Mater et Magistra (et other news first)

The big news first: I’m out of the hole! Yay.  I can do things like check my e-mail, or water the garden without getting out of breath.  Actually the mowed the lawn Monday, which involves more miracles than we need discuss here. (But, note to self: When in doubt, marry a man who can maintain heavy machinery.  One more reason we call him the SuperHusband.)  Was back to fighter practice yesterday after about a month off — won’t say I was 100%, but wow it sure cheers me up, getting out and trying to stab people for a little while.

***

Now for our topic: Mater et Magistra magazine. My first issue arrived right when the baby was up with croup — she and I went out in the early morning hours to fetch the newspaper, and look, I’d forgotten to check the mail!  New magazine!  Which said 3-year-old immediately claimed, and for the first few hours I was okay with that.  Until she hid it in her room someplace to keep it safe.

But we eventually cleared up that little misunderstanding, and wow, I had no idea.  This is a great magazine!  Written by actual homeschooling parents (as the better homeschool magazines are), the tone is very practical and honest.  When you read an article encouraging you to respond to God’s grace, or persevere through a struggle, it is written, you discover, by a person who openly admits to dirty laundry.

The articles in this issue ran the gamut — encouragement, general practical tips, specific study ideas, and lots of reviews.  The style is Catholic Lay Intellectual — this is the place where all the catholic nerd moms gather to compare notes.   So think of articles a little longer, a little deeper, than what you find about anywhere else in the publishing-for-parents industry.

The Catholicism seems to me to be just normal catholic Christianity — I didn’t detect a particular strain to one extreme or another, other than a sincere desire to follow God.  In my opinion, a non-catholic who was comfortable with Catholic-y stuff might also enjoy the magazine.

The format is small — half-size, like a Reader’s Digest — and very reflective-feeling.  Lots of words, smallish print, no hype, a few pictures, mostly traditional artwork.  Interior is all black-and-white or black-and-special-color-for-the-unit-study-insert.  (Curiously: the color scheme and general format remind me a bit of this blog . . . I suppose if you hate this place, you might hate looking at the magazine, too.)

This is a small, low-budget production.  But a really nice magazine.  If you like to read here, or places like Darwin Catholic, Eric Sammons, or anything by Amy Wellborn, and you homeschool, you will probably like Mater et Magistra.  Highly recommended.  Maybe ask someone to give you a subscription for Mother’s Day?

Book Review: Saint of the Day

Our pastor included  Saint of the Day (6th edition, Leonard Foley ed.) on his recommended reading list this past Advent.   I’ve never gone wrong in taking his advice, so when the book showed up on the Catholic Company’s review list, I saw my big chance.    The result was consistent with Father’s track record: Not something I would have chosen myself, but I’m glad to have given it a try.

Saint of the Day is a compilation of lives of saints spanning from the time of Jesus through our day.  Most entries are about one page front and back, and include a brief biography, a reflective commentary, and a quote which is either from that saint, or which is connected in some way with that saint’s life and teachings.   There are also entries for most (but not all) of the event-related feasts.  (Think: the Visitation or the Immaculate Conception.)

To answer the most common question I received while reading this book:  No, there is not an entry for every single day of the year.  So, for use as a daily devotional, it will meet many readers’ needs far more precisely than we would like to admit.

Because the entries are brief, the editors naturally had to be selective about what information to include.  The general pattern is this: If it is expected that the average reader already knows about the saint, the focus is on analysis and spiritual lessons to be learned.  If the saint is either relatively obscure or relatively new, the entry provides more concrete biographical details.  Certain major saints and events don’t make the book, either because they are too specialized (St. Genevieve – Patron Saint of Paris) or so well known they needn’t be discussed at all (Feast of the Incarnation).

I  found the book most helpful for learning about new saints — especially those newly canonized, but also some of the more obscure historic saints.   I found that if I already knew quite a lot about a saint, invariably the editors had chosen to leave out some crucial detail I thought terribly important.    I was also frustrated with some entries that omitted even bare biographical details such as where the saint lived, in favor of more reflective commentary.  For example, the entry for “Teresa of Jesus” never tells us that this Teresa of Avila — I was only sure they were one and the same because I happened to have The Way of Perfection sitting on the bathroom counter,  which work was mentioned in the “Teresa of Jesus” entry.

