BADD 2013 + Theology of the Body for Every Body

It’s BADD time again, May 1.  Of course I forgot, again, even though I knew it was coming up.  But look, over at New Evangelizers, I reviewed Theology of the Body for Everybody. Which hits on exactly this topic. The whole living-in-a-body experience we human persons get to enjoy.  Go look.

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And now you’re back, and here is my annual BADD comment, 2013 Edition:

People don’t want to be treated like dirt.

Profound, I know.  (Hence Leah Perrault’s whole book on the topic.  See “book review” above.)

When you read around at crotchety disability-rights sites, there’s a lot of conversation about how to think about disability.  Something that confuses bystanders is the insistence that it’s not about the medical condition.

Which puzzles, for several reasons.  The first is the happy-sad problem.  Given the choice between hearing and not-hearing, seeing and not-seeing, walking and not-walking, everything else equal, we go for the ability every time.

Now someone might say, “I’m so glad I had this stroke, because it caused me to learn so much about __{insert profound revelation here}__.”  And what they mean is typically not, “I always wanted to know what it was like to slur my speech!”

Rather, the “I’m so glad” is usually code for, “I discovered there was this whole part of my life I’d been ignoring, and now I’ve grown in ways that matter far more than any physical ability, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”  People say that, and they mean it.  For good reason.  But still, if they could have the spiritual growth and the ability to remember words on command, yeah, they’d take both.  Nothing wrong with being able to talk.  We know this, instinctively.

But here’s the other thing we know instinctively: Humans deserve to be treated with respect.  And the disrespect of disablism falls into two big lumps:

1. Can’t be bothered to have you around.  Too much work.  So terribly haaaaaarrrd to put in a ramp.  So coooooomplicated trying to have one Mass, anywhere in the diocese, ever, with an ASL interpreter.  So very, very overwhelming, having to change the seating arrangement, or modify the assignment, or find one more volunteer to assist the kid who needs assistance.

The message is pretty clear: It’s not that we don’t love you.  We just don’t love you enough to go through any inconvenience for you.

2. Your kind of suffering is not my kind of suffering. This is straight out of the eugenics playbook.  It’s no surprise that the recent fashion for killing off disabled children before they see light of day is always couched in terms of “avoiding suffering”.  Better to be dead than to be you.

The feeling may well be mutual, but that’s no solution.  The solution is to quit being such a wimp.  To quit dividing the Fates of Man into a two-part list, labeled Normal Problems and Pitiful Freaks.  This isn’t 1930.  Get over that nasty notion that you must be ranked among The Fit in order to deserve life and respect.

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And since BADD is the annual day for airing our pet peeves, I’ll share one with you: If you never really appreciated your kid-job-marriage-finger-toe-brain until it was gone . . . could you keep it to yourself? Or just let everyone know you have a gratitude-deficiency-disorder. I guess I could cultivate some compassion for that.

See all the BADD entries, which are by no means Catholic nor genteel, here.

April 8th HHS Contraceptive Mandate Comment Period Closes

Go here to leave a comment. Go ahead and do it right now, then you can come back to read my ranty-rant if you like.

Either you believe in women’s liberation or you don’t.  Do you believe that mentally competent, grown women are capable of making their own purchases?

Then require employers to pay us a living wage, and let us make our own purchases.

Women don’t need men at the office, men in Congress, or men at the HHS to force us to spend our wages on this pill or that surgery.  And we don’t need Mama making us buy stuff either.

We’re grown-ups.  Pay us fairly, and we’ll pick our own health insurance, thank you very much.

Book Review: Getting the Marriage Conversation Right

(There’s a book review coming at the bottom of this, but I need to lay out some preliminary matter first.  And this is a post concerning sex.  Not for children.)

To be Catholic is to be aware of a long list of my own faults.  Let’s review a few of them:  I goof off too much (not just on the internet, everywhere).  I lack patience for the most trivial of inconveniences.  When I’m irritated, I use my verbal powers for evil and not good.  I spend way too much money on myself, and far too little on the poor.  I procrastinate.  On any given day, there’s a decent chance I spent the time I meant to spend praying (not an exorbitant quantity) doing some other more entertaining and entirely optional thing.  For those who are familiar with the Little Flower, we could safely describe me as the Little Weed.  The anti-Therese.

And that’s just my public sins.  For every one you see on the kitchen floor, there’s a hundred more in the walls. If Therese is one of our few Doctors of Church, I’m guaranteed a spot among the vast number of Patients of the Church.

