Will there be fake news in Heaven?

The IC is having a book-release party for Felon Blames 1970s Church Architecture for Life of Sin. Go take a look.

Someone was asking me yesterday which blogs I follow, and of course I completely blanked out.  (Um, look at my sidebar?).  But I believe I’ve read every single post by the Ironic Catholic since however many years ago it was I discovered the place.   And probably on that day I scrolled through the entire archive.

Intelligent, clean-cut catholic satire that *is* funny and *is not* mean.  How many other writers could sit in the middle of that venn diagram?

mysterious new format problems?

A reader tells me that my new blog format is annoying.  From the description, it sure sounds annoying.  But here’s my trouble:

a) I didn’t change my blog format.

and

b) When I look at the blog, it looks exactly like it always has.

But apparently all of wordpress has fallen into the evil spell.  And when I look at another of the reportedly-affected blogs, it looks the same as always to me.

Help?  Anyone?

Thanks.

Christian Art

Gryphon Rampant Grapic Arts.  Exceedingly cool.  Click and go see.

–> Link courtesy of John McNichol, source of much coolness, whom had I had the great pleasure of meeting during the momcation.  It will not surprise you to learn that the lovely Mrs. McNichol is herself a delightfully interesting catholic-mom person, as I had long suspected.

***

And as long as we’re doing a celebrity round-up, Bishop Elizondo, who confirmed the nieces, Wow!  What a guy.   I generally  do not go in for clergy-watching, but my goodness that man has a gift.   Very happy.  Spot-on.  Real pleasure to have been there.

And yes, that was *my* niece arguing with him when he quizzed the kids during the homily. Makes an aunt proud.  (I told her she did the right thing.  Cause she did.  Good girl that one.)

 

 

 

Home again.

Momcation successful.  More news later.  If your e-mail to me is sitting all sad and lonely in my inbox, I promise to dust it off and respond soon.  Ish.

Two notes for now:

1.  Wow, it is really neat to have a place that is home.  To be able to go off on vacation someplace superior in weather, scenery, traffic-planning — generally better in every way –, and then come home to a hot, muggy, concrete-laden, weed-infested corner of suburban sprawl and just grin with happiness at being HOME.  And have no desire to live anywhere else.

I like that a lot.

2. Please pray for John Hathaway and his family.  I want very much to keep him in exile here in this fallen world a little longer (a lot longer), but he threatens once again to make his escape. Please pray.

the child who is determined to hate Kolbe

Yesterday after I dropped the kids off for Grandma time, a little voice told me to visit the other crack dealer Educational Wonderland.  Sure enough, they had cool little wipe-off books of math facts games and drills for the little guys (yes, I gave my daughter math books for her birthday — she was thrilled), and these:

So today I was thumbing through the new history books, and a certain rising 4th grader comes along and picks one up. “Oh.  Those are the terrible KOLBE books.”  Disgust.  Horror.  How could your mother do this to you?!

“No, darling.  Those are the books I got for you to do instead of the Kolbe book.”

“Oooh!”  Picks up book again.  Actually looks at it.  “Hey, this looks fun!”

Yes dear.  After enough years of living with you, I begin to have a clue, thank you.

–>  I found this year that I really like having all four kids on the same subject.  Not necessarily the same books, just the same general topic.  So for the coming year, I signed up both big kids for Kolbe’s Ancient Rome study, which the boy has already started reading for fun, and the girl is determined to hate, on account of it being called Famous Men of Rome.

Emphasis on Men.  She is not interested in Men.  Plus it is Kolbe, and we all know that Kolbe is Evil.  Even though we have never ever tried it, and plus it looks eerily like what we already study.  But it is to be hated.

Anyhow the plan is for the boy to whiz through the set plan, which he will complain is too easy and plus he already read the book this summer and why does he have to do the dumb workbook, blah blah blah, and look, here’s an Osprey book, let’s read that instead, yes dear on your free time you may.  (And he will.)

The craft-loving 4th grader I’m going to let do the Pockets books first.  Q1 she gets to be the teacher and take the littles through Ancient Civilizations.  That’s only 7 pockets, so 7 weeks, and the last two weeks of the quarter she’ll do some timeline work and then write me a report, which will bring up the grade-level to more her age.  Q2, littles will work through some other ancient Rome / Greece items with me, and my Kolbe-hating darling will do the Ancient Rome Pockets book, which will fill the quarter.