I was very happy to confirm the commentary is all 100% straight Catholicism — neither to the left nor the right.  Because the book was assembled from the work of many contributing authors, and because my mood is highly changeable, sometimes I found the quotes and reflections a little wanting, other times they seemed to be dead-on.  For many entries, the related quote comes from a papal encyclical or other modern church document. I found myself  frustrated at times by their ponderous style, but also glad the editors chose to introduce the reader to these momentous and undeniably relevant works.

I’m still looking for the perfect one-volume, general-interest saints book.   Saint of the Day takes an honest stab at that effort, and if it isn’t perfect, I wasn’t able to find another book on the shelves of my local catholic bookstore that did as well.   For the fairly informed catholic adult looking  for a combination devotional and historical brush-up, this is a sound choice.  It probably will not be the one book that meets all your needs, but it is reliably catholic, and certainly does what any good saints book will do:  it points you in the right direction.

Letting Swift River Go

We read Letting Swift River Go this week at school.  Tells the story of the damming of the Swift River, from the perspective of a young girl whose home and town are dismantled to make way for the lake.

Well done, highly recommended for the check-out-at-your-local-library list.  My three-year-old sat still for it (hot-chocolate assisted) and all my big kids (5,7,9) listened with interest.    Fits well into mid-20th century American history (all ages), or for little kids, as part of the famous “my town” social studies topic, if you happen to have a dam of your own.   Covers the entire process from making-the-decision to lake-is-full.  I did need to explain to the kids that our local man-made lake was created for a different purpose (hydro-power) than the water project in the story.

More details available at the author Jane Yolen’s blog.

Tripods Sequel Update

John McNichol (now added to the sidebar) posted this good news for fans of Tripods Attack!:

I am now working on the 2nd draft of the Sequel, tentatively titled “The Emperor of North America.”

Gilbert returns to his American homeland, Herb and Gil become separated in more ways than one, and both boys face temptations, trials and dangers in an attempt to survive the onslaught of the self-declared Emperor.

Here’s hoping you enjoy it as much as the last one!

If you haven’t read Tripods, I highly recommend it.  Not my usual genre, but I have both a weakness for all things GKC, and a boy who enjoys the normal quota of aliens, slime, plots-to-takeover-earth, etc.   Real win-win in the literature department.

(The Curt Jester approves, too, if that helps you decide.)

Asimov / Belloc follow-up

Finished reading The Shaping of France.  Pretty happy with it.  All my reservations stated below continued, and of course it was just dreadful to read such an agnostic account of Joan of Arc — what a spoilsport!  But as a nice clear, readable telling of the kings and battles of medieval France-in-progress, it did the trick.  Great introduction to military history for people who don’t really do military history, but want to understand some of the big picture.  For all its faults, I think reading this one is a good starting point, or re-freshing point, before diving deeper into any particular topic covering medieval France or England.  (For example: 1215.)

I’m not sure whether it makes Hillaire Belloc squirm or chuckle, but I think his  Characters of the Reformation is a natural follow-on to The Shaping of France. Similar type of work, though the author’s historical lense now switches from ardently-atheist-mode to ardently-catholic-mode.   Belloc’s character-by-character approach is a little more disjointed and difficult to follow, but in exchange you get a slightly more intense look at each individual.  Likewise, Asimov is the more goes-down-like-popcorn story-teller, but I think Belloc is selling meatier ideas.  (And it was very refreshing to read an account of the reformation from an unabashedly-catholic perspective.  Just because you never do.  No doubt a bit of bias in there, but bias worth discovering for change.)  As far as historical-documentation goes, they are twins.

My only regret on these two: I really wish I had read The Shaping of France before Characters of the Reformation, because the one really sets you up to understand the other.

***

Next on my to-do list: Getting my notes done on my medieval-france honkin’ big pile of library books before they have to go back at the end of the week.   In between taking girls to the Nutcracker, cooking for Thanksgiving, attending Thanksgiving, hosting Thanksgiving, and maybe doing other fun stuff.  And then cleaning of my desk, haha.

 

Reading French History to Understand the English

I’m about a third of the way through Isaac Asimov’s The Shaping of France (Houghton Mifflin, 1972).  Not exactly a proper history book, since there are absolutely no citations or bibliography or anything else to back up his various claims, but more like a highly readable report written by an astonishingly good undergrad.   For all the man can’t seem to document, he can tell a mighty good story.

