3.5 Time Outs: New Things

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who’s also doing a time-travel edition today.

Click and be amazed.

1.

Blogging Popes.  That’s my topic for today.  Not the kind you’re thinking of, though.

2.

See, here’s what happened:  Saturday night I was bored, tired, and itching for something to read.  Something fun and relaxing and novel.  Meaning, new-to-me.  I usually grab one of my daughter’s library books for this purpose — just enough entertainment to get me through a non-digital Sunday, but not so much that I’ll be out of service, glued to a book, for 10,000 hours waiting for Br. Cadfael to tell me who did it.  But I needed novelty.

So I went to Papal Encyclicals Online.  I’m sure that’s what you do, too.  But before you get too impressed, keep in mind that the three reasons this was a possible source of reading material were:

• I’d never read most of them before.  Strike one against my Catholic-nerd credentials.
• They’re usually very short.  This is why I’ve read the minor prophets, but *still* never gotten through all of Isaiah.
• There was no chance I’d let the cat starve, or grouse at my children for interrupting me during an especially gripping scene.

And the thing is, they tend to cover that same juicy ground as your average Catholic blogger, only you get bonus credit for not being stuck to the computer all day while you work up your angry frenzy at the injustice in the world.  Of course, no Star Trek screen shots for illustrations, but look, I was desperate for entertainment.

3.

And the one I picked was Rerum Novarum.  Which is basically a series of blog posts on economics.  Perfect.

(Let me just say right now, JPII’s follow-up work is not blog-genre.  Waaay more wordy.  Waaay more.  I haven’t finished it yet.  But I’m half thinking, “What more is there to say?  Leo.Encyclicalpress.com already covered the whole territory.  But you know how it is, people need to explain the obvious.  Or maybe people needed the obvious re-explained.)

Here’s a sample snippet of the Leonine goodness:

Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.

And this:

The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men.

Followed by this:

To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

 

See? I spent my weekend reading 64 Cath-Econ-blog posts, 19th century edition.

3.5

And although I could pretty much shut my eyes and point my finger anywhere in the document to find a good quotable quote, one of my underlined favorites is

***

Well that’s all for today.  Still accepting suggestions for additions to the sidebar, so tell me who to add.  But do just one link per comment, because otherwise the robotic spam-dragon will consume the whole lot of them.  Thanks!

How’s the parish doing? Depends on who you ask.

OSV reported the other week on CARA’s most recent survey of parish leaders.  The money quote:

The latest survey shows that parish ministry leaders, for the most part, are satisfied with their work, which they see as a calling, and believe that their individual parishes are meeting their communities’ spiritual needs.

And this is what you’d hope. I’ve never met someone in ministry who was going at it indifferently.  Church staff work hard and give it their best.  Volunteers pour out their time and energy, a free gift, given in love. They can see that what they do matters.

When I teach religious ed, I’m encouraged by the number of students who think my classes are fantabulous.  But then there’s the other ones.  The kid who quietly disappears mid-year.  The mom that told me this summer, “My daughter dreaded your class.”  (It was an easily fixable problem — nervousness about the test — but one I could not know about, until someone told me.  I’m glad Mom told me, however belatedly.)

The parish leadership survey unwittingly uncovers a terrible problem, though: Most parish leaders think they’re doing just fine.

Well, we aren’t.

It’s easy to dismiss the person who pew who “won’t get involved”.  Those types must not care about their faith, we say.  They just want to complain. They don’t want to be part of the solution.  Hmmn.  Maybe.

But really?  Do people come to Mass each week, hoping to avoid the community of the faithful the other six days?  “Lord, I got up early on my day off to come to this place,  please don’t get me interested in learning about You, or serving You, the other hours of the week.”  Is someone kneeling in the pew before Mass, praying, “Dear Jesus,  I sit every week next to these other Christians . . . please keep me from becoming friends with any of them.  I already have all the friends I can stand.”

No.

