Inside Our Homeschool – What We’re Doing This Year

Last updated on: August 18, 2015 at 12:05 pm By Jennifer Fitz

What I’ve been doing instead of blogging lately is getting ready for school — organizing the house, buying books, writing up the calendar. No, this is not one of those posts where I explain that this is the very best method and your children will rot if they do something else.

–> FYI If you’re also posting your non-hubris-laden plans and I don’t regularly read your blog (or I fail to read it this one time), you can tweet it to me @JenFitz_Reads.

If you don’t want to read about every single book we’re using, skip down to the math story at the bottom. People who homeschool will especially appreciate the magnitude of the pending Saul-on-his-way-to-Tarsus thing that happened.

The Boy, 10th Grade

Core Classes

He’s enrolled in Kolbe Academy’s online school for everything core-academics except science. To my pleasant surprise he asked to take Latin I, so he’s switching languages (last year was French I). We’re super happy with the decision to go with Kolbe for him, it’s a good fit. For science this year he’s going to take some computer programming courses, per his goal of getting some IT certifications under his belt. He’ll pick back up with the lab sciences at Kolbe or the local community college for junior and senior years.

The Fabulous Exciting Economics Class

We’re doing a 1-semester-credit economics course with some friends, meeting once a week over the course of the year. It’ll cover personal finance (Dave Ramsey version), then traditional Econ 101 via Compass Media’s Basic Economics. Neither of those programs are themselves Catholic, but you can count on me to insert necessary commentary to adjust as needed. We’ll wrap up with a survey of what I think are the big encyclicals you need a working familiarity with (starting with Rerum and ending with Laudato, big surprise).

Going along with that is a debate-club portion of the class. Kids will start by working through The Fallacy Detective and warming up their arguing skills that way. Second half of the year they’ll prepare a couple of debate pieces. Some of the debaters aren’t in the econ class, but for those who are, they can use their debate topics as research reports for a component of the economics class.

I’m so stinking excited about this class. More fun than anyone should be allowed to have on a Friday.

Electives

The boy’s continuing with piano and classical choral for fine arts, and a combination of outdoor sports (mountain biking, hiking, general fitness) for PE. We don’t count shooting sports in PE, but that’s just so that administrators don’t faint when they see it on the transcript. Auto Upkeep is on his to-do list as a parent-mandated prerequisite for a driver’s license, but the parents have no required time frame, so it might not be this year.

The Girls, 8th, 6th, and 4th Grades

Language Arts

All three girls are using Language of God from CHC for their grammar and composition. We used this last year, and the workbook format is very handy for me for recordkeeping. I like the way CHC’s textbooks integrate the faith: Catholicism-as-normal-life. (The old Voyages in English had the same merit — I liked that one, too, no complaints, we just needed to transition to workbooks for ease of use.)

6th and 4th graders are using My Catholic Speller from CHC, which wins points with me for including words like “monstrance” and “transubstantiation” on the spelling lists. In the older grades the spelling words are written in cursive, which is either good practice or the bane of your existence, depending on whether your child can read that stuff. I vote “good practice.”

They are also both doing MCP Plaid Phonics, which has been a longtime winner around here. I like the way it takes words apart in 7,000 different directions. Word Surgery is a subject, in my book.

For handwriting my 6th grader is finishing up Cheerful Cursive (I liked this very much), and then following with CHC’s Handwriting Level 4, which doubles as my consolation for the fact that the girls won’t have any formal Latin going on this year. (They get their share at Mass, though, so their brains won’t completely melt in one year.) 4th grader is doing an intro to cursive with CHC’s Handwriting Level 3. What sold me on switching first-year cursive programs was that CHC’s book has goofy riddles in them.

Social Studies

All three girls are continuing with Faith and Life. Of course. The younger two are doing the sadly out-of-print Bible Story Workbook which is just plain fun and pleasant, and Map Skills for geography.

8th grader is using MTF’s The History of the Church for her history book. True story: We had decided to keep working through The Catholic Textbook Project’s history series, which we like very much, but when I went to file my paperwork I completely forgot we had agreed on that. We already owned the MTF book so it was in front of my face, and I’d been thinking she really needed a good Church History course, so I wrote it down on the forms. She’s resumed speaking to me, so it’s okay.