So be it.  Some people talk about so-called “Catholic Guilt”, and those people are invariably the ones who missed out — in whole or in part — on the real deal: Catholic Mercy.  If I don’t crumble in despair at the state of my soul  (and yes, actually despair is one of my sins as well), it’s because there’s hope for me.  Not hope that I’m going to wake up one morning suddenly meriting Heaven.  But because Someone Else has gone ahead and opened Heaven for me.  He loves me with His whole being, and will do anything — anything — to give me an shot at eternal happiness, mine only for the asking.  And not just me — He loves everybody that way.

My experience with evangelization is that few of us are converted because we suddenly discover how wretched we are, and thus desire to jump into the cosmic shower.  Quite the opposite: We long to know God, and having been drawn to Him, we begin to see, bit by bit, what life in Heaven looks like.  And what kind of baggage we’ll be leaving at the door when we get there.  Some things we drop like an old stinky garbage bag, in a flash of horrified understanding. Other things we keep stuffed in our pockets, sure they are part of us, or sure that these are little treasures we can sneak through eternal security . . . and it is only late in this life, or at the beginning of the next, that we catch on to the fact that, oops, we’ve been running around with the spiritual equivalent of a moldy rotten banana shoved in that coat pocket.

I’ve got rotten bananas in my pocket. (Usually only spiritually, though there was that one time I waited a month to clean out my tote bag . . . ick.)  But if your argument consists of, “Jen, you stink!” my response is, “Um, why yes, I do.”

I hate the topic of Gay Marriage.

Hate it.  Let me count the ways:

1) Because I know that the people who favor gay marriage do so for entirely understandable reasons.

2) Because I’m not an idiot.  I’ve known plenty of folks who favor same-sex unions, and who are, put simply, better people than me.  And they’re far and away better people than some of our rotten-to-the-core unrepentant clergy who’ve spent decades hiding despicable offenses.

3) The division concerning gay marriage doesn’t have its roots in questions about homosexuality.  For the last fifty years, the going cultural norm has been that whatever I desire, sexually, should be acted upon.  That marriage vows are no vow at all.  That children and marriage have nothing to do with one another.  That children have no particular need to be raised in a home with their mother and father.  That any parent-type figure will do just fine.

An aside: People have a hard time accepting that adopted children feel a genuine grief concerning their biological parents.  That very illusion — that your parents were unable to care for you, but hey, you have nothing to cry about — feeds into the destruction of marriage.  Something my dad said to me very plainly when he remarried after my mother’s death — I knew it, but he was absolutely right to lay it on the table  — was, “Your stepmother is not a replacement for your mother.”

It is a beautiful and wonderful thing when some loving person can step in and fill some portion of the blank left by the loss of loved one.  But it doesn’t erase the loss.  Acknowledging the loss makes it possible to delight in the sheer gift of this new and full and lively relationship, because we can accept it on its own terms, not pretend it is the other gift now gone.

4) A significant portion of the so-called Christian world doesn’t even acknowledge the horror of abortion.  An even larger chunk, including many people whose genuine faith in Christ I don’t doubt for a moment, think sterilization and contraception are AOK — desirable even.  And I don’t want to contemplate the numbers in the Church who approve or encourage the sin against purity we used to discreetly but emphatically call “self-abuse”.  Before you start citing the ancient Jewish law concerning homosexual acts, review the details concerning Onan, eh?  Struck dead on the spot?  Actions speak louder than words.  Disapproved.

5) I know that condemnation is the way of the world.  To ask for so-called “mercy” in the wider world is to heap condemnation upon yourself.  So I know that for many people dear to me, if I ever say, “Well, actually this one thing you’re doing is wrong,” those people I love will hear my words as code for, “Actually I hate you and I was just faking nice.”  Which isn’t true.  See my sins above — faking nice is not one of my virtues.

So to discuss gay marriage, at all, is to be accused of hatred.  I can discuss contraception, and people just think I’m a little daft.  I don’t mind that.  But I dislike the fact that to open this topic is to have a number of people I respect, admire, and count as friends, be tempted to assume the worst about me.  Well, the worst about me lies elsewhere.

[For the record: People hate you just as much if you talk about modesty in any specific terms.  Which I will be doing at NewEvangelizers.com in a couple weeks.  I'm racking up the voodoo rays this month.]

On to the Book Review

Getting the Marriage Conversation Right: A Guide for Effective Dialogue by William B. May is a short, readable booklet, written for a Catholic audience who wants to defend the sacrament of marriage, but suffer from poor rhetoric.  The assumption is that you the reader agree with the Catholic teaching, but perhaps you articulate it poorly.  You may even be currently basing your arguments on any number of details that simply aren’t Catholic.

