Good news and bad news (cross-posted)

The good news is, I got accepted at the Catholic Company to be one of their reviewers. Yay! I love reviewing books.

More good news: They are still accepting reviewers.  That could be you.  Learn more at:

http://www.catholiccompany.com/content/Catholic-Product-Reviewer-Program.cfm

The bad news is, when I went to pick out my first book, I *thought* I was clicking on ‘product information’ when I saw a title called The Fathers.  Because I was thinking that of the choices available, the new teen novel sounded about my speed (I have teenaged godchildren.  I have to keep up with this stuff).  But I wanted to just take a look at this other interesting title before I made a final decision.  But I accidentally  made the final decision then and there.

Which means good news: I’m supposed to be getting a free copy of the holy father’s new book. (Oh yeah, *that* book about the Apolostic Fathers.   Oops.)

Bad news of course being that I am now required to *read the whole book*.  In order to review it.  Ack!  This is work!  I meant to do something fun!  By which I meant, something easy!

The good news is, it should be good for me.  Truth is, I did want to get the book.  I just couldn’t justify buying it until I finished Jesus of Nazareth, which is still sitting in my living room waiting for me to finish it.  Not dusty, I might add, because several other neglected books were sitting on top of it.

Not sure which blog I will put the review on yet.  We’ll see.

Good news for you: The Catholic Company ( http://www.catholiccompany.com/ ) is offering a free shipping coupon.  Here is the note for the announcement e-mail:

On a much happier note, we have a special offer this week for your blog readers.  We are offering free shipping from now until Midnight Sunday…on any size order.

If you think that this is something your readers would be interested in knowing about, then please spread the word.

1. Simply place an order. You can place this order through our website, by phone, by fax, or by mail.

2. Use this coupon code: BLOG

If you order online you will type in the coupon code during checkout. Simply type BLOG in the coupon code box located at the bottom of the payment page.

If you order by phone simply tell the coupon code BLOG to your customer service agent.

If you order by mail or fax simply include the coupon code BLOG on your order form.

*Terms and conditions: This offer cannot be combined with any other offers. Applies to U.S. delivery addresses only. Applies to standard shipping only. Cannot be used on orders already placed or on backorders. Offer expires at 12:00 midnight, Eastern Time on Sunday, September 28, 2008.

By the way, I am all about supporting your local catholic bookstore, if you have one.  So nobody go neglecting a real live starving bookstore owner on account of free shipping at an internet company.  (Even if they do send me a free book that will make me have to pay attention and think for a change.)  After all, your local shop doesn’t charge shipping ever, if you just go pick it up yourself.  But if you are an unlucky soul who *needs* to order online, there’s your coupon.

I know, I know . . .

Running a bit behind schedule here – no drama, just a lot of ordinary life all at once.  Will try to put up the book review this afternoon.  If that doesn’t pan out, I haven’t the faintest idea when I will do it . . . but next week *looks* normal, so worst case scenario we miss a week and pick up with the schedule from there.

Christian Theocracy Unveiled

To read certain introductory works on life in the middle ages, you might get the feeling that medieval Europe was a strong-armed theocracy, where Stepford kings and Stepford peasants droned “Yeeess, Biiishop” as they together marched with glazed eyes towards the few courageous free-thinkers who’d been ferreted out of hiding and gleefully prepared for execution. Here’s an excerpt from Medieval Life (Dorling Kindserly, 1996, Bridget Hopkinson, editor), from page 30, “The Church”:

“The Catholic Church was at the center of the medieval world . . . it governed almost every aspect of people’s lives . . . For many, life on Earth was hard and short, but the Church said that if they followed the teachings of Christ, they would be rewarded in heaven. This idea gave the Church great power over people’s hearts and minds.” [Elsewhere on the page you can see the illustration of heretics being burned, with corresponding explanation.]

In contrast, spend an afternoon poring through the old four-volume Butler’s Lives of Saints, and you get quite the opposite picture – a Europe that is only barely Christian, and constantly forgetting what little of the faith it has learned. However much bishops and abbots might be entirely mixed up in the affairs of state, they are no more ‘in control’ than their secular counterparts in the constant struggle for land and power. (Contrary to myth, this edition of Butler’s Lives does not indulge in romantic revisionism. Where it reports legend, it will tell you very plainly what is legend, what is verifiable fact, and what is educated guess. You may be able to find a book that will retell history as if medieval Europe were a glorious interlude of catholic-paradise-on-earth, but Butler’s Lives is not that book.)

