life Series in Religion . The first is about the season in general, the second about next Sunday (before it became Divine Mercy Sunday, of course).

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.

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Holy Week and Easter Books

A quick reminder:

• More on all of these here. 
• The Bible study I did for Loyola on the Passion in Matthew’s Gospel is available for Kindle – so you could grab it right now and use it for the week.
• Kris McGregor of Discerning Hearts very kindly still has the interview series she did with my late husband on The Power of the Cross available on the website. You can listen here.   The book is out of print – used copies (not cheap) are available here, but you can also download a free (pdf) copy here. 
• The How To Book of the Mass would be a great gift for a new Catholic.  You can get it here (or probably any Catholic bookstore). I also have copies for sale from by bookstore.
• The Words We Pray might also be a nice gift. More on that one here. 

• Easter Gifts and First Communion gifts? Got you covered.  Buy from me here or just poke around at your favorite Catholic bookstore on online retailer. 

 

 

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