Q3 & Q4 she will finally have to buckle down and be serious, and do Q1 &2 of Famous Men per the Kolbe course plans.  Which should be easier having had the intro in the fall.  If she wants she can read the rest of the book in her free time.  Yes, I will totally let a 4th grader master only half of the history of the Roman Empire.  She’ll see it again one day.  Plus she’ll have the motivation of trying to get a higher score on the test than her brother did.  Which will definitely motivate her.

Went ahead and wrote up next year’s plans for the littles, who are still on the library-book method (not Kolbe — I do too much subbing out at that age, we’d only go crazy).  For science, sticking to my ‘everyone studies the same thing’ approach, I went through the 4th grade science course plans from Kolbe, and assigned the littles to study each week whatever topic the 4th grader will be covering.  So that will be a double bonus, in that they can sit in on her science experiments, and she’ll have a bunch of easy library books sitting around that cover the same thing she is learning in her horrible no-good very bad science book.  (That I think she will like.)

–> If I weren’t worried about the good of various eternal souls, and plus having told the whole internet that lying is wrong, I’d just tell her it wasn’t the Kolbe book, and then she’d love it for sure.

[Mr. Boy will be happy to do science all on his own.  I didn’t try to rope him into the coordinating thing for that.]

So we’ll see how that goes.  I’m hopeful.

****

I’m off tomorrow for ten days of Momcation, visiting the nieces who have the good sense to go to school.  Assuming my abandoned children don’t hack into the blog to show the world their atrocious grade-level spelling, expect blog silence here.  If you are desperate for goofing off in my absence, you can check my side bar links and tell me which ones have gone bad — I found one already, and no I haven’t fixed it yet.

Otherwise, enjoy the quiet.  That’s what I’ll be doing.  And have a blessed Memorial Day.

Historic Maps for K-12

A friend of mine told me about this site:  Historic Maps in K-12 Classrooms.

There are lesson plans and stuff, but you could just look at the maps.  Very cool.  Says a person who owns many maps.  Can you ever have enough?

Mothers & More

Here’s a great article on “Why Mothers Matter”, h/t to the Pulp.it for pointing it out.  Totally made my day.  (Yes, I am goofing off.  Bad mother! Clean house!  Make children clean house!)

–> Which explains why St. Thomas More re-married so quickly after the death of his first wife.  As Butler’s Lives points out:

More was a man of sense as well as sensibility, and he had four young children on his hands: so he married a widow, seven years older than himself, an experienced housewife, talkative, kindly and full of unimaginative common sense.

Apparently she didn’t appreciate his jokes, though, which the biographer observes was an “undeniable trial of patience” — for which spouse the text does not specify.

A quick saint bleg on that topic:  Our VBS-alternative (“Terrific Tuesdays”) will feature St. Thomas More, St. Joan of Arc, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Therese of Lisieux, and St. Martin de Porres.  If you happen to be sitting on a linky-link treasure trove of free-to-copy coloring sheets, puzzles, clip art, and the like, I would be most grateful to learn your secrets.  Thank you!

–> FYI if you are in a similar boat, I’ve been mining the My Catholic Pray and Play Activity Book for generic worksheets.  Nicely done, good little resource for elementary-age catechists to keep in the drawer.  The sheets are reproducibles for non-commercial use.

***

And this is a random other lives-of-saints observation I stumbled upon last night, and had to share.  From Butler’s Lives, further down on July 9th (same as More), concerning the martyrdom of Sts. Nicholas Pieck and Companions, Martyrs of Gorkum in 1572.  This was a Calvinist round-up in the Netherlands, and the clergy arrested included not only the saintly types, but also St. James Lacops, who “had been very slack in his religious observance and contumacious under reproof”, as well as St. Andrew Wouters, who “went straight from the irregular life to imprisonment and martydom”.

Here is the bit I found to be a timeless reminder:

. . . when already Father Pieck had been flung off the ladder, speaking words of encouragement, the courage of some failed them; it is a significant warning against judging the character of our neighbour or pretending to read his heart that, while a priest of blameless life recanted in a moment of weakness, the two who had been an occasion of scandle gave their lives without a tremor.

Bleg – downloadable catholic bible?

UPDATE #2:  Leo in the combox points out that Ignatius Press now has an e-book version of their RSV.  Thank you, Leo!

UPDATE:  Christian LeBlanc kindly e-mailed me these links:

Blue Letter Bible Protestant with great features. 

RSVCE my preferred Catholic Bible for quoting, etc.

BibleGateway all Books Protestant but tons of versions & flexible search engine. I use this to check King James Version for alternate English to RSVCE.

NAB the Bible you hear at Mass. I use this in class most of the time so it will be the same as Mass to the kids, unless I have a particular reason for using another version.

NEW ADVENT BIBLE tritongue Greek, D-R, Vulgate. I use this to check Douay-Rheims for alternate English to RSVCE.