Or you may be a Catholic who wants to follow Church teaching, but doesn’t understand why the bishops are so adamant about not allowing civil unions as a peaceful live-and-let-live alternative.

There is a single refrain that explains the disconnect between reality and popular culture.  The going definition of marriage in our society is this:

“Marriage is the public recognition of a committed relationship between two adults for their fulfillment”.

And let me observe right now: If this is your definition, it is logical to accept gay marriage.  Trouble being, that’s not what marriage is.  It is what civil marriage has become.  But it’s not what it is supposed to be.  Here’s the Real Ale definition of marriage, the one the Church is trying to defend, too little too late:

“Marriage unites a man and a woman with each other and any children born from their union.”

This is the radical reality that animates the entirety of Christian thought on marriage and sexuality.  Each child has a need to be raised by his mother and father.

Sometimes bad things happen — death, or serious sins such as an abusive parent, or a rapist father — that make this need impossible to fulfill.  When that happens, we have no choice but to go with the next best thing, whether it be single parenting, or remarriage, or adoption.  The next best thing, in the context of a response to tragedy, becomes the very picture of self-giving love.  Anyone who steps into fill the void for a child who is unable to be reared by both his mother and his father?  A true hero.

We live in a fallen world, and marriage faces countless obstacles.  Getting the Marriage Conversation Right addresses each of these difficulties in turn, and explains how we are to understand a proper response to _______ problem.  The book repeatedly admonishes us to avoid the temptation to condemnation, and maintains a thoroughly Catholic — that is, merciful — response to the many problems that individuals may face.

No hate-spewing.  No tsk-tsking.  No “they deserve what they get”.  None of that.

Who Should Read This Book?

The audience is those who accept, or wish to more fully accept, Catholic teaching on the sanctity of marriage.  If you aren’t interested in being convinced, you won’t find this book convincing. It’s a book of explanations for why the Church teaches as she does, and how to effectively communicate that teaching to others.

The reading level is all-adults.  The tone is conversational and the word count is short and to-the-point.  This is an excellent resource for a parish study group.

Helpful for Outsiders?

If you are in favor of same-sex unions, will this book help you understand the other side?  A lot depends on your mentality.  This is an unabashed defense of the Catholic teaching, written by and for those who want to agree with it.  There is no effort to create, within the book, an apologetic geared towards the worthy opponent. Yes, if you read the booklet with a desire to understand, in the spirit of true dialogue, why people oppose same-sex unions, you will in fact learn why people oppose same-sex unions.

But if it’s going to make your blood boil to see anyone lay out a defense of a position you abhor, then yeah, it’s going to make your blood boil.  No way around it.

Summary: Good book.  Short, readable, gets straight to the heart of the matter.  This is the first title I’ve read on this topic, and it does a good job at what it does.  For those who oppose same-sex unions, but don’t really know why, or how to explain their position, this book makes a good start.

Boilerplate:This review was written as part of the Catholic book reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on Getting the Marriage Conversation Right. The Catholic Company is the best resource for all your seasonal needs such as First Communion gifts as well as ideas and gifts for the special papal Year of Faith.

Seven Takes: Life, Death, Warped Things Governments Do

No, I’m not back to regular blogging.  But I had approximately seven things to say, and it’s a Friday, so that makes this Seven Quick Takes, right?

1.  Why yes, that was us you saw at the National Vocations Meet-Up March for Life.

Low point:  Children in tears due to experience of being a southern-person whose mother does not know how to dress them for cold weather.

High point: Making a brief retreat into the National Gallery to go potty, rest, and warm-up, then re-emerging to a gentle made-for-TV snow flurry, taking up our signs, and falling into line with these guys.  Who sing beautifully.

Weird Point: The Metronome, as my 3rd-grader calls it, is determined not to take my money.  I kept trying to pay full fare, but the machines refused me at every turn. Fortunately the kind metro-ladies are apparently used to clueless tourists with five children in tow, and sorted me out with a combination of generosity and exasperation that I think must be the hallmark of the metro system.

2. Petersburg National Battlefield is a good place to run the kids and get your history fix all at once.  The ranger does come around checking to see if you’ve paid.

–> Touring tip:  Always ask if you’re supposed to pay.  Because they expect you to pay, even if they never ever tell you that.  And the ranger lady has a gun.  Luckily I had asked.