Lapsed Catholics are a thornier situation yet.  A vast and complicated problem, with no single answer.  But I know Catholics — earnest, lifelong, pious Catholics — who leave the Church.  Because it stinks.  Because they were in a crisis and nobody noticed, let alone cared.  Because the Church-ocracy demon is out of control, creating a thousand bureaucratic hurdles in the name of “efficiency” or “thoroughness”.  Because the liturgy makes them want to hide under the pew until it’s over — or as happened once years ago when Jon and I were on vacation, my then-protestant husband turned to me and asked, “Are you sure this is a Catholic church?”

Are these good reasons to leave the Church?  They are understandable reasons.

We have the Eucharist, that’s reason to stay.  Have that, all the rest is details.   But goodness, the details.  We kid ourselves if we count only the satisfied customers.

3.5 Time Outs: The Sitcom Life

As I’m writing this on Monday and getting it scheduled for Tuesday, it’s occurred to me that Sept. 11th is a serious day.  Also my niece’s birthday. Please feel free to commemorate more solemn matters, and come back here to my trivial  comedy of a life some other day.

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who has never made me laugh during Mass, but often at other times.

Click and be amazed.

1.

You know those movies where the lead characters acquire the run-down house/school/shop/bus/crematorium, and with the help of a fast-forward film sequence and a peppy soundtrack, they all pitch in and get the place cleaned up in about 2.5 minutes?  Complete with a spunky sign to announce their new venture?

I walked through my yard Sunday afternoon, and confirmed I am living in the “before” scene.

So now I just need some colorfully-dressed teenagers and a singing nun to descend on the place and fix it up.  Preferably before the Tinkerbell-themed birthday party this weekend.

2.

I’m not winning the holiness award.  Because if your group stands up at the start of Mass and warms-up by chanting “Yellow Leather Red Leather”? Yes.  I’m going to bust out laughing.  In church.

3.

But I’ll try do it quietly.  At least until I get to the parking lot.  Then I’m going to laugh very loudly.  And probably use the Lord’s name in vain, but then quickly convert it into a prayer of some nature, to do a kind of retroactive-save on that decidedly un-holy verbal reflex.

My son is 98%  holier than me, or at least 1 chromosome better suited for the priesthood (we knew that), because he kept a straight face the whole mass, and afterwards.  I was amazed.

3.5

. . . the Spanish Mass. [Where they do not do tongue-twister warm-ups — we’ve changed scenes completely.]  We have a new Spanish priest now, and he does not use the words “Jesus-Christo” and “Salvacion” as often as the previous one.  Which means I can no longer understand 5% of the homily, like I used to do under the old regime.  I do still like the mariachi mass, though.   So perky.

 

***

Still accepting suggestions for additions to the sidebar, so tell me who to add.  But do just one link per comment, because otherwise the robotic spam-dragon will consume the whole lot of them.  Thanks!

The Kolbe Reviews: Religion

Freedom’s just another word for “knowing what to do.” And then doing it.

I’ve been using the Faith and Life textbook series for homeschool religion since the boy was in first grade.  I loved it then, and still love it now.

 

What you get: Each book in the series has approximately 30 chapters, designed to be read one a week throughout the school year.  (Some years there are more chapters, some years less).  The reading is on grade-level, but the first grade book is designed to be a read-aloud, and the second grade book will be a read-aloud for some students.  Each chapter might be ten minutes worth of reading?  One day’s assignment. At the end of the chapter there are usually some vocabulary words, a scripture or prayer, and some catechism questions and answers.

All except the 2nd grade book feature gorgeous traditional artwork for the illustrations.  The second grade book uses contemporary-school-book genre stuff, but you’ll get over that insult when you get back to 3rd grade and the serious art resumes for the remainder of the series.

Each book has a theme — first grade covers Salvation 101, 2nd grade prepares students for the sacraments of reconciliation and communion, fourth grade is a survey of the Bible, sixth grade is heavy on the moral life.  Along the way you spiral through the essentials of the faith at an age-appropriate level, so it’s possible to jump right in at grade-level even if you haven’t used the texts before, or even ever studied the faith before.