The two younger girls are unschooling literature, because I have trouble with them reading all the “literature” selections ahead of time. Good problems. 8th Grader is doing CHC’s The Secret Code of Poetry. It looks promising. We have an attitude problem at our house concerning poetry, and I’m hoping this can be the year we fix that.

Science

8th Grader is continuing with CHC’s middle school Life Science text, which we did half of last year (she had some other science things going on to, get up off your fainting couch). We’ve had good luck with getting together with friends to do the labs, so I’ve got two lab-weeks penciled in, one for fall, one for spring.

Because our science-friends have a 6th grader doing Behold and See 6, our 6th grader is doing it too. That’s the reason. But it’s a beautiful book and I do like it. The book is divided into three units, and we’re doing them out of order. We’ll start with Unit 1, physical science, then skip ahead to Unit 3, astronomy, because it’s easier to do astronomy labs when it’s winter and it gets dark early. Then we’ll go back to Unit 2 (habitats-n-animals-n-stuff) in the spring, which is when it’s nicer to go to the zoo.

4th grader has a co-op science class, and I think we have a couple science books she hasn’t read yet. This is why God ordained that there should be libraries, because one science book a year is not enough, she says. Give me another one, she says.

Also: Everybody Always Does a Science Project That Is The Law. SuperHusband has made no firm dictate on this year’s plans, but he’s eminently predictable, so I say February sees us studying Physical Science, again. Life Science projects take too long, we need things that can be studied in exactly six hours on a Saturday before the Science Fair on Tuesday. I should start looking around now for deals on double-sided tape for Mad Monday, when all the displays get made.

Other Stuff, Not Counting Math

All three girls are in strings (violin, viola, cello), eldest does classical choir too. (So again, not entirely Latin-deprived). Older girls’ co-op is going to include some assorted fine arts, a book club, and I forget what else. Good fun things.

They are all participating in varying amounts of volleyball; the youngest has also taken to going on a bike ride with me every day, and she’s going to have PE in her weekly co-op, too. Hiking kicks in wherever volleyball doesn’t.

I’m going to have to suppress the craft factory so we can get school done (my children have a bad habit of sneaking away from their books in order to pursue their PhD’s in Pinterestology.) But in the meantime, the knock-off American-Girl-Sized dolls are getting school uniforms, new backpacks, and textbooks with calico covers.

Math. Oh Math.

Okay so this really crazy thing happened about math. I’ve been perfectly happy with Math-U-See for many years. I like the way it teaches concepts, I like the scope and sequence, I like the materials. I had every intention of continuing with it.

Then I was ordering my books, and MUS’s server was malfunctioning. So I was delayed in placing my order.

Meanwhile, we’d already planned to hire a Math Assistant, because this is our weakest subject. It’s the area where kids have the most resistance and parents have the least enthusiasm (see a pattern there?), and we’d determined that an Outside Force would be crucial to meeting our goals for the year. Our fantabulous find was a willing homeschool mom (kids now grown) who was game for some part-time work.

She’d done Saxon with her kids, but we both agreed that math is math so it didn’t matter all that much.

Saxon. Dreaded Saxon. Fearsome Saxon. Crazy Saxon. Everybody Loves/Hates Saxon.

And while I was waiting for MUS’s server to begin behaving, I grabbed a rosary and went for a walk, and ended up with Saxon On My Mind. I’m not sure whether that counts as a distraction to prayer or the kind of penance you’re only allowed to undertake with a spiritual director’s supervision.

So I came home when it started raining, and surfed around, looking at Saxon. Disadvantages:

Being a crazy curriculum-changer when you’re already happy with existing program.
Higher marginal cost, since with MUS I’d only need student workbooks, whereas with Saxon I’d need to also pick up the answer keys and stuff.
It’s sorta busy. Manically busy.

Advantages:

The intensity of practice and the spiral-approach were well-suited to the particular math goals we had for this year. Which is to say, This Is The Year of Math, Be Silent You Who Want More Latin!
I could get in Saxon’s sadistic idea of “one lesson” the amount and types of practice that we would have been compiling from MUS plus supplements-n-stuff.
Our Math Assistant would be on familiar ground.
I could order the books from one of several vendors I’ve used happily in the past, since Saxon is sold via distributors.

