What those [parenting] books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations and the older parents at cocktail parties -- what they taught me was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay.
There are no heated political arguments in [Jane Austen's] novels, neither any romantic adventures, no crimes or scenes of violence. Her novels are not of a kind which could be described as thrillers. And yet they are amazingly popular nowadays. Can the reason be that we as a society have lost something precious and now we are desperately longing for its return?
We seem to nearly have lost the culture of home. It is the description of this culture which makes Miss Austen's novels and their adaptations so irresistible to modern audience. In fact, we can learn a lot from them. Take, for instance the novel "Emma". There is the character of Mr Weston, which is a perfect illustration to my first point. He went into trade to make money and when he earned enough, he retired, though he was quite young and healthy. There is no mention in the novel that he ever regretted this decision. He evidently saw his market activity as a means to an end, and not an objective in itself.
To those of you who think religion is a self-delusion based on wish-fulfillment, all I can remark is that this religion does not fulfill my wishes. My wishes, if we are being honest, would run to polygamy, self-righteousness, vengeance and violence: a Viking religion would suit me better, or maybe something along Aztec lines.
The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
In the twenty years after 1917, all aspects of Soviet society came under the purview of the [Communist] party. The atomization of society, a prime characteristic of totalitarian government, did not permit such secret and trustful groups as the family to exist at ease...By and large the government worked to weaken the importance of the family. Initially after the revolution, divorces required no court proceedings, abortions were legalized, women were encouraged to take jobs outside the home, and communist nurseries were set up to care for children while their mothers worked.
The board game "Monopoly" served allied prisoners as a real-life tool to get out of jail during World War II, says Brian McMahon in Mental Floss, a magazine of farflung trivia.
In 1941, the British secret service asked the game's British licensee John Waddington Ltd. to add secret extras to some sets, which the Red Cross delivered to prisoners of war. These included a metal file, compass and silk maps of safe houses (silk, because it folds into small spaces and unfolds silently). Even better, real French, German and Italian currency was hidden under the game's fake money. Soldiers and pilots were told that if they were captured they should look out for the special editions, identified by a red dot in the game's "Free Parking" space.
Of the 35,000 prisoners of war who escaped German prison camps, "more than a few of those certainly owe their breakout to the classic board game," says Mr. McMahon.
In a society that is so preoccupied with feelings, many expect that prayer will result in feeling close to God. In fact, though, the great fruit of prayer is virtue. Putting ourselves into the presence of God opens us to the power of the Spirit that orders our priorities to see as Jesus sees and to desire what He desires...Prayer gives us the grace to move beyond preoccupation with self and, little by little, to put on the mind of Christ.
We do our children a disservice by expecting them to do their duty day in and day out without a worthy reason. On the other hand, saying, "I'll take you to Six Flags if you do all your schoolwork and don't complain for a whole week," is a demeaning motivator. For, essentially, in extending such a carrot, we are assuming the child can only care for the temporal and fleeting pleasures of life.
I was never really quite comfortable with IVF although I could not put my finger on why. It began to come into focus as we sat in the doctor’s office and she pressured us to sign a form to allow for selective reduction. I wouldn't do it, but we told her we would think about it. I could not believe that a doctor who knew I had lost every one of my pregnancies would ask me to abort my children. I was stunned, and she would not do the IVF with out us signing the form.
After years of discernment and prayer, I joined the Catholic Church in 2000. The best way I can describe my conversion experience is this:
It was as if I had entered a beautiful and mysterious palace with hundreds, thousands of rooms. I had heard strange things about the palace and was warned not to go in. But I had been given false information and rumors. I had to see the palace for myself. Each room was full of rich treasures and I was in awe of the beauty, majesty, wisdom and peace there. The palace was lovely all along; I just needed the veil lifted from my eyes to see it and the courage to go in.
I too have been pointed out as someone whose quality of life has been diminished as a result of my injury and have actually been told by another individual that they would kill themselves if they were in my position. I don’t know a single person who would want to trade places with me. But but does that mean that I would be better off dead? And who is this man to decide whose life is a living hell?
[Richard] Dawkins’ understanding of religious faith as an irrational commitment strikes the Catholic as strange. The First Vatican Council condemned fideism, the doctrine that faith is irrational. It insisted that faith is and must be in harmony with reason. John Paul II developed the same idea in his encyclical on Faith and Reason, and Benedict XVI in his Regensburg academic lecture of September 12, 2006, insisted on the necessary harmony between faith and reason. In that context, he called for a recovery of reason in its full range, offsetting the tendency of modern science to limit reason to the empirically verifiable.
Please join us this December 16th 2007 for the largest one-day political donation event in history. Our goal is to bring together 100,000 people to donate $100 each, creating a one day donation total of $10,000,000.
The kids in this video have to cross a raging river via a steel rope 1,200 feet in the air to go to school. Amazing.