I picked up the book from the library wanting shore up my knowledge medieval french history, and certainly it’s been helpful for that.  But the surprise was this:  Suddenly the history of medieval England makes so much more sense.   Asimov’s telling of the Capetian kings’ efforts to build a stable (French) kingdom works like the denoument of a good mystery, where Father Brown or Miss Marple explain the motives of that one character you never really noticed before, but whose actions were driving all the strange comings and goings of the rest.  You need, of course, to already have the outline of English history in the back of your head, or else the final explanation won’t do you any good.

–> I’m don’t know that Asimov’s book is the best out there.  You could never use it for academic purposes without making your advisor chuckle (or cringe, or both).  And I’m only up to Philip VI, so this a PBR.  But if you need an easily-digestible history of the kings from Charlemagne forward, in a way you can actually pretty much remember and make sense of, Asimov is mighty handy in a pinch.   And just the trick for making sense of England.

 

Depression & Creativity

Essay in the Journal this morning, in the weekend section, about the connection between mental illness and creative genius.  I try not to pay too much attention to the WSJ’s Saturday essays, and my mental health is the better for it.  But I thought today’s page W3 piece by Jeannette Winterson (“In Praise of the Crack-Up”) wanted a little reply.

[For a very thorough, sometimes too thorough, exploration of this topic, see Peter D. Kramer’s Against Depression.  But my thoughts, different from his, are what follows.]

No one extols the virtues of depressed Pizza Guys. Read an essay like Winterson’s, you’d get the idea that writers and artists were the only moody people out there.  Perhaps artsy people don’t have a very wide circle of acquaintance.  So let me assure you: mental illness, including but not limited to depression, knows no professional barriers.  Accountants, Wal-Mart Managers, Engineering Professors — keep an ear out and you’ll quickly discover these people, too, can suffer mood disorders.

The difference being, of course, that your average laboratory technician doesn’t get asked to write an op-ed about the experience.  And no one pores through the details of the billing-clerk’s private life, in order to write a riveting biography about the “real story” behind that face we know so well.  Thus we never ask ourselves, “But what would interstate commerce come to, if we didn’t have depressed truck drivers??”  [Who would cover those long-haul routes without the work of those who long for solitude?  Mmn, I suppose the guys who are so fond of CB radios, and, these days, cellphones.]

But in fairness, the nature of literature and art does mislead.  I was struck the other month reading through a collection medieval poetry: it’s 98% about love, death, and combinations of love-n-death.  And pretty  much that seems to hold true through the centuries.   As much as *I* like to write about exciting topics like doing the dishes, or changing diapers, apparently themes with a little more drama tend to be more enduring.

–> So whereas the janitor has little to gain, professionally, by letting his personal agony shine through in his work, a writer or painter can use the depths of despair or psychosis as raw material for a riveting masterpiece.   Of course ordinary grief and heartbreak are plenty dark for those purposes, and most of us will get to enjoy a fair bit of both by the time we’re old enough to write decently;  but sure, if you happen to have episodes of mental illness to draw on, that works too.

And it *is* consoling for other suffering readers to know they are not alone in their experiences. So not such a bad contribution to the art, if you go in for that type of reading.

Which leads to a final point: Writing about difficult experiences is helpful to the writer. Or painting for the painter, and so on, I imagine.  (The other arts are beyond my skill, so I can’t be sure.)   Though honestly, most of us, when we work through our feelings this way, end up with a piece that is dreadfully boring — ‘maddening’ you might say; it takes true genius to be able to write about the experience of  mental illness without causing it to become contagious.   For the average depressed person, best to keep those feelings in the personal journal, far, far, from an editor’s desk.

But none of that makes it necessary to keep around the assorted mental illnesses just for literature’s sake.  Any more than we need to keep around cancer because it has produced so many great works of art (I like this one), or encourage warfare in the Mediterranean that we might get another Iliad in the process.   Given effective, no-obnoxious-side-effects cures for mental illness, there will still be plenty to write about.

Booklet Report – Church & State . . .

The Relation of Church and the State in the Middle Ages

The Very Reverend Bede Jarret, OP, MA, STL

Requiem Press, 2005

ISBN 0-9758542-7-5

Whew.  So as you know, when it comes to philosophy, I really have just fallen off the turnip trunk.  Which  is a bit of a problem, because when I picked out this little booklet as part of my Req Press omnibus order in January, it looked like a perfectly nice essay on *history*.  Close: history of ideas.  Lent-a-claus sure was feeling lenty on me.