My children held a flash-mob protest when I said the S-word, because of course they’ve heard all the tales. They are homeschoolers, they are not sheltered from the dark secrets of the textbook world. But I managed to quell the seething masses and persuade the opinion leader (8th grader) in time to hit “submit order.”

So it’s done. We’ll see how it goes when the books get here.

New Entries for Our French-Redneck Dictionary

Last updated on: March 23, 2015 at 5:44 pm By Jennifer Fitz

So I’ve got four high school students sitting at my kitchen table, and we’re going over the passé composé today, that stalwart French tense that is the bane of first-year students. I grab a random verb from the list in the textbook, renverser, to spill. Because they have an evil instructor who gives difficult quizzes at the start of every class session (the better to learn from, my dear) I remind them that a phrase such as j’ai renversé . . . [insert your own object, or wait five minutes and one of your younger siblings will have done it for you] can be translated variably as:

I spilled . . .
I did spill . . .
I have spilled . . .

And then, since English verbs are just spilling out of my brain, I throw in:

I done spilled.

(Alternate usage: I’ve done spilled. Alternate spelling, which is entirely unnecessary, and if it sorta capture the emphasis, it at times overstates the nuances on the pronunciation and in the process looks hopelessly silly: I dun spilled.)

And of course it could be spilt. So, so, many variations, and they aren’t interchangeable, non-natives don’t try this in public. If it isn’t your dialect, you listen politely and reply in your own. To the educated, it suffices that the variants are mutually comprehensible.

Then, of course, one of the kids wants to know how you say y’all in French. The answer of course is vous. I explain that if we hadn’t done away with thou, we wouldn’t need y’all. But we did, so we do.

***

Related: If you tend to get your pants in a wad because your kids’ French teacher is delving into dialect and she means it for serious because it’s not just interesting academically, but at times useful if you mean to be an educated person who can circulate in multiple circles without being snickered at by those possessing a wider understanding of the local culture than your average ill-educated, untraveled, upper-middle-class standard-English-speaking isolationist, maybe a book like this one will help you unwind a little. Or not. But it’s readable and interesting, so it can’t hurt to try.

Artwork: Diego Delso [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Christian Community Renewal for Ordinary Moms

Last updated on: January 15, 2015 at 11:09 am By Jennifer Fitz

This story is for Melanie Bettinelli, who is far more thoughtful than I am, and her house is in better order.

So just before Thanksgiving this year, me and another mom got an invitation. We had a new friend who we’d met because our daughters played sports together and liked each other. And she said, “I’d like to have you over to do a Thanksgiving craft with us.”

We said yes, even though we were not really looking for Thanksgiving crafts, but we knew that friendship and community life is important.

On the appointed day we rearranged schedules as needed and made the time.

It was not a complicated event. It was not a huge affair. It was three families spending a few hours together on a weekday afternoon. There were some snacks, the host mom made the other moms coffee, and the kids did their crafts and then went to play, and the three moms got to know each other better.

That was it. It was the best thing ever.

I had shown up tired and overwrought and useless for intelligent conversation, and I went home feeling alive and refreshed and full of hope. A few hours with a couple other moms, talking about things that were important to all of us, in a clean, tranquil house full of happy kids.

***

I don’t really know if my friend had to muster every ounce of bravery in order to extend the invitation, or if she’s one of those people who lives from tea party to tea party. Probably something in between. I do know that the Christian community my children are growing up in consists of invitations like this. I have a friend who puts on an Advent Tea for Girls every year; of course we come. My in-laws have a few events they host. There are a few things that are sponsored by our parish as a whole, or by a parish group, or by some apostolate separate from, but working in sync with, the Church.

Likewise, my children’s spiritual formation is a combination of what they learn at home, what they learn participating in formal programs or ministries sponsored by this or that corner of the Church, and small events hosted by fellow families who see a need and act.

An example of the latter: Our local youth groups are stretched to their max doing what they do, which is primarily evangelism and early discipleship. They do good work, and I’m glad for my children to be involved. But several of us were looking for an apologetics course — the kind of thing that was more than our local youth groups were in a position to offer just now. Finally, one of the dads, who is a pro at apologetics, but not able to get into formal ministry work at this time, decided what he could do is open his home a couple nights a month: Come have supper then learn some apologetics.

This is how it’s done. Each of us offering the little we can, in the times and places we can. The big vision isn’t being achieved by one massive coordinated effort. It’s being achieved by countless mini-invitations, some of which we have to decline, others we can gratefully accept, a few we can extend ourselves.

