Yes, this is a genuine question, not just a rhetorical one. I came across this in reading the Archdiocesan paper which they’re sending all the school parents in hopes of hooking us as eventual paid subscribers, so I looked them up, found the website, and some general information: this is a parish-by-parish process that’s been underway since 2011, operating in waves of 20 – 30 parishes at a time; so far 140 of the 353 parishes have been through this process.... Read more
Or, “wow, that was fast.” Once upon a time, “gender” had one meaning: the linguistic differentiation, in various languages, between words which were masculine, feminine, or neuter, which dictates which articles and, depending on language, which adjective endings are used. It seems to me that people occasionally try to make the claim that whether a word is masculine or feminine in a given language says something about the culture. Some time ago, in the 70s or 80s, feminists began using... Read more
You can’t avoid it. It’s everywhere: little girls Irish-dancing their way through your facebook feed, parades, articles on the Irish, overcoming adversity to prosper here and in their home country, and the fabled green river. Specials on corned beef & cabbage at the grocery store, as well as shamrock trinkets of all kinds. (Thank God my kids are old enough that their teachers don’t fill them with tales of leprechauns any longer.) Now, I admit it: I’ve never identified with... Read more
A couple days ago, my son asked me how big Jerusalem and Mecca were, as two major holy cities, so we pulled up the respective Wikipedia articles, and I read a figure that astonished me, “Under Saudi rule, it has been estimated that since 1985 about 95% of Mecca’s historic buildings, most over a thousand years old, have been demolished.” Today at the library I came across a book on the history of the city, Mecca, The Sacred City, by... Read more
It’s a listsicle, as I’ve learned this is called! But we’ll be visiting my parents next week, and trying to figure out how to help them. Dad spends the majority of his time playing computer solitaire or watching TV (often in bed), and Mom is quite unhappy that he won’t get dressed until it’s almost too late to go to the community center senior lunch, and he doesn’t do the exercises he’s supposed to do, or even make other efforts... Read more
The author (whose foreign name is due to Taiwanese ancestry, but this doesn’t particularly factor into her story) is billed as “Co-Director of Caring Across Generations and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and her background is not one of working with the elderly, but advocating for the home care workers (healthcare and, more typically personal care aides), alongside other “domestic employees,” and this book is not about the elderly per se, but those who work for them (with large portions of the... Read more
A couple days ago, I wrote about the “Power of 15” initiative at our local high school/community college, in which they were going to offer dual-enrollment courses, that is, courses offered at the high school which would earn credit at the community college. My take? That in principle the idea was sound, for classes which were truly at a college-level degree of rigor, for instance, by transforming AP History or Calculus into the equivalent college class, and earning the credit... Read more
Here’s a Ross Douthat column in the New York Times: “For Poorer and Richer.” This is another in the various columnists and bloggers commenting on the new book by Robert Putnam, Our Kids. Here are a few key paragraphs: . . . “Our Kids” is attuned to culture’s feedback loops, and it offers grist for social conservatives who suspect it would take a cultural counterrevolution to bring back the stable working class families of an earlier America. That idea makes... Read more
This is more of an open-ended post for reader comments, on something I’ve been thinking about for a while. (Politically-oriented readers, sit tight; I’m reading America’s Bitter Pill now, and will have comments on that soon. . .) Remember a couple weeks ago, when I lamented that Catholics, by and large, do a pretty lousy job of singing at mass? (My metric: can I hear the voices of everyone around me, or just my own voice and/or that of the... Read more
So says an article at The Federalist this afternoon, “Women Can’t Have it All, But They Can Have What Matters,” in which the author cites another piece, at Fortune, “Female company president: “I’m sorry to all the mothers I worked with,” which promotes the idea of working at home. The author of the latter article, Katharine Zaleski, talks about her experiences as the head of a start up with a remotely-working workforce, PowerToFly. If they work from home, it doesn’t matter if... Read more
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