Discussion Question: Any Particular Reason the Union had to engage in war?  Why not just let the Confederacy secede, and work on patching things up diplomatically?  Put another way:  Did the US Civil War meet just war criteria for the Union?

My boy says yes.  I’m playing neutral professor-person.

In other US history topics: The essay “Smuggler Nation” in this month’s Harpers is really quite good. One more shovel of fodder for that pirates-vs.-privateers topic that’s always coming up around this household.

Our other airline-miles magazine subscription, Western Horseman ran a great piece a month or so ago on the troubles ranchers along the US-Mexican border are having with Mexican smugglers, and the lack of cooperation from some of the US border patrol in keeping their lands safe.  I can’t seem to find an article link.  But let me just say right now, that if you purchase approximately one plane ticket every five years, and want a family-friendly periodical to purchase with your miles before they expire, WH is the one.

3.  My son objects to the strong language in Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Views the Body.  It pleases me greatly to discover I’ve reared a middle-schooler who complains about words like “damn” and “hell” improperly used.

4.  My January New Evangelizers column was 10 Ways to Support Evangelization Even When Your Parish is Falling Apart.

I picked this photo.

Apparently it grabbed someone’s attention, because the Catholic Vitamins people invited me to do an interview for their podcast.  Which is exciting, in an I-hope-my-phone-battery-doesn’t-die-while-we’re-talking kind of way.  I think I can bribe my kids into being quiet with the promise of Krispy Kreme donuts.  Also, presumably this is just one step on the long road towards true fame? By which I mean, of course, being on Rhett & Link’s Good Mythical Morning? My son doesn’t think I’ll ever be quite that good, but he puts on an encouraging face all the same.

5.  Helen Alvare nails it on the head in her analysis of the new HSS regulations.

Let me observe once again that there would be no moral objection at all if the government merely required employers to pay workers a sum sufficient to pay for the desired contraceptive services — for example, by putting the necessary funds into a healthcare savings account that employees could then use to purchase supplemental insurance if they so chose.

And how exactly is it “freedom of religion” if insurance companies and self-insurance administrators must sell (or give away, per the new iteration of regulations) products they may themselves object to?  Is there no legal right to sell insurance for some but not all health care services?  Will insurers eventually be required to pay for euthanasia as well?  Apparently there is a religious test required in order to enter the insurance industry.

6.  Speakin’ of that constitution thing . . . my boy observes that 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides.  (Wikipedia’s citing 60%.) Which puts a certain corner of the culture in the odd position of wanting to outlaw something they’re trying to legalize.  Apparently depressed and disabled people should die, but only at the hands of licensed death-care providers?

If you aren’t from Gunlandia, you probably should not visit gunmemes.com. It takes a special red-state redness to enjoy.

7.  You know you live in a warped culture when you feel the need to clarify something like this: “For the record, I’m 100% opposed to all forms of murder and suicide.”

Ooh, oooh, want me to exasperate everybody in one single catechism quote? How about this one?  Enough to make everyone you know get all squirmy-wormy:

2269 The fifth commandment forbids doing anything with the intention of indirectly bringing about a person’s death. The moral law prohibits exposing someone to mortal danger without grave reason, as well as refusing assistance to a person in danger.

The acceptance by human society of murderous famines, without efforts to remedy them, is a scandalous injustice and a grave offense. Those whose usurious and avaricious dealings lead to the hunger and death of their brethren in the human family indirectly commit homicide, which is imputable to them.⁷⁰

Unintentional killing is not morally imputable. But one is not exonerated from grave offense if, without proportionate reasons, he has acted in a way that brings about someone’s death, even without the intention to do so.

Happy February.

3.5 Time Outs: Tigering

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who is himself Mr. Thankful today, good guy that he is.

Click and be amazed.

1.

Yesterday the kids and I turned out at the parish gym to help get the St. Vincent de Paul boxes of Thanksgiving food put together.  It was our first time.  It’s a two-step operation, well-run, which is what happens when you have a ministry put into the hands of a large group of retired professionals.  We arrived during opening prayers; long tables were already set up with different food-category stations on each table, clearly labeled.  Green beans, corn, other vegetables, canned fruit, snacks, pasta, breakfast, cranberry sauce . . . etc.

In one corner was the haul of imperishables donated by the parish the previous day. Our first job was to grab bags of unsorted food and walk the tables, getting all our food to the proper piles.  Three big kids worked independently, with the occasional, “Mom, what is this?” question about mysterious food items.  My only rule was Please Do Not Pick a Bag With Glass Jars In It.