***

I don’t live in Catholic Wonderland. I live in as typical a corner of American Catholicism as you could hope to make a sitcom about. Since it’s the Bible Belt, we are helped by a culture of discipleship in the evangelical congregations that surround us — but my children’s Catholic childhood community looks nothing like the typical pattern for evangelical kids. We may be buoyed by the surrounding evangelical culture, but our reality is distinctively Catholic not just in the decorations, but in the overall rhythm of interaction.

There’s a greater vision we’re working towards, but it’s not something that will ever be fully achieved. The big vision isn’t an action though, it’s a motivation. It is the perspective that helps us know that yes, when your friend invites you to come do the craft, you change your schedule to go do the craft.

Just as the Church can only be built one small soul at a time, Christian communal life can only be built one small invitation at a time.

Artwork: By Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (Musée Condé, Chantilly) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Being Someone New for 2015

Last updated on: December 31, 2014 at 3:46 pm By Jennifer Fitz

Two links to my work elsewhere that deserve your attention as we start the new year:

1. At CatholicMom.com earlier this month, I wrote about a Gospel passage I never quite grasped until the events literally happened to me. And then I got it. Read the whole thing, and then you’ll know the context for my summing up:

Is there an area of my life where I’m clinging to a past identity? Allowing what I’ve done to define me? To condemn me? What can I do, right now, to become a person who is no longer defined by that past?

When you get to mid-January and your resolutions have already fallen apart, this is what you fall back on. This is what your efforts are about. Every minute of your life is a new minute.

2. If you live someplace with people in it, there’s a book you might find helpful. At New Evangelizers I review The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It isn’t what you think it is.

My background is in business and in international studies, and over the years I’ve looked in on a number of “diversity” type presentations. Usually they boil down to a few funny stories about what your brandname means in Chinese and an admonishment that we all need to get along and celebrate our uniqueness, pass the baklava and let’s sing a Polynesian folk song. This book is completely different.

Getting along with others isn’t the highest ideal. But it is good for you to try it sometimes. Take a look at the book.

Cover image for The Culture Map courtesy of ErinMeyer.com.

The Immaculate Conception: More Good News than Your Enemies Want to Admit

Last updated on: December 26, 2014 at 4:29 pm By Jennifer Fitz

The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8th, is a holy day of obligation in the United States, which means you need to go Mass. Answering some common questions:

Dr. Ed Peters, Canon Lawyer, explains that no, you mustn’t try to kill two birds with one stone by counting a Sunday evening Mass as both your Sunday Mass and your Vigil of the Immaculate Conception Mass.
But he adds, any two masses (on the appropriate dates / times) will do, even if the Mass you assisted at wasn’t celebrated in observance of the event that gives rise to the obligation.

Why does the Church do this to us, insisting that we reorganize our lives, often at great inconvenience, in order to get our rear ends into Church an hour a week, and twice in a week when there’s a holy day? Because it is the most important thing.

In the case of the Immaculate Conception, the importance is partly that it is the feast of the patron saint of the United States. You can read the history of how that came about here. It wasn’t what I had guessed.

There is also, of course, an amount of general spiritual significance that shouldn’t be overlooked.

What does it mean to be without sin?

For those who are new to the feast, the “Immaculate Conception” refers to the fact that Mary, mother of Jesus, was conceived in her mother Anne’s womb free from the stain of original sin. This doesn’t mean she didn’t need a Savior, nor that she saved herself. Since we’re talking about stains, you might imagine Jesus saving each of us people-who-are-not-Mary by, say, trading shirts with us when someone accidentally spills red wine on our good clothes mid-party. In Mary’s case, slight variation, He managed to whisk His mother out of the way of that clumsy butler before the splash hit. She was still saved, by Him, just in a different way.

(And as it happens, thanks to His continued work in preserving her from sin throughout her life, He wasn’t even doing it out of fear He’d get a whapping if He didn’t.)

So, to be without sin is to be like Jesus or to be like Mary. Jesus is a pretty good example, but since He is also God, sometimes we can think that in order to be sinless we have to be able to do some of the things He did that were actually His divine nature acting and not His human nature. So, for example, if you can’t seem to calm storms, it’s not because you’re sinful, it’s because you are human. (You might be sinful, indeed we assume you are, but even if you weren’t, you still wouldn’t possess this ability.)