The accompanying Activity Book is a consumable workbook with a combination of study questions and fun activities like coloring pages and crossword puzzles.  Together the two make a complete package for home use — the student does the reading, completes the study questions, and does any of the extra workbook pages as desired.  I let my kids write in the book, but if you did only the study questions on a separate paper, and no fun-and-games, you could pass the book down.

I have looked through the expansive (and expensive) teacher’s manuals, and they do contain a lot of helpful information for the catechist.  But for home use, I think these are not needed.  My advice for a parent who is not very knowledgeable of the faith would be to do the student reading along with the child, and then to learn more about the faith in general by picking out other good Catholic books on topics of interest.

UPDATED: Tara in the combox observes, and I would take her advice over mine:

I find them really really useful because I am not a catechist and I cannot make this stuff up. They have the answers for the activity book pages and have a test / quiz for each chapter and each section (again, answers supplied too). Unless you’re very confident and very experienced, I think they’re well worth the money.

FYI the teachers manuals are huge.  So priced comparably (even favorably) to other works offering similar amounts of info.

I’ve never used Faith and Life in the classroom.  My parish has always used some-other-brand.  I have talked to several catechists from other parishes who didn’t care for F&L, because of the strongly academic focus (a selling point for me — I love it), and because the style of the lessons didn’t call for crafts and activities and so forth.  We did do one test section of F&L for 8th grade last year, and the feedback I received at mid-year from the catechist teaching that class was very good.  Feedback from a 2nd-grade catechist at another parish was that course material was good, but the lessons worked best if the teacher had free reign to present the topics the way she thought the students would learn them best.   I think a lot depends on whether the parish in fact wants students to learn the faith with the rigor expected in other academic subjects, and whether the teacher has the experience and confidence to teach the material effectively.

What you don’t get in F&L:  There’s very little in the way of multicultural imagery, church geography, or even much for lives of saints.  This is a theology course, and you need to plan to fill out your students’ religious education with all the other stuff that makes up our faith and heritage.  If you are going to Mass, observing the feast days, living out in the wider world, praying as a family, and reading lives of saints as part of your literature curriculum, you’re in good shape.  Otherwise, plan to pick up some supplemental materials that will fill in your gaps.

About the Three Editions:  There’s original, revised, and 3rd edition to match the new mass translation.  Don’t worry about it.  If someone gives you an older edition, it’ll work fine. Every now and then one of the assignments won’t line up, but it’s not a big deal.  On the other hand, the books are fairly affordable new.  My personal approach is if I’m going to buy, I buy new, but I’m not upgrading my older stock.

Kolbe also uses the St. Jospeh Baltimore Catechism series.  These are retro-style catechisms, complete with an English translation of the mass that sounds almost like our new mass translation, because, get this: it’s translated straight from the Latin.  Because the books are that old.  The language is frank, the drawings are 1950’s-chic, and yes, I love this one too.  Great discovery.  If you want to justify mowing the lawn on Sundays, don’t let your kids read this book.  No toe left un-stomped.

The course plans.  For me as a catechist who happens to be a parent, the course plans primarily save me the work of writing up my own.  But I think they’d be one of the sets of plans worth purchasing if you aren’t registered with Kolbe, because each day’s and week’s assignments include a summary of the lesson topic, and points to clarify as you teach your student.  Lots of material in the plans.

The planned assignments do call for a lot of memorization and recitation.  Recall that as the teaching parent, you’re free to decide just how much of that memory work your student needs to do.

FYI: The Kolbe plans run on a four-day schedule, and are built around a tutoring-type environment, so they can’t be peeled off the page and inserted into a parish religious education program as-written.   That said, if I were Queen of Religious Ed (I’m not) and had the budget to match my imperial fantasy life, I’d want something like this to give to new and struggling catechists, because the plans to do a good job distilling the faith into the essentials.

***

Questions?  Comments?

My vote for Most Important Book of 2012

I just spent 3 days in the largest Catholic bookstore in the world.  I bought one book.  This is it:

Then I was stuck in an airport for five hours.  Perfect timing.

