This week has been Exhibit A in “Why I could never lease a car.” Back and forth to Montgomery on Monday for a talk, then over and back from Atlanta today to pick up some stuff from my oldest’s condo – he moved to NYC in January, has the closing on his Atlanta place on Friday, and had a few things in it that he will probably want someday, but can’t have up in NYC right now, considering he’s renting one room in a house in Brooklyn at the moment.
Plus the usual at least 40-50 miles/day I put on in my rounds to various schools…I can’t imagine a life of only putting 10-15,000 miles/year on a car. I’d like to, but right now…it can’t happen.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! More about him here, including from two of my books, the Loyola Kids Book of Saints and The Words We Pray.
Is your diocese dispensing from the Lenten Friday abstinence? Ours is, with a caveat:
To eat meat on this Friday, Catholics in Diocese of Birmingham must do one of these penances:
1. Pray the rosary for increase of vocations in the Diocese of Birmingham;
2. Participate in public celebration of the Stations of the Cross;
3. Do an act of charity;
4. Read scripture on the Passion of the Lord;
5. Spend time and pray before the Most Blessed SacramentMay St. Patrick intercede for us to celebrate his memory well and to practice our Lenten penance with contrite heart with prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
Rocco has a Master List at his place.
Charles Collins, formerly of Vatican Radio, now writes for Crux – a superb call on Crux’s part – and has thoughts on this patchwork of regulations and dispensations:
Instead we get a hodgepodge of contradictory rules, and people get upset because their bishop didn’t give the dispensation, or they fret that no one really cares about Lent anymore, or they just find the conditions attached to the dispensation confusing.
There is no other day on the Church calendar which causes such a fuss. No scorecards are needed for St. Stanislaus or Saint John of God, which also often fall during Lent, despite the strong devotion of segments of the population to these saints.
Saint Patrick is different. The Church in Ireland has had an outsize influence on the Church in the United States, even when taking into account the large number of Irish immigrants who came to the country. In many ways, American Catholicism grew from an Irish root, and in Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day is a solemnity and meat is allowed.
What a glorious anniversary! It’s been a whole week since the BBC Dad explosion, and did you ever? Yes, it’s true that one of the things I hate about writing on the Internet – are questions about what people write about on the Internet. As in: Why are you writing about that? And not this Important Thing? Hate it.
BUT.
Think for a minute about the people who spent a whole lot of time last weekend extrapolating Big Themes from 30 seconds in another family’s life and fighting with each other about said Big Themes.
God almighty, it was not a big deal. It was cute. It was funny. It just happened. It really was not a deeply meaningful leading indicator of Gender Relations. And…there were more interesting things to do last weekend than fight on Facebook about this, I’m pretty sure.
He told the Wall Street Journal: ‘As soon as she opened the door I saw her image on my screen. She was in a hippity-hoppity mood that day because of the school party.’
Prof Kelly, 44, said he gamely tried to continue with the interview but then nine-month-old James tottered into the room. ‘Then I knew it was over,’ he said.
To complete the farce, his wife Jung-a Kim then came skidding through the door.
She grabbed the two youngsters and attempted to drag them out of the door, but one of them could be heard wailing and the baby’s walker got stuck in the door.
(The WSJ article mentioned is behind a paywall now, but it mentioned that Jung-a Kim was recording the interview airing on the television in the other room – recording it with her phone – and didn’t notice the kids were up to anything until they appeared on the screen.)
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Gene Luen Yang is a favorite around here – a great storyteller and graphic novelist. He’s also a Catholic. Christianity Today has a nice article about the McArthur “Genius” grant winner, his art and his faith:
Yang admits these tensions were not always easy for him to navigate, but his perspective on not fitting in has changed over time. “Now, when I look back, I feel really grateful and appreciative of being an outsider,” Yang told me. “When you are in a place of comfort, there are things you end up taking for granted.” While his upbringing and education were privileged in many ways, Yang is familiar with the feeling of cultural discomfort.
Spurred on by the complex tensions between his Chinese-Christian and Western-American heritage, Yang’s work represents an ongoing quest to better understand himself, his faith, and the world around him. He often takes his characters on similar journeys of exploring identity, place, and purpose—something that readers of any cultural and faith background can connect with.
From last December, a local (Atlanta) news feature on the Hawthorne Dominicans’ ministry in the city:
The Monk who saves manuscripts from ISIS:
Under Stewart’s direction, HMML has expanded its activities to India, where it recently photographed 10,000 palm-leaf manuscripts, and to Ethiopia, where it digitized the Garima Gospels, believed to be the oldest surviving Ethiopian manuscripts. The organization has also worked in Middle Eastern countries like Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey, photographing thousands of manuscripts of all confessions and languages, from Coptic to Maronite and from Greek to Latin.
In 2013, the organization decided to start digitizing Islamic material as well. In Mali, HMML is currently digitizing more than 300,000 Islamic manuscripts, which risked being destroyed when Islamists associated with al-Qaeda took over the city of Timbuktu in 2012.
With the rise of ISIS, 2,000 out of the 6,000 manuscripts that HMML managed to digitize in Iraq between 2009 and 2014 have been lost or destroyed. Other manuscripts digitized in Syria may have suffered the same fate.
Starting to think about Easter gifts? First Communion? Confirmation Mother’s Day?
For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!
Charlotte was Both 