So one of the neat things about Mary is that she really didn’t do anything all that spectacular, other than avoiding sin and doing good.* We don’t read in the Gospels about how her jam won first prize at the County Fair. She wasn’t a ninja. She didn’t even raise ten kids, let alone ten non-divine, original-sin-bearing kids. And though she likely did a bit of homeschooling, her husband and the local synagogue probably did the heavy lifting. She did what God wanted her to do, and that sufficed.

Thank God for Mondays

This year the Immaculate Conception falls on a Monday, which means that if you are praying the Rosary, you’ll be going over the Joyful Mysteries. The fifth Joyful Mystery is a funny one: The Finding of Jesus in the Temple. It’s funny because in order for someone (Mary and Joseph) to find Jesus, first they had to lose Him. Easier said than done when your kid is without sin.

Now it’s easy to just blame Joseph for the whole disaster, but let’s remember that Mary is a bona fide mother. She was on the trip, and her kid got lost. Now if you were on a trip, and you were a mother, and your kid got lost, what would you do? You would blame yourself. That’s what mothers do. “I should have remembered to make sure Jesus was with Joseph.” “I should have double-checked that Jesus was with us when we left the Temple.” “I should have developed a routine six pilgrimages ago about how to communicate before hand so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.” “I should have known that He’d go back to the Temple, He’s like that.”

Because this blaming thing is so ingrained in us, people will actually tell you that the Losing of the Child Jesus is proof against the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. If Mary had been a good mother, they say, her kid would not have gotten lost.

But here’s the thing about sin, the thing we need to know: You can be a perfect mother, raising a perfect child, and your kid can still get lost. Your kid can even end up tortured to death.

Bad things can happen on your watch that aren’t your fault.

The Immaculate Conception is about a lot of things, all of them worth attending Mass to commemorate. But this particular thing, that we can sometimes be innocent when it feels like we are not, that we can sometimes have done the right thing and still have everything turn out unspeakably wrong? What about that?

People could be blaming you right now for stuff that happened because you don’t know everything and can’t control everything. But God will look on you and say, “Hey, I’m the Omniscient and Omnipotent One, not you, so let Me climb on that cross and take the hit, you’re guilty of plenty but not of this.”

I think that makes the Immaculate Conception a feast day we desperately need.

*This suggests that if you want to avoid sin and do good, it might be better to avoid trying to do spectacular things. Unless, of course, God wants you to do them, in which case, you must. Mary’s life as a model for the Christian life: Usually humdrum, sometimes spectacular, sometimes just absolutely, heart-piercingly awful.

Bacon Famine 2022?

Last updated on: August 12, 2021 at 10:11 am By Jennifer Fitz

Those of us who lean conservative have a knee-jerk tendency to ask, “Can anything good come out of California?” Hence a recent spate of gloating over the prospect of that state waking up New Year’s Day 2022 to a bleak, bacon-less dystopia caused by 2018’s Proposition 12 ballot initiative.

If you aren’t familiar with the law, here are three articles that provide varying perspectives. If you only have time to read one, go with the piece from Civil Eats, as it has the most thorough reporting of the three:

Vox‘s explainer, which is less-annoying (not annoyance-free, mind you) than their usual fare. No surprise Vox comes out in favor. Set aside the fact that the staff at Vox probably don’t eat much bacon anyway, it’s still a decent summary of the law and its ramifications.
National Hog Farmer on “How will Prop 12 affect sow housing?” This would be the anti-Vox, and the article gets into some interesting technical details on how an industrial-scale pork farmer might modify existing pens to comply with the law.
And from the other end of the farming spectrum, Civil Eats asks “Could Crate-Free Pork Become the New Industry Standard?” Very thorough discussion of the state of industry, as well as the personal account, with a few data points on cost and production, from a farmer who went from un-crated to crated and back again.

Longtime readers may recall that I’m pretty happy with not having to keep kosher. Still: I’m not convinced California is wrong on this one.

Here’s the key line in The Catechism:

2418 It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly.

(Find the context here.)

Key word here is needlessly, and on that point Catholics of good will are free to hold different opinions about the details of California’s new law.

I think it’s important, though, to acknowledge that just because one’s usual political opponents are consistently wrong on any number of very serious matters, it doesn’t follow that therefore they are always wrong.