What it is:  Tiến Dương is a real guy about your age (born 1963) who is now a priest in the diocese of Charlotte, NC.  Deanna Klingel persuaded him to let her tell his story, and she worked with him over I-don’t-know-how-long to get it right.  Fr. Tien is a bit embarrassed to be singled out this way, because his story is no different from that of thousands upon thousands of his countryman.  But as Deanna pointed out, if you write, “X,000 people endured blah blah blah . . .” it’s boring.  Tell one story well, and you see by extension the story of 10,000 others.

The book is told like historical fiction, except that it’s non-fiction verified by the subject — unlike posthumous saints’ biographies, there’s no conjecture here.  It’s what happened.  The reading level is middle-grades and up, though some of the topics may be too mature for your middle-schooler.  (Among others, there is a passing reference to a rape/suicide.)  The drama is riveting, but the violence is told with just enough distance that you won’t have nightmares, but you will understand what happened — Deanna has a real talent for telling a bigger story by honing in on powerful but less-disturbing details.  Like, say, nearly drowning, twice; or crawling out of a refugee camp, and up the hill to the medical clinic.

–>  I’m going to talk about the writing style once, right now: There are about seven to ten paragraphs interspersed through the book that I think are not the strongest style the author could have chosen.  If I were the editor, I would have used a different expository method for those few.  Otherwise, the writing gets my 100% stamp of approval — clear, solid prose, page-turning action sequences, deft handling of a zillion difficult or personal topics.

Why “Most Important Book?”

This is a story that needs to be known.  It is the story of people in your town and in your parish, living with you, today.  And of course I’m an easy sell, because the books touches on some of my favorite topics, including but not limited to:

• Economics
• Politics
• Diplomacy
• Poverty
• Immigration
• Freedom of Religion
• Freedom, Period
• Refugee Camps
• Cultural Clashes
• Corruption
• Goodness and Virtue
• Faith
• Priestly Vocations
• Religious Vocations
• Marriage and Family Life as a Vocation
• Lying
• Rape
• Suicide
• Generosity
• Orphans
• Welfare
• Stinky Mud
• Used Cars
• Huggy vs. Not-Huggy

You get the idea.  There’s more.  Without a single moment of preaching.  Just an action-packed, readable story, well told.

Buy Bread Upon the Water by Deanna K. Klingel, published by St. Rafka press.

What to Read.

I’m here in Dallas (no one told me it was beautiful!) with a slooooow internet connection, so you’ll have to read somewhere else this week. No shortage of options.

Two brand new homeschooling blogs, written by internet friends of mine, that I think are worth a look:

Home Grown is by a Catholic mom of 1, and for all everyone sighs and moans at the sight of large homeschooling families, 1-child families have a dynamic that can be quite challenging for the stay-at-home parent.  I love how Susan is up front about the problems she works through.  Also, I wish I could write as beautifully as her 4th grader. There’s a reason this blog doesn’t include penmanship samples.

[And so that you’re warned, any snide comments about family size, and I’ll scratch your eyes out. You have no idea.  No. idea.]

180 Days of Homeschool is by Amy, a mom of eight, ages baby to senior in high school.  She’s been at this homeschooling thing for a while, and the day-by-day approach gives a nice realistic look at what it is homeschoolers really do all day.  The other interesting thing for non-homeschoolers to note: by “homeschooling” what we often mean is “sending the kids to school, just not all day every day”.  Amy has a few kids taking classes at a home-school school — think private Catholic school, but courses ordered a la carte, much more like college.

On education: If you aren’t already reading Bearing’s tremendously thorough series on the goals of Catholic education, per the Church, check it out.

***

On the plane I started reading Grace in the Shadows by Denise Jackson.  I read a lot of self-published books for the Catholic Writers’ Guild Seal of Approval process, so I am fully aware of the trepidation one feels in picking such a work.  The content on this one is excellent.  It’s part-memoir, part no-nonsense talk about the reality of sexual abuse, and how to move forward despite a miserable past.  It has a very personal style (there’s poetry, for one thing) that you wouldn’t see in many traditionally-published books, so I’m glad Denise chose to stick to her guns and write it the way she thought it needed to be told.