A book that explores the importance and the limits of church influence in pre-conquest England and Normandy is Queen Emma and the Vikings. This is a biography of the woman who managed to be queen to both her first husband king Aethlered of England, and to the Danish king Cnut who overthrew him. In telling the story, Harriet O’Brien also shows the tension between the desire for approval from religious leaders that lends legitimacy to a conquering ruler, and the confidence that said approval does not require a strict adherence to the less convenient bits of church teaching.

It is a surprisingly persistent tension. Witness today the insistence with which Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden claim their catholic heritage, all the while publicly rejecting elements of church teaching. There is nothing preventing either one from saying, “As a faithful Episcopalian it is my belief that . . .”, and yet they and countless other catholics cannot quite bring themselves to shake their catholic heritage*.

There must be something to this.  I wonder if there isn’t an inborn sense of a need for religious approval and belonging that transcends time and place and culture; an intuition so strong that rational agreement with the actual religion is no obstacle?  Even when there is very little at stake — contemporary American society is hardly a place where membership in a particular denomination is a prerequisite for public office.  Something to think about more.

Meanwhile, I’m reading 1215: The Year of the Magna Carta, a book for adults that I will review next week. One thing I am enjoying about the book is the exploration of the mixed-up situation of church and state, belief and practice, that characterizes the era in question. And here is an excerpt that illustrates that tension – the struggle of an ordinary sinner who is trying to find the way to keep to church teaching, but is all the same powerfully caught up in the values of the wider society to which he belongs. We read (p.17):

It was sign of status to be accompanied almost everywhere, even when in the bath or the privy. Even so, there were a few things that people preferred to do alone. According to the historian William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190’s, when the doctors advised a seriously ill archbishop of York that his only hope of recovery lay in having sex – many doctors believe in the restorative power of the sexual act – the archbishop took the young woman they provided for him into his private room (secretum). But when the doctors examined his urine the next morning they discovered he had not, after all, followed their advice. He explained to his friends that he could not break his vow of chastity – not even for medicinal purposes – and that he had pretended to do so in order not to hurt their feelings.

I can relate to the archbishop. And I think that ultimately when we talk about ‘the power of the church’ in any given time and place, we need to remember we are speaking of a church composed of millions of people, all of them in their own special spot on the scale of ability to follow church teaching – me and the troubled archbishop of York, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta and St. Thomas Aquinas, Nancy Pelosi and King Cnut. Pick any one of us and convince yourself we are representative of all the other catholics of our time and place, and it might make for a fun horror movie, but it doesn’t really tell us much about history.

*I am not, by the way, the sort of catholic who wishes the less-practicing would shape up or ship out.  I do wish Pelosi and Biden would get on board with church teaching, but I’m not quite persuaded that sitting in Episcopalian pews will speed the conversion process.  Then again, maybe so.  A question for wiser minds than mine.

updated my homeschool blog link

Moved my homeschooling blog to a new location here on wordpress the other week.  Finally got the link updated today.

At the new location I’m also giving the blog a schedule.  I enjoy the way blogs lend themselves to sharing news & observations as they occur, but in practice, using the ‘spontaneous approach’ I always seem to end up composing posts in my head, but rarely getting them to you.   For better or for worse, the schedule here has been really helpful in getting me to actually write out more substantial posts than I would otherwise pretend I had time to write (you may be secretly wishing I wrote less substantial posts).

Anyhow, will try the same method for the homeschooling blog.  Three weeks out of four it will be miscellaneous homeschooling topics (about our school, about homeschooling in general, about what’s on our agenda); the other week is a ‘catholic’ topic.  As if I weren’t writing on enough catholic topics here.

Those tricky catholic topics, plus the education topics, means there’s a certain amount of overlap between the two blogs.  I do have logical plan for deciding what belongs on which blog, but at times it is a special kind of logic, not unlike the way I organize bookshelves, that is known to me alone.

In any case, if you haven’t found it yet, the new site is http://greencastlehomeschool.wordpress.com/ .  Enjoy.

PSA: Text Size

I hate it when internet text is too small to read easily, and sometimes it seems like this blog is one of the offenders.  If you share that opinion, know that if you use Mozilla Firefox you can hit “ctrl +” (the control button and the plus button at the same time) to increase the text size.  Hit “ctrl-” to make the text smaller.

Sadly, my version of Internet Explorer is not so handy — when I tried increasing text size, it only enlarged the headings and titles, not the body text.  Good news is that Mozilla Firefox has been a great program and I highly recommend it.  I think you can download it here.