California has a horrendous record on protecting unborn humans. Absolutely abominable. Frankly living conditions for the born-humans aren’t consistently all that impressive either, a reality hinted at by the steady out-migration of California residents to other parts of the country.

Still, it’s honestly not unreasonable to think that, say, a pregnant sow ought to be able to turn around in her pen. I like cheap bacon. Really do. But if it’s possible to feed the nation without inflicting needless suffering on the animals who give us all our tasty meat, then we are obliged to do so.

And in that regard, the California experiment isn’t half bad: If it works out, everyone wins. If it turns out that no, it’s actually not possible to feed the country given such restrictions on production methods, then we can find that out through a relatively small experiment rather than pulling the whole nation into famine.

Enough to make a state’s-rights conservative double-like the idea.

Related:

The Humane Society put together this pdf compendium of quotes on Catholic teaching about animal welfare. Some sources in the document are more authoritative than others, but the wide variety of authors cited includes a little something for every taste across the spectrum of church politics.

And for a palate cleanser, immerse yourself in years of blogging from the homesteaders at Bethune Catholic.

Seriously, conservatives: Don’t let your irritation at the woke-left cause you to abandon your own faith.

Photo of a man with a pig on a leash, on a sidewalk in Brattleboro, VT, courtesy of Wikimedia, CC 4.0. Photo contributed by Beyond My Ken.

Immigration Policy and the Moral Law

Last updated on: September 27, 2016 at 2:41 pm By Jennifer Fitz

“You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.” Leviticus 19:15

This month over at (the extremely right-leaning) Chronicles magazine, Karina Rollins is reporting on the epidemic of sexual assaults committed by migrants in Germany. To recap the situation, a few links from across the spectrum:

These news reports, some reactions on the right, and some responses on the left, each in their way reveal a dramatic failure to abide the moral law. I’m hopeful none of my readers need any explanation of the grave evil carried out by the perpetrators of these crimes. So let’s look at the other two big lapses.

On the right, if you scratch the surface of the internet, you’ll encounter staunch xenophobia. Foreign Criminals = All Foreigners Must Go. I’m seeing a resurgence of nativist arguments among Americans like something out of 1850.

On the left, there’s worried hand-wringing and fretful apologies for those poor foreign people who just haven’t been taught their manners yet, and terrible fear that if we acknowledge any cultural aspects of this particular set of crimes then we are bad, bad people.

To make an analogy, it would be like addressing the US illegal drug trade by either banning tacos or else pretending there are no cartels south of the border.

This is not the way.

Christianity: Always Simple, Never Easy

What is the moral response to the dueling problems of strangers in need of refuge and rank wickedness? It isn’t complicated. But it does require a willingness to accept the entirety of the Gospel.

Here are the principles:

We are obliged, as much as we are we able, to welcome the foreigner. That’s what the Bible says.
We have a right to legitimate self-defense. (It’s in the Catechism.)
Government authorities have a responsibility to uphold the law.
Crime is crime. It doesn’t matter who is doing the raping, serious crimes have be dealt with frankly and unequivocally.

This creates some tension for public policy. If a nation is in fact unable to receive immigrants due to an inability to maintain civil order, that is a legitimate reason to set limits on the borders. Doing so, however, doesn’t allow us to wash our hands of our obligation to welcome the stranger. Rather, public policy should be oriented towards strengthening the institutions and general tenor of the nation so that in the future it is possible to provide more assistance to our neighbors in need.

It is likewise reasonable for a nation to observe that there are serious problems among a group of migrants (hint: they aren’t leaving home because everything was so wonderful there), and take measures, within the limits of respect for human dignity, to welcome those in need without rolling out the carpet for thugs.

What we can’t do, if only because it’s bad for our own sanity, is pretend that our fellow humans are all either devils or angels. Foreign people, even desperate, germy, illiterate foreign people who follow the wrong religion, are fellow humans. They possess an inherent dignity as persons made in the image of God, and thus they also possess free will.

The biblical command to welcome the foreigner doesn’t allow us to ignore the needs of our neighbors, nor to ignore the real crimes of evildoers among those neighbors. Peace requires both mercy and justice. Mercy and justice are in turn the fruits of devoted slavery to the entirety of the truth.

Photo by Ggia (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons