Two girls and I pulled into St. Mary’s Greenville Saturday evening with half an hour to go before the vigil Mass. Thirty minutes is too long for tired children to prayerfully admire the architecture, and too short to go anyplace else. So we went to the playground across the soccer field, by the school. It took about five minutes on that playground for my eight-year-old to start campaigning for us to move to St. Mary’s and enroll her in the... Read more
Today at New Evangelizers, I write about “Small Groups.” By that what I mean is a handful of parishioners — say, less than 15 — getting together to do Christian stuff together. Learn about the faith, do a work of mercy, pray, whatever it is that particular group does. Your parish has to have small groups. If it doesn’t, everyone dies on the vine: But everybody – everybody – in your parish needs a small community. Human beings literally cannot socialize in large gatherings. You’ll notice... Read more
Karen Kelly Boyce has a good piece up at the Catholic Writers Guild on cementing your identity as a writer. Her two instructions are: 1. Tell people you are a writer. 2. Treat your writing seriously. Make an office, use it. For those of us transitioning from “I’d like to be a writer one day” to “I am a writer” there’s a vicious cycle of self-doubt: We don’t take ourselves seriously, so others don’t take us seriously, so we don’t take... Read more
If you want to understand the clerical food fight portion of this month’s Synod on the Family, what you need to know about is sexting. Not the Catholic kind, the other kind. Your must-read article for this month is The Atlantic’s feature Why Kids Sext. It’s long, and you should read the whole thing. Points to ponder as you do so: Louisa County is normal America. There’s nothing “different” that explains why there was suddenly a website full of students’... Read more
I’ve been following the Ebola news with interest. It takes a special kind of hubris to assume that Americans are somehow automatically protected from massive deadly epidemics, or any other disaster. I’m certainly hopeful, of course, that this will turn out to be a local tragedy and not a turning point in world history. As a general rule, turning points in world history make good reading but horrible living. *** I grew up in a family that didn’t freak... Read more
Something fun: I was putting together my author bio for the 2015 CatholicMom.com Gospel Reflections e-book, and discovered my catechist book is now out in Kindle. Woohoo! Pretty cool, huh? That makes me high-tech and stuff, right? If you know a religious education teacher who’s floundering big time, this book is your answer. It’s short, readable, and gives you step-by-step methods that anyone can use to put together a passable Sunday school class. Yes! Even at your crazy parish, where... Read more
Synod Survival Tip, and this works for parish and family life too: If you find yourself stuck on the grumpy loop, rehashing over and again the failings of Cardinal Clueless or Father Frustrating, pray for him as if he were dying. That’s right. Imagine your nemesis on his deathbed, about to face his eternal reward, and pray as if his very soul were at stake. If you are correct in perceiving just how far he has strayed from his vocation, then... Read more
Today (October 13th) is the feast of St. Gerald of Aurillac, which means it’s time for me to point you to fun for junior historians. Biography in general is a useful way to study history, because you quickly get past the generalizations and see what people really did. Even better is biography written in the era you are studying, so that you not only find out what happened, but how the contemporaries viewed the events. St. Odo of Cluny wrote... Read more
Here are a handful of resources for those who are interested in following all the sex talk at the Synod, but are having a hard time making sense of the assorted news reports. For beginners, take a look at: This homily text from Fr. Jim Leblanc on marriage, divorce, and annulments. If I have my facts straight, Fr. Jim was a lawyer before he became a priest and canon lawyer; he’s also a personable, genuinely pastoral guy. He knows his... Read more
There’s some exasperated amusement in St. Blogs over the new California laws concerning sexual consent on campus. We can learn about the human heart from doubtful laws. Implicit in this law is the question, “Are you sure you want to do this?” Why do we ask that question? Because we know that sex outside of marriage is bad for women. If sex were, as corners of our contemporary culture so desperately insist, just this thing you do, a way... Read more
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