Thank you!!

**************************

(Some of you just got this bleg in your e-mail.)  Anyone have a good catholic e-bible you like?  I am not sure of the needed format, so all suggestions welcome.  It’s for a gift, so it doesn’t have to be a free version.  Thanks!

If you have one you like, tell me all about it.  Recipients are teenagers, if that makes any difference.

the weather. wow. weather.

At my house today, NOAA forecasts this:

Hot.

Just “hot”.  That’s all they have to say.  High of 97 — even I don’t call it “warm”.  (90 is warm.  Up to 95 is quite warm.  97 is firmly in the “hot”.)  That isn’t water you see in the picture, it is a mirage.  We’ve been seeing them on the highway since the middle of May.

Come Saturday I fly out to Vancouver, WA for the neices’ confirmations, so I go check what NOAA predicts before I start packing.  I learn seven different ways to say “It’s going to rain”.  And, by the way, the high will be, mmn, not very high.   I think I can leave the shorts home.

–> Funny, I had planned to wear the exact same outfit to this confirmation that I wore to the one at my parish in February.  But I think I need to find something a tad warmer.

***

Meanwhile, am cleaning the house in an effort to fool the babysitter about our housekeeping standards.  I doubt it will work, but a girl can hope.  Don’t know how much internet-writing I’ll be doing during the momcation, so if you don’t hear from me, yes, I did drop off the edge of the earth.  Or I guess technically, I’ll be paddling around just shy of the edge.

The Youcat

So I dropped by my local catholic bookstore yesterday in search of confirmation gifts.  (Got ’em, and they are NOT BOOKS.  The nieces will suspect I am an imposter.)  Shop owner says, “Look over there, we’ve got the new Youcat in.”  Waves toward rack with all the neat items-to-be-promoted.

I smile.  A pained smile.  Um, okay.  Thanks.

Because you do not know how many reviews of this book I have not read.  Many.  If there is someone on that sidebar who wrote a review of the YOUCAT, I saw it and skipped it.  Not interested.  Just not.  Too perky.  What a goofy name.  And plus what’s wrong with the big catechism, ya know?  Do I look fifteen?  No, I do not look fifteen.

So then I wander over to the promo rack, and well, I’ll just take a look at the thing.  Might as well see what it is.  Someone might ask me about it.  My DRE might try to make me use it or something.

Open it up to a random page.  Read a sample.  Told the shop owner, “You just sold a book.”

[She proceeded to sell me two CD’s by playing samples of these guys off her PC while she was at it.  Smart lady.  Crack for catechists.]

Anyway, the story with the Youcat is this:

It translates the Catechism for you.  It’s a quick, easy way to look up the catholic teaching on something, and get answers in words kids can more or less understand.  You still need to understand the teachings of the church yourself.  Big Catechism isn’t going anywhere.  But if you want the words to give to kids?  Here it is.  Plus, if you’re in a hurry, you don’t have to really think about the answers when you look something up.

Compare and contrast . . .  In the big catechism, here’s 1755-1756:

II. GOOD ACTS AND EVIL ACTS

1755 A morally good act requires the goodness of the object, of the end, and of the circumstances together. An evil end corrupts the action, even if the object is good in itself (such as praying and fasting “in order to be seen by men”).

The object of the choice can by itself vitiate an act in its entirety. There are some concrete acts – such as fornication – that it is always wrong to choose, because choosing them entails a disorder of the will, that is, a moral evil.

1756 It is therefore an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or emergency, etc.) which supply their context. There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery. One may not do evil so that good may result from it.

Here’s the Youcat.  A simplified version of those paragraphs is given, and then this:

The end does not justify the means.  It cannot be right to commit infidelity so as to stabilize one’s marriage.  It is just as wrong to use embryos for stem cell research, even if one could thereby make medical breakthroughs.  It is wrong to try to “help” a rape victim by aborting her child.

What you need to know.  To the point.  Answers the questions students actually ask in class. 

You could leave it lying around for the kids at home to read, too. Or the adults.  And I’ll admit, the sunny cover and all the photos and drawings do make you want to read the thing.  It’s as if someone at the Vatican really really wants people to learn the Catholic faith.  Maybe the guy who wrote the foreward, for example. 

You can order yours directly from Ignatius, stop by your local catholic bookstore if you are a good, holy person who happens to have such a thing nearby, or support one of the blogger-friendly internet retailers such as The Catholic Company (coming soon) or Aquinas and More.  Basically, no excuse not to have one.  Well, okay, don’t go into debt for it.  But aside from that.