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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.
From the Supremacy and Survival blog, a post about the “Angel Roofs of East Anglia.”
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.
Tomorrow, May 13, is the 100th anniversary of the Fatima apparition. There are countless books out there remembering this anniversary. One of them is the work, in part, of my friend and frequent collaborator Ann Kissane Engelhart:
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:
For more on the book, here’s the Sophia site.
Two quick takes on life:
The British Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child links to and discusses a recent Daily Mail expose on the exploitative nature of fertility clinics, here.
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.
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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….
A couple of final book notes. First, it’s not too late to grab a copy of the Catholic Woman’s Book of Days for a Mother’s Day gift – even as a Kindle version.
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.
For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!
The How to Book of the Mass
h has “Watford Junction” as an end point, but has many stops before that and takes an hour. The one we went on had only two stops, and took, as I said, twenty minutes. The train going out wasn’t crowded, but coming back was packed, and we had to stand the entire time. You can use the Oyster Card for these fares, although I never could figure out exactly how much it was. All I knew is that I had enough to pay for it.
first the whole aspect of contemplating a cultural phenomenon in all of its dimensions, and this is one I’ve watched for a long time, every since my now-25 year old daughter became entranced at the age of 7. There’s also the factor of seeing creativity at work – hard at work. I don’t care what the subject matter is, or even if that subject matter engages me personally – if people are inspired and work hard to bring their vision to life, I’m interested in that process.
“Quiet please, Filming in Progress” signs in the square, and in the morning had seen a couple of vintage cars parked there. Well now, here was the filming, evidently. Big lights were set up, and people in yellow vests with walkie-talkies were milling about. What was it?
Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a “paron” above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme “Paron”, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited.