6-year-old and I worked as a team.  She was quite insistent about putting all the food from her bag up on the tables herself.  If I impulsively reached in to help her quickly get all her creamed soup cans shelved, she’d complain, and I’d have to let her put up one of my food items as compensation for her missed opportunity.

The second job was to get the freshly-organized foods into the baskets.  Our leader walked the aisles and estimated how many of each item we had, and thus how many could be put into each box.  Then each person or team was given a food product to distribute.  We were the Stuffing People.  Two boxes of stuffing in each of the hundred boxes.   Half-dozen Hispanic families had their boxes pulled aside, and our venerable Spanish Lady (a real live 80-something lady originally from Spain, with a brilliantly German last name) saw that all the salsa and tortillas went into those boxes.  Hint: If you are more of a salsa person than a weird-packets-of-instant-gravy person, if you ever need food relief, give the SVDP ladies a Spanish-sounding pseudonym.

2.

Tigering is the new verb around our house.

Tigering is what The Tiny Tiger does. All the time.

3.

What with the Groaning Ladies Show having come to season’s end, Sunday and last night we watched The Dust Bowl.  Good way to get your head on straight for Thanksgiving.

3.5

Fifi the resident cat does not care for the Tiny Tiger.  But she seems to be getting along with the young interloper better now that the Tiger has been taken on as the Chief Pot-Licker’s protege.  Last night during The Dust Bowl, all pots having been duly cleaned, they spent a full two hours rough-housing in the living room.

So the dog knows that the bunnies and chickens and the cat belong to us, and that the kitten is an orphaned puppy in need of a good upbringing.  She also knows that squirrels and voles are for hunting, but that SuperHusband will step in and take over when it comes to possums.  There was confusion the other week though, about what to do with the big fuzzy

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Well, that’s all for this week.   Tuesday’s Link Day, which is when instead of e-mailing fun things I ought to post but forget to, you just tell the world all by yourself.  Entirely optional.  I’m pretty swamped with real life but I’ll try to post updates here as I work through my to-do list elsewhere on the internet. Have a great week.

3.5 Time Outs: Entertained.

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who has his own entertainment post up today.

Click and be amazed.

1.

At CatholicMom.com, I have a post up for November about how to get along at holiday parties, even if people bring up the topic of homeschooling. Apparently I hit a chord, because I’ve gotten some good feedback.  Mostly from non-homeschoolers.  Also, it was a great excuse to use this photo:

It would be convenient if I had married a guy who liked to take pictures of homeschoolers, and CCD classes, and stuff like that.  (Um, except, we’re not allowed to publish photos of CCD kids, so I guess it would just be some adult teaching and a bunch of blurred-out backs of heads.)  Instead every month I amuse Lisa Hendey with my proposed alternate illustration for the homeschooling column.  So far she hasn’t rejected any.  Patient lady.

2.

Sunday night I helped out in a colleague’s CCD class by dressing up like this venerable creole candidate for sainthood:

I own absolutely nothing that could be described at mid-19th century clothing, but the 6th graders were very polite, and overlooked the fact that my costume was really more like Faux-Edwardian-Pulled-From-late-20th-Century-Closet.  Also, I learned a surprising number of the kids had some knowledge of the French language.  I’d estimate 2/5ths of the class.

Heartening: 95% of the class had no difficulty with coming to Ven. Henriette’s same conclusion, that having a wife in the countryside and a mistress in the city was not the Catholic way.  Good for them.  The other 5% just weren’t paying attention, but once they heard what I had said, they too, agreed.   I guess it’s easier in 6th grade, when who wants a girlfriend anyway?

3.

Eldest daughter and I have recently gotten hooked on The Groaning Lady Show.  So-called by the guys in our household.  Who always come and watch it.

 

3.5

St. Monica, of course.  In other homeschooling news:

a) We’ve completed Q1 with varying amounts of success, and are jumping into Q2 today with varying amounts of enthusiasm.

b) I tried to vote mid-morning, but estimated the line was about an hour long, not so fun for young children, particularly the one with a nasty scrape on her hand from tripping on the walk down the block, plus an un-fun headcold.  We retreated, charged the iPods, and will give it another shot after lunch with entertainment in hand.  Most years there isn’t much of a line, but apparently people are a touch worked up about this election.  Go figure.

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Well, that’s all for this week.   Tuesday’s Link Day, which is when instead of e-mailing fun things I ought to post but forget to, you just tell the world all by yourself.  Entirely optional.  I’m pretty swamped with real life but I’ll try to post updates here as I work through my to-do list elsewhere on the internet. Have a great week.