At the halfway point, I’m giving it a ‘buy’ recommend for anyone who has the job of creating a safe environment for preventing abuse, or has the vocation of being the friend of a sexual abuse survivor.  Denise Jackson has a very mature, well-balanced Christian spirituality, and what has fascinated me as I read is seeing how many of the patterns of behavior and emotion surrounding sexual abuse are in fact the same patterns you see in many other situations.  Great book.  I can’t wait to finish it.

7 Takes: The Ease With Which We Lie

Lighter fare this way. Click as needed.

1.

I would like to thank all of you who have prayed for me.  I’m lousy at praying, but I do pray for my benefactors, and that would be you.  Because your work has been, thus far, very effective.  I would like to double-thank those who have been patient in practical matters as my attendance at this or that has been spotty.

2.

Tuesday  morning I learned a friend had been deceiving me for some time.  Not lying, not outright.  She’d made a (perfectly legitimate) decision that she knew I wouldn’t like.  She put off telling me, presumably in the hopes it would simply never become an issue. That I wouldn’t, in the end, need to know after all.

2468 Truth as uprightness in human action and speech is called truthfulness, sincerity, or candor. Truth or truthfulness is the virtue which consists in showing oneself true in deeds and truthful in words, and in guarding against duplicity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy.

What began as prudence and discretion, looking for the right moment to share the news I needed to know, turned into  a lack of candor as the months dragged out.   Sometimes I worry about doing the same thing.  Is there something I should be saying, and haven’t?  It is easy enough to be misunderstood.  It is possible to deceive without intending to, without any sin at all.

3.

2469 “Men could not live with one another if there were not mutual confidence that they were being truthful to one another.”²⁶² The virtue of truth gives another his just due. Truthfulness keeps to the just mean between what ought to be expressed and what ought to be kept secret: it entails honesty and discretion. In justice, “as a matter of honor, one man owes it to another to manifest the truth.”²⁶³

4.

I should note here that my own fault runs more often the other way — I had already strained our relationship by being quite blunt in a matter where I felt absolute candor trumped sparing of feelings.  There are long passages in the catechism about the importance of not saying too much.   I stink at that.

Even when I am trying to be prudent, to actually shut up and think for a change, there’s always the wondering.  Does someone truly need to know this thing I know?  Will I be more guilty for speaking, or for not?

5.

2483 Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth. By injuring man’s relation to truth and to his neighbor, a lie offends against the fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord.

So I was composing this post in my head this morning before mass.  After, I had the privilege of being outright lied to, in a mortal-sin kind of way, if my fact-checking turns out to be correct.  (Completely different scenario, different people.)  It was . . . very strange.

But it happens.  People do evil things.  People who are kind and generous and pious sometimes do evil things.

6.

Why do Mark Shea and Chris Tollefsen get told off every time they point out lying is wrong?  I think it’s because we’re so used to it.*

We have a cultural fear of the truth.  Faced with a difficult thing to say about even the most trivial matter, we tend to look for away to skirt the truth.  How can I get my girlfriend to purchase a different outfit, without telling her this one she loves makes her look awful / is terribly tacky / is exactly the one I’m wearing to the same event?

We are so used to thinking of deceit as necessary for police work, or some similar situation, that it is unimaginable, truly unthinkable, that it might, possibly, be the wrong thing to do.  We so fear harming innocent children or the frail elderly with difficult facts, that I’ve been accused of great cruelty for suggesting that such people can, in fact, be given difficult but necessary news in some sensitive but honest way.

7.

And it cannot be denied: the moral life is not the easier life.  The freedom truth brings is bought at a cost.  A willingness to risk not nabbing the criminal, of making the little girl cry for the rest of her life, of causing grandma’s heart to fail.  Or a boycott by angry customers.  Or martyrdom.