Luckily not a very long essay — the whole booklet is about 30 pages of comfortable middle-sized print – and entirely readable.  I couldn’t comment critically on it, but I could understand it.

Here’s what it is: A summary of how theologians have viewed the relationship of church and state from the founding of Christianity through the end of the middle ages, and how that relationship has worked in practice.  The goal is to puzzle out how the English Martyrs got into the position they did.  Seems obvious now, but apparently, as the publisher’s preface observes, even St. Thomas More didn’t initially believe that the papacy was a divine institution.

Now if your history-of-philosophy education was as sorry as mine, your knowledge on this topic might consist of two assumptions:

1) We enlightened people believe in the Separation of Church and State

2) People in the past believed in The Divine Right of Kings.

The Relation of Church and State walks you through a much more nuanced and detailed assessment of how Christian thought and practice has developed over the centuries.  It opens with this observation about why the question is a uniquely Christian one:

That the difficulty [of adjusting the relations of church and state] is wholly Christian can be seen if it be remembered (using the words in their present day sense) that to the pagan his State was his Church, and to the Jew his Church was his State.  In either view, they were not two powers, but one. . . . For the Christian, however, the problem was much more delicate, since he was brought up to look on both the Church and State as divinely authorized powers and to believe that the authority of both was from God.

Tricky, what with the king being Nero and all.

But it got even trickier after the Edict of Milan:

. . . when Christians were allowed freedom of worship, and when the Emperor himself became a catechumen.  The difficulty now was no longer the simple difficulty of heroic obedience to a persecuting government, but of adjusting obedience to two authorities which were both interested in the application of the moral law of Christ to life.

The essay details of how this tension was addressed through the centuries, and what legacy was available to the martyrs of the English Reformation.   I can’t tell you how completely or precisely the author covers the topic, because it is brand new to me.  But I will say that it is worth your attention, if you want a survey of ideas for an introduction.  (Or, if you are more knowledgeable, you want a nice argument.)

Curiously, the conclusion is that relationship of the papacy to the national monarchies remained incompletely resolved at the close of the middle ages.  Jarret concludes that the the right to invest the Bishops was won by the papacy.  The right to tax and judge the clergy was won by the national monarchies.  But one thorny issue remained open:

. . . the right to determine the character of the beliefs of the nation.  This was the wholly new problem which John Fisher, Thomas More and the rest had to settle for themselves.

Worth a look.  I won’t say it’s an essay for everybody; but if it is a topic that interests you, it’s a respectable start.  And manageable – ordinary mortals can read it, which cannot be said for all works of philosophy.

Oh and the most wonderful bit about Requiem Press’s edition:  *translations of all the Latin*. Ha.  Because you know back in 1928 when this paper was first presented, it was assumed you could just toss off bits of Latin and everyone would understand.  Turns out not only was my philosophy education deficient, but my Latin isn’t all that great either.  Go Req Press.  My heros.  Woohoo.

readers wanted (cross posted)

If you are interested in reading the 2nd draft of my short story, contact me directly or leave a comment here.  Your e-mail address shows up to me when you comment, so you don’t need to put in the text of the message.

What it is: short, fluffy, humorous.  No quests, trysts, magic, murders, aliens or sermons.  No deep thoughts or great art.  Your basic model medieval sit-com.  G-rated.

Not looking for approval right now — if you hate it, let me know.  If you can’t bear to finish it, let me know where I lost you.  We’ve got the story to where SuperHusband and I enjoy it, but are now trying to move it to the point where other people like it too.

Offer expires once I get enough readers.

Book Review: Embryo

Embryo: A Defense of Human Life

by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen

Doubleday, 2008

ISBN 978-0-385-52282-3

(Available as an audiobook on audible.com.)

The truth is, I picked this book up because I am a Chris & Laurie Tollefsen fan. Yeah, yeah, their philosophy is good (who knew!), but what I really like is them. Their cooking, their conversation, their de-cluttered home – hard not to like people who excel you in every way, and have the courtesy not to point it out. Not that I wasn’t interested in the book, of course. But I don’t think I would have trudged to my local catholic bookstore and actually bought a copy without that personal connection.