3.5 Time Outs: Charisms

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who’s got the best hurricane photo going.

Click and be amazed.

1.

SuperHusband & I went to the state Catholic Charismatic Conference this weekend.  Friday evening began with such a promising start that we dragged the kids along Saturday so we could both attend all day.  Yes, I bribed them.  They seem to be okay with that.

I don’t actually have a charismatic bent, but it’s comfortable enough once you’ve traveled in Evangelical circles for a while.  Here’s what we liked:

• All the songs were about God, and directed to Him.
• The guest speaker taught the Catholic faith.
• The people were friendly.

Yep.  I will totally turn out for that.

2.

The retreat leader was Fr. Peter Sanders from New Pentecost Catholic Ministries.  The topic was “The Character of Christ”, the focus being on using the cardinal virtues to conform your life to Christ.  Knowing nothing else about the guy than what I saw and heard Friday and Saturday, I’d recommend him if you are looking for a guest speaker.  100% Catholic, no patience for New Age nonsense, and no patience for the showboating that can swirl around certain Charismatic circles (not something I’ve ever seen from a local, FYI).

Recall that SuperHusband reverted to the Church less than two years ago, though he’d been attending Catholic churches for all his vacation/travel church attendance for years prior.   This was the first time he’d ever heard of the cardinal virtues.  Next day at dinner he was telling some friends about the talks.  “What a great framework! Apparently it’s this well-established thing.  Very useful.  I wonder why I’ve never heard a sermon about it?  You’d think it would be the kind of thing priests would teach in their homilies.”

I’ve been Catholic much longer, and I think I’ve heard a priest mention the virtues in passing one time.  Note to priests and deacons: “The Cardinal Virtues” isn’t being overdone these days.  You could preach about that.  Thanks.

3.

Because homework is not his charism, our boy is currently living the iPod-free lifestyle.  Which  means he needs some kind of other music to listen to when he does dishes.  So he’s taken to composing fake VBS theme songs.  Yesterday’s was, “I’m a Little Bitty Platypus in a Great Big World”.  Took me hours to get the tune out of my head.

3.5

I went crazy and volunteered my own house for the annual homeschool All Saints Party (long story), because certain of my children have been planning their costumes for months. Eldest daughter did a saint-change on account of how even though it’s very cool to carry around eyeballs on a platter, St. Lucy is just too easy to guess.  She’s going with a more obscure saint.  And the youngest is of course going to be

***

Well, that’s all for this week.  Tuesday’s Link Day, which is when instead of e-mailing fun things I ought to post but forget to, you just tell the world all by yourself.  Entirely optional.  I’m pretty swamped with real life but I’ll try to post at least once more this week as I work through my review-backlog. Have a great week.

Religious Freedom. Worth Keeping.

 

It’s that time again.  Find a list of locations here.  If you aren’t able to attend one, think now about what you could do tomorrow — prayer, fasting, offering something up, doing a work of mercy — to stand in solidarity with those who are showing up on your behalf.

Reminder: This is a not a partisan issue.  This is not about money.  If it were about money, the US government would do just as well requiring employers to set aside the necessary amount of health care savings, and leave it to employees to decide whether or not they need this or that type of insurance.

To gather the critical number of participants per plan, the US government is entirely capable of asking health insurers to organize their policies by groups of some kind other than “employees of this” and “employees of that”.  You could, say, simply pool all people in each state who want a particular level of insurance from a particular provider into a single insurance pool.  Not complicated.  The alternatives are myriad.  It is absolutely not necessary to require employers to purchase specific products directly.

Does your boss buy your Christmas tree?  Your hot dogs?  Your swimsuit?  It is entirely legitimate for the government to require employers to pay fair wages, including sufficient amounts to cover health care costs.  It is not legitimate to require individual employers to purchase products directly for their employees, with no regard for the employer’s religious beliefs.  Or the employee’s beliefs.  Please, no, give my money to charity, I don’t need that ____.

3.5 Time Outs: Family Life

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who is nothing if not a family kinda guy.

Click and be amazed.

1.

This weekend I met a couple of the ladies from the Society of Joyful Hope.  I’d never heard of such a thing!  A real-life support group for families that use NFP!  A true support group, btw, not just your NFP instructor checking in to remind you what Acheiving-Related Behavior tends to achieve.  The group prays together, and then kids do activities and the parents talk about parenting.  Very cool.

1.A You can see their website here, and though the events page is a running behind on updates, they are an active organization.  I’m in that blissful state where I am not the least bothered by people who are running a tiny bit behind on website maintenance.  Ahem.