Mostly, doing what is right is also doing what feels better.  What, in the end, makes like easier.  Our conscience is clear, our friendships are solid, people want to work with and help others they know to be decent, honest folk.  Mostly.

Not always.

Don’t forget to pray for Allie Hathaway, then go read more takes at the home of our lovely hostess Jen F. at ConversionDiary.com. 

*Not telling them off.  Lying.  Though we’re also getting used to telling them off.  Curiously, my Mark Shea link has no negative comments on it, at this writing.

Complete Abandonment to the Will of God

From the CMA. Remind me I have a funny chair story to tell you about that place.

When I’m praying the 4th glorious mystery of the rosary, that’s what I think about.  Mary entirely entrusting herself to the will of God.  At the hour of our death, we all be come childlike — our fate entirely in the hands of the Lord, whether we intended it or not.  You really cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven any other way.  Scientific fact.

But before that?  Eh.  Not so easy.

One of the surreal side effects of trusting in God, is knowing that in the middle of the something miserable, we can look forward with hope, and in my case, curiosity, towards the future.  How’s He going to sort this one out?  But surreal, because the miserable is still, you know, valley of tears.

***

All of y’all need to get yourself to Mass today, because it’s an HDO.  And I know sometimes that’s not possible, or it’s possible but it’s not easy, or you honestly forget, because you didn’t goof off on the proper internet sites in time . . . so many different opportunities for offering up the disappointments or frustrations of a double-glorious day.  And if you’re looking for a cause towards which to direct your prayers . . . I could use a few.  Thanks.

Jen.

Patron Saint of Dark Humor

Don’t already know the joke? Click and be amused.

Happy feast day to Larry D., Larry L.! And all the other Lawrence-y types, except those of you who’ve taken on one of the dozen or so saints also by that name.  Note that martyrdom seems to be the common theme.  Just sayin’.

3.5 Time Outs: Not Chicken

Thanks once again to our host, Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who must have conspired to trick me into posting today.

Click and be amazed.

1.

The reason I’m posting is because in my ten minutes of goofing off, I found this link for you, via Allie’s dad:  This is the Allie Hathaway for whom you’ve been praying. See?  Totally worth it.

2.

Since the arrival of the chickens, I’ve been noticing how much better we understand the English language now that we have two hens in our yard.  So here’s the discovery today:  Our chickens, who are indeed chicken when it comes to many things, managed to scare away the cat.  Because apparently, in addition to being catty (which we knew – ouch), she’s also a fraidy-cat.  I guess that tells you how to rank your insults, when measuring cowardice.

3.

I already knew, before Sunday, that Brandon who writes at Siris is the smartest guy I read.  (I only read him some of the time — he exceeds me mightily more often than I like.)

But so, here’s the thing, and I’m not sure how bloggable this is, because I don’t want to embarrass too many philosophers in one day, or alienate real-life friends . . . I had a different philosopher tell me this, and I paraphrase:  “I noticed sometimes you link to Brandon’s blog.  He’s the smartest guy I know.  He teaches at this community college, and he doesn’t publish except on his blog . . . and he’s the smartest philosopher out there.”

Plus, he’s 238 in dog years.

3.5

Book department update: I’m editing like a crazy person trying to make my book deadline AND be happy with the final product.  Meanwhile, this morning at Mass the reading was about Peter walking on water, and not walking on water, and yeah, just what I needed.  Pleasantly surprised later this afternoon when good things happened exactly where I was afraid everything was going to fall through.

(Um — even though it didn’t matter? I have special nervousness powers. But you know, the thought of trying something and failing? It’s daunting.  It is.)

In defense of Peter: Neither chickens nor cats would’ve gotten out of the boat to begin with.

***

And with that, I’m back to regular life.  I’ll keep y’all in my prayers, and I’m trying to work through my blogging backlog in addition to doing all the other stuff I need to do, so look for me to pop in with this or that, time permitting.  Have a great week!

(And yes, you can post links.  I am, by the way, reading comments.  Oh, about once a week, but I am.  And trying to reply as well.)