Wow. Way worth it. Even if there is no hope whatsoever of any kind of culinary benefit to you for reading this book, you still ought to read it. Even if you aren’t pro-life. And in particular if you aren’t catholic, because it is not a book about catholic (or even theist) perspectives on the topic.

–> If you are catholic, you should read it so that you can speak intelligently to people who want to understand your position on the proper treatment of human embryos, but who aren’t particularly interested in arguments that begin ‘Well, the Pope says . . .’.

Why Philosophy? Philosophy*, as I understand it, is more or less the study of What People Think About Things. For example, how should I treat my fellow human beings, and why so? This is a philosophical question. It can be answered with respect to God, of course, but if you are person who doesn’t believe in God, you still may have an opinion on right and wrong behavior, and probably even some good reasons for your opinion. In this book, George & Tollefsen argue that human embryos deserve ‘full moral respect’ – that is, that they share certain fundamental human rights along with the rest of the species (that’s us). They lay out the reasons for their opinion chapter by chapter.

What’s in the book? And am I smart enough to read it?

The opening chapter, “What is at Stake in the Embryo Experimentation Debate” is a sort of presenting of the situation. It will help tremendously here and throughout the book if you have a passing awareness of the public debate on the topic, and a little bit of familiarity with philosophical terms. The text is eminently readable – very clear and precise, and with quick prose given the technical nature of the topic — but this is not Embryos & Philosophy for Dummies. (Someone please suggest a link for those who want to do the pre-req reading. If nothing else, reading the Secondhand Smoke blog for a few weeks might help.)

Likewise, the second chapter, which lays out the biology of embryonic development, really requires that you have completed high school biology and have some vague recollection of what you learned on the topic. If words like “RNA” and “meiosis” ring a bell, you’re good. Don’t worry if you can’t exactly define them just now; as you read your memory will be refreshed and it will make sense again. It may be a little bit of work to follow the detailed explanations, but you can do it.

After answering the question of ‘is it a little tiny human being?’ in the embryology chapter, George & Tollefsen move onto the philosophical question of what to do with those tiny beings in the remainder of the book. Topics covered include things you might not have known people doubted, such as “What is a person?” (Once a person always a person? Or does your personhood come and go according to this or that factor? It is a relevant question, and one that apparently folks have some interesting ideas about.)

And then, once they’ve established their reasons for thinking that not only are embryos human beings, but they are, in fact, human persons, the book proceeds with building the arguments for what rights persons have, and therefore how they ought to be treated by all the other people.

Who should, and should not, read this book?

This is an important and useful book, regardless of your opinions on the topic. If you beleive in the human rights of embryos, it will help crystallize your thinking and recognize why others may disagree. If you don’t beleive in such rights, it will help you understand the logic of people who do. So it is a book that facilitates the mutual understanding essential to any hope of finding common ground.

And it is particularly useful because it is not a religious book. You may, of course, have religious reasons for your opinions, but those reasons won’t make much sense to people who don’t share your religion. Embryo argues that respect for the rights of the human embryo is not the province of any particular religion, but is in the same category of fundamental human rights that people of any religion or no religion at all tend to agree on.

–> And here is an important caveat: This book assumes that you are not a Nazi. If you need someone to explain to you why people deserve the same rights regardless of race or religion, you need to get that explanation elsewhere.  This book assumes you already hold that view. Likewise, it assumes you understand the difference between people and animals.  If you think it is okay to eat people, or to do deadly medical experiments on them without their full informed consent, again, you need to look to some other work to understand why this is, in the view of the rest of us, not so.

I warn you of this, because George & Tollefsen really do hit a tremendous variety of arguments against their opinion, and deal with them respectfully and thoroughly. [Do you wonder, for example, whether you are really the person who inhabits your body, or if ‘you’ is something else? They address this possibility.] But these two particular views I mention above (not a nazi, people are not fodder for your whims) are assumed, and at times even central to their arguments.

For nearly all readers, this shouldn’t be a problem, I hope. But I am aware that ‘nearly all’ does leave out a select few.

**

In summary: Highly Recommended. Well written, thorough, examines the debate from every angle. The tone is charitable and friendly, at times even humorous. Deserves to become a standard work on the topic.

*I mention this because if you are like me, you may not really have that clear of an idea of what exactly it is philosophers do. I’m just starting to catch on. And it’s relevant to this book review, because you can’t really know what is in the book if you don’t understand what Philosophy means, or at least what it seems to mean in this context.