1.B The nice thing about openness-to-life is that eventually you don’t need to go visit the NFP instructor to be reminded what Achieving-Related Behavior acheives.  Your children are there to remind you.  All the time.

1.C  I was showing around Sarah’s new pregnancy book, and the Joyful Hope lady exclaimed when she saw Hallie Lord’s endorsement on the cover.  Solving the mystery of what it was that had caused Betty Beguiles to pick up and move south.  Wow.  I had no idea.

1.D More cool: Fr. Kirby at Charleston Vocations gave us a bunch of t-shirts to give away for prizes at our Family Life reception.

1.E Triple Cool: Eldest daughter has been reading assorted fiction and lives of saints from Pauline Media, causing her to ask all kinds of questions about the Daughters of St. Paul.  Mostly: What do they wear?  So it was neato to walk into the Doughnut Room and, surprise!, there was Sister Francis, whom I’d never met before, but it turns out is very good at chatting with girls interested in all things Nuns Who Publish Books.  Less cool: I had no money with me for book-buying.  Because of course the girls found something they liked.

2.

Coolness aside, here’s the real topic: How Good is Your Parish at Doing Family-Friendly Ministries?

I had a conversation with a young mom, not at my parish, who had moved up from Florida (St. Agnes’s in Naples, I think?), and she really missed the number of family events and activities at her former parish.  I got to thinking about it, and realized that one of the things sabotaging some of my own parish’s ministries is a lack of Stuff for the Whole Family to Do.

It’s not like families with young children are really going to turn out for ministries five nights a week, don’t mistake me.  There’s only so much a person with humans for children can do, time-and-energy-wise.  But in order for a family with young children to do anything. at. all., there has to be provision for the whole family.  The crying people.  The climbing-the-curtains people.  The elementary-aged people.  The teen people.  The female people.  The male people.  All of them.  And if we’re feeling broad-minded, how about the elderly-relative-living-with-you people?  Or the not-so-polished-in-the-social-skills-for-reasons-beyond-their-control people?

–> Because otherwise, church stuff breaks apart the family.  Oh it’s all lovely to get together with just the girls, or just the fathers-n-sons, or whatever it is.  We do that here and there.  Sunday afternoon our girls met for Little Flowers while our boys went mountain biking.  It was good.  But there are only seven nights in a week, and people keep insisting we eat dinner together at least a few of those.

[Without wishing to pull out the Evangelicals Are Smarter Than Us card, I will point out that on Wednesday nights around my town, most of the other churches are hosting an evening of this-n-that, in which you can bring your whole family, and all y'all get your faith-formation or ministering-to-people fix in one fell swoop.  It's only one night a week.  But it's one night a week.  Some of the churches do the same thing Sunday nights too.  Or Fridays.  Or whatever.]

So anyhow, that’s my question: If your parish is successful at getting families involved in the life of the church, what is it that works so well?

3.

Happiness is agreeing with your editor.

3.5

fairy wings and magic wands.  Works great.

***

Well, that’s all for this week.  Tuesday’s Link Day, which is when instead of e-mailing fun things I ought to post but forget to, you just tell the world all by yourself.  Entirely optional.

Higher Ed – My Answers

Just mailed off my answers to Friday’s questions.  Here they are.  Now going to take a peek at everyone else’s.

1.      What is your opinion of the value of college in today’s society?

College covers a wide variety of types of education. With that in mind, I see several common types of value, but they will vary from student to student:

-Professional training.  In fields such as health care, engineering, accounting, and so forth, as well as smaller but still important fields such as the theoretical sciences, social sciences, and the like, there’s a lot to be learned.  College provides a place to learn it.

-Learning how to think.  Whether through a rigorous liberal arts program, or through the study of the sciences, or honestly any subject studied in depth, something college can do, but doesn’t always, is give the student training in how to study, how to research a question, how to think about a topic in a mature and thoughtful way, and ideally, how to act on the findings.

-Signaling to employers.  This to me is the most common reason students today attend college, and an unfortunately necessary one, but one which I think is wasteful.  Completing a college degree tells employers, “I can do the work”.  Getting a high school diploma was once this signal.  Getting an 8th grade diploma was once this signal.  Now we find people getting masters degrees, and employers requiring them, just to signal who stands out from the crowd as college becomes watered-down as well.  I don’t think this is a good trend.