How do we "do" our vocations at work? How do we know how far to go, how zealous to be, how counter-cultural (and being Catholic, really Catholic, is certainly counter-cultural) to be? How do we "do" our vocations through blogs or websites or other forms of the written word? How often do we mistake what our vocations are, doing what we like or feel comfortable doing when God is waiting for us to do His will? How do we discern God's will for us?
If you have read my "about me" page, you know that I was paralyzed in a car accident almost 7 years ago. I have always been a pro-life advocate, but recently I have found myself at the forefront of the stem cell research debate in this country as someone who could theoretically benefit from such research. After testifying at a senate judiciary committee hearing in the state of Missouri in favor of a ban on human [cloning] I have made it my goal to research and educate people about stem cell research and human cloning. This blog is dedicated to promoting and building up a culture of life.
A stray bullet rips through the command center, blowing holes in vital equipment and damaging the data archives. Repair teams spring into action. The damage must be patched up quickly or the control systems could go haywire. It's literally a matter of life or death, and a decision must be made: try to fix the damage in place, or move the broken parts to the repair shop.Read the rest.
This is a drama that unfolds every day in the microscopic world inside the cells of astronauts.
[Charles] Simic points out some broader differences between American and European approaches to poetry. "In Europe poetry has always been a literary undertaking, it's really part of literature," Mr. Simic says. "If you write poetry in a serious way you are participating in a very long tradition, over a thousand years . . . they don't have, for example, the tradition of confessional poetry, they never had a Walt Whitman." He adds, "Surrealist poets broke a lot of literary taboos, they were irreverent, but they would never write a poem saying, 'this morning, I drove my kids to school. . .'"
In America, he says, poetry can play the role of a journal, or a record of one's life. And yes, there is a downside to this "raw, direct quality that allows us to write endless, endless poems in our culture." He explains: "One could say, this is all wrong, this is the trouble with American poetry, so much of it is about someone's life, there is a kind of a narcissism, me, me, me, me, me, this is what happened to me, and therefore I'm going to record it, put it down. And we all as readers shout: 'It's trivial! Don't bother! It happens to everyone! It's boring!'"
My Dad entered the last stages of his long fight with Cancer on Memorial Day weekend '04. He began hallucinating and such. During this time he prayed Rosaries nearly all of his waking hours. Doctors said he would be gone in days. So I stayed with him.
It wound up being months before he passed away. In those months, he was rarely the man I knew as my father. But he said he loved me all the time, several times per conversation. After a couple of weeks he would say, "Let’s pray this rosary to end abortion."
After several rosaries to end abortion in one day, I asked, "Let’s pray this one to heal your cancer, or ease your pain."
He said, "NO! we are praying to end abortion."
He then shared with me a story one evening about my own conception, and its inconvenience. A very long and complicated story made short.
They chose to have it, "taken care of." They went to the Abortion Clinic, he paid the money, and then my mother stood him up for the final appointment.
He didn’t speak to her for weeks, until finally his mother shamed him into marrying my mom.
He said, "Here it is 25 years later, and the baby I wanted to kill is by my side at my deathbed."
Church Fathers such as Augustine didn't include a commemoration of Christ's birth in their lists of holidays at all. Early Christians focused their attention on Easter, the holiest day in the Church's calendar, the solemnity of solemnities....The earliest surviving record of a specific celebration of the Nativity is a sermon by St. Optatus, bishop of Mileve in Africa, from about 383.The whole thing is worth reading.
The Basque language...is not an Indoeuropean language, and shows no resemblance to languages in neighbouring countries...Owing to some similarities with the Georgian language, some linguists think it could be related to languages from the Caucasus. Others relate the language to non-Arabic languages from the north of Africa. One of the most likely hypotheses argues that the Basque language developed "in situ", in the land of the primitive Basques. That theory is supported by the discovery of some Basque-type skulls in Neolithic sites, which ruled out the thesis of immigration from other areas. Many think it is a very old language because there are words, such as that for axe ("aizkora" or "haizkora") for example, that have the same root as the word rock ("aitz"> or "haitz").
[The materialist] believes that when he draws his last breath, he will simply cease to be.
And in his most private moments, the materialist is quite likely to be horrified by this thought. He is likely to be aware how much some force within him rejects it, turns in fear from it, weeps unseen tears over it. As tragic as he finds the deaths of those he loves, his own death looms like the greatest tragedy, clouding every bright horizon, drawing gray lines of terror over every future aspect.
[Carl Sagan] laid out a hypothetical world that exists only in two dimensions. The inhabitants of this world were flat pieces of paper moving about on a plane (a tabletop). One day an apple visits this world. Sagan dipped the bumpy bottom of the apple on an inkpad and set it down amid the flatworlders. To them, he said, the apple appears as four, distinct objects where the ink marks the tabletop. Their dimensionality prevents them from seeing the rest of the apple as it truly exists in three dimensions...One could argue that it also shows the weak spot of science if it bows to methodological materialism and only adheres to observations made with the five senses.
A joint survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy -- hardly a bastion of conservative orthodoxy -- found that in covering the current presidential race, the media are sympathetic to Democrats and hostile to Republicans.
