I just finished reading Simcha Fisher’s A Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning this week, and I agree 100% with Sarah Reinhard’s review. My credentials to help you understand how much I like this book: I took Family Honor’s online course this summer. For those who aren’t aware, it is an excellent class, but it’s also basically 5 hours a week of Catholic Sex Ed bootcamp that lasts for, oh, two tours through the gulag. (Actually: About 3.5 months. Semester... Read more
My eight-year-old has a sense of when I’m reading a book she’ll like. Dear God, I Don’t Get It, by Patti Maguire Armstrong (Liguori, 2013) is one of them: it’s perfect for her, and though I don’t have a middle grade son, I think this book would work for either boys or girls. It’s cute, in the “I’m an adult reading a kids’ book” way, without being cutesy. The storyline is basic and yet…is there anything basic about being in... Read more
Why is Halloween the second most commercially-successful holiday in the US, and growing? In a follow-up to the Faith, Science & Halloween post, this morning on The Catholic Channel at SiriusXM I had a chance to chat with Gus Lloyd about the whole Halloween thing. My argument: People are playful. I’m aware that people also like to party, and so holidays like Mardi Gras and Halloween are a big hit with the drunkeness-and-debauchery crowd. Ignore all that for a moment,... Read more
Mind Over Psyche is the second in what’s promised to be a trilogy. (I’m holding the author to it.) It was every bit as good as the first one, Mind Over Mind (which made my Top Fiction of 2011 List). I was sucked in from the very beginning, and though it had been a few years since I read the first one (and I had forgotten plenty of the details), I fared just fine (and couldn’t put it down all... Read more
The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury My rating: 5 of 5 stars It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so much wilderness around you couldn’t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness. The town was full of trees. And dry grass and dead flowers now that... Read more
All Saints’ Day is this week with All Souls’ Day right behind it. Soon we’ll be at the beginning of a new liturgical year. What better time to settle in with a bit of spiritual guidance from the saints? Yep, that’s what I thought too. So it is my great pleasure to tell you about this new book. Paul Thigpen is a favorite author of mine from way back in the days when his books in The Saints Speak Today series... Read more
Years ago, the big thing at Halloween was receiving the annual Jack T. Chick tract about how Halloween was one big festival of the satanic. Fitting, since All Hallow’s Eve is a Catholic holiday, and we all know how Jack T.C. felt about Catholics. (If you don’t, and want to be amused by a tour through the weird and creepy this Halloween, Jimmy Akin’s book on the topic is just the thing.) Concern about the demonic is why certain evangelicals... Read more
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The sacramental principle tells us that, since the Word became flesh, God has begun to heal and restore his creation. Spiritual light can now shine through the material world. On one level, bread and wine; on another, oil, candles, fabrics and paint, bricks, blocks, and filigree–all these can mediate God’s presence in the world. I honestly thought I already reviewed this book. When I saw it on my “to review” stack, I thought it... Read more
I’ve been following Simcha Fisher on and off for a few years. Without fail, she always gets me laughing, whether she’s writing newsy stuff or cracking me up on her personal blog. In the midst of my laughing, though, Fisher also gets me thinking, usually in a way that’s long and hard and ongoing. She inspires me, that’s for sure. I don’t know many other people (in fact, I can’t think of any) who can get me snorting a hot drink... Read more
You know what I find myself struggling to read? Self-help books. Especially of the parenting kind. I suspect it has more to do with my pride than it does with me having any clue about what I’m doing. And I haven’t read many of them (aside from Dr. Ray, who I follow like he’s a rockstar), because, well, there are so many other books to read. So when Six Sacred Rules for Families: A Spirituality for the Home arrived, I braced myself.... Read more
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