-As I mentioned on the phone, I think sadly, one purpose of our state and community colleges is to provide a high school education.  In SC the quality of high schools varies tremendously.  As a result, many students who finish high school with decent grades have not yet received a high school education.  They come to college and are given courses in algebra, basic writing skills, and supplemental tutoring for their other courses, to make up for what they did not learn, and should have, in high school.  This reality is shameful for our public schools, but of course I am glad that there is some means that students who persevere through their lousy high school can in the end get the education they deserve.

 

2.      Do you believe in the theory that everyone should have a college education?

No.  I think college is being used for the average student as a substitute for a good 8th grade education.  Read through a copy of the McGuffy Reader Book 6.  It’s a school reading book series published in 1879, once widely used throughout the US in pre-high-school education.  The selections are what students now read in college. I do think that this kind of education — a well-rounded liberal arts education — combined with professional training either in secondary schools, or trade schools, or college, or on-the-job, I do think this is necessary for nearly everyone.  But it’s a pathetic state of affairs when what used to pass for 8th grade is now being taught at University.

I think that teens who resist being forced to sit still, and to “learn” virtually nothing for years, when they are at the peak of their energy level, and ready to prove themselves and learn on the job, I think these teens are feeling a normal, healthy impulse.  It’s normal to want to *do* something, not just sit around.  It’s silly to water down school and then wonder why kids drop out.  It’s a travesty that there are no good options for young people who want to go right into the working world, whether before or after high school, and come back to higher education later in life.  I think for many young people, some real-life work experience first would add value to their education when they are ready to resume their studies in a more serious way.

I think also the emphasis on official certifications (“getting the piece of paper”) versus real learning is embarrassing.  How can it be more valuable to be forced to learn something for a test, than to go out and learn it on your own, out a pure desire to gather the knowledge?  Silly.

3.      According to Louis Menand, author of “Live and Learn”, there are three theories of why people attend college. The first theory is that college is an intelligent test meaning people go to college to prove they are smart. The second theory people go to college is for the social benefits since college should theoretically be getting people ready to enter society. The third theory is that college is job training. How does this align with you own theory of the purpose of college? Do you believe in these some values?

Per my answer in #1, I somewhat agree with this.  I’d like to talk, though, about the “getting people ready to enter society”.  College does try to do this to you.  As a simple fact, the professors and staff do try to impart their values on their students, and are often successful. (And wish you well in the process — they are trying to do you a service). And this is a concern to me, because we can see that some widely-held values in our society are in fact quite harmful.  But let me clarify: The problem here isn’t that students learn the values of their professors; it’s that our culture is warped to a point that the values being taught are simply wrong.  In those schools where students are taught to live well and think clearly, college can be an immense help.

I’ll also observe that in preparing to enter the adult world, long hours spent goofing off with other teenagers is . . . maybe not the most effective method?  That what we end up with is not young people who learn to act like grown-ups, but rather grown-ups who go on to spend their whole life acting like children.  They think they’re being grown-up, because they’re still doing what they learned to do in college.

(This is nothing new, by the way.  From the very invention of the university, students were notorious for plaguing the townspeople with their binge drinking and other misbehavior. Maybe it’s time to reconsider how we do student housing?)

 

4.      Growing up was your value of a college education influenced in any way? If so was it family? Teachers? Or some other form?

In our family, the expectation was that we’d go to college.  Normal as drinking water or decorating a Christmas tree.  Just what you do.  Not a question, just a way of life.

 

5.      In recent years the availability of a college education has changed and become more accessible to more people. For example there are online Universities, certain states offer scholarships to many high school graduates, and there is government funding to minorities. Do you agree or disagree with this?

I think it is good to make college more accessible, to not have it be the province of the wealthy, as it once was.  I don’t always care for the particulars of every way this happens — for example, I don’t like scholarship programs that pressure students into attending college before they are ready for it..  I am strongly in favor of education that is universally available at modest cost, throughout the lifetime of the citizen.

6.      What will you teach your own kids about the value of a college education? What influences this?

I’m encouraging my kids to discern their vocation: What does God want me to do with my life?  College is something that will either fit in with that, or not.  I think of my kids as being “college material”, because yes, they’re smart, inquisitive, talented . . . everything points towards “should go to college”.  But ultimately I don’t want them to just follow a set path.  I want them to follow *their* path, whatever that is.   I thinks it’s dangerous to approach life by doing what you’re “supposed to do” because that’s what “everyone does” or “it’s the thing to do”.  Rather contrary to the point of a university, don’t you think?  To accept something as true without testing it?  Without probing and asking, “Is this really right?”.  There’s no sense sending a kid to learn critical thinking, if you only came up with that decision due to a failure in critical thinking. :-).