Thanks to Happy Catholic for directing readers here. Can’t believe I’ve been missing out all this time — not to worry, I’m increasingly caught up. (With my internet reading. Pile of papers under the desk is as unfiled as ever.)
Readers of this blog may also enjoy Dr. Boli’s links to his alter-ego’s non-humor blogs. Patristics, Pittsburgh, The Grail Code, things like that.
I’ve been reading The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow on and off for a while now. Picked it up from the library about a year or so ago and never got past the introduction; got it out again recently, and have been browsing through it in spurts. Pleasantly surprised tonight to discover I have one more renewal left before it goes back, so I may yet make some headway.
I should say right now that if you pick up this book, go straight to a chapter that interests you. I had to slog through the introduction (I’m not saying *you* shouldn’t read it, just saying, don’t judge a book by its intro), but was rewarded in chapter one with a great lesson on the basics of what-was-what in medieval french languages.
So far I’m up to p. 100 in the cover-to-cover reading of the book, but I’ve also skipped ahead and read some bits farther along, and it was all good. Assuming you have at least a smidgen of background on the topic, you can pretty safely just pick up and read wherever you like, and come away entertained and educated. You do not, by the way, need to know French — English translations provided for all the non-obvious French words tossed out as linguistic examples, and some of the obvious ones, too. (Say you couldn’t figure out that the word zéro meant, er, zero? Don’t worry, there’s a translation there for you on p. 30.)
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What struck me in reading the chapter on medieval ‘french’ is just how busy a time it was, linguistically. By the year 800 a language distinct from latin had emerged, to the point that the church had to require homilies be given in the vernacular. But this new language was both very local — not so much a unified language as a collection of more or less mutally understandable regional dialects — and vigorously international. In addition to the exportation of Norman French to England with William the Conquerer, there was the development of the lingua franca, an italian-french dialect used in the mediterranean.
(Why did French become the, er, lingua franca of this region? It was the dominant foreign culture. Not unlike how the Amish call the rest of America ‘the English’, or a non-hispanic American might be called an ‘Anglo’, the Arabs apparently call all the crusaders, regardless of country of origin, ‘French’.)
–> And still more going on in addition to all that, over the five or so centuries that are especially middle of the middle ages. Borrow the book and read Chapter 1 to get the introductory course.
There’s something worth understanding here. When we think about language and geography and politics and culture, we Americans come from a perspective of a single highly standardized common language that has been fairly stable since as long as we can remember. It is important in looking at medieval history and culture to understand that it was not this way then. By getting a grasp of what was going on linguistically, we can avoid some common blunders in our historical analysis, and even hope to understand why certain elements of medieval society worked as they did. Good stuff. Well worth your time.
I forget which of the several great blogs I owe thanks to for pointing me to Secondhand Smoke. Good coverage of ethical issues, and over the past week there have been a few posts specifically on health care and end-of-life decisions. Look here for a brief report about how the British healthcare system rations expensive medicines. And here is an article about a family that wishes to dehydrate-to-death a family member who has become severely disabled by a stroke — of significant concern is the cost of nursing care for the patient.
I wanted to point out two issues that these articles raise:
First of all, making cost-versus-benefit decisions about medical care is normal and rational. Resources are limited, and both length and quality of life can be subject to opportunity costs. As a wife and mother, frankly I’m all about making this life’s inevitable suffering and end as frugal as possible. There are times when my family’s money is better spent on some other purpose than my medical care.
Forgive me if I shock you, but shouldn’t my money be spent on my happiness? If I find greater marginal utility in spending $10,000 on college tuition for my children, rather than on a year’s supply of a prescription drug of doubtful longterm benefit, do I not have the right to spend my money as I see fit? If it is acceptable for me to give up my life of housewife luxury in order to toil away in a fluorescent-lit cubicle farm, in order to provide some perceived good for my children, am I not also allowed to give up that same number of days of housewife luxury, for the same benefit to my children, if instead of a cube farm I find myself suffering at home, or in purgatory, doing some kind of work arguably no less valuable than whatever clerical job I might have gotten in the first case?
So what’s wrong with a nationalized health care system making rationing decisions? The same thing that would be wrong with a command economy telling me I am required to take that clerical job. These are my decisions to make. The catholic name for this principle is ‘subsidarity’. From CCC 1883:
Socialization also presents dangers. Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”
Any health care system that violates the principle of subsidarity — taking health care decisions out of the hands of the patient and making them subject to the preferences of the state — is not morally sound.
The second point that came to me, especially reading about the beleaguered stroke patient, is that we as a culture seem to have lost all concept of responsibility for caring for family members. Let me be the first to say that I find nursing to be icky work. There’s good reason I went into accounting and not health care. I can barely stand to change my own kids’ diapers, why would I want to change anyone else’s?
But contemporary America has decided to completely forget about the work of caring for the helpless. All those housewives who ‘don’t do anything’? They’re, um, taking care of other people.
–> Ever notice that if you don’t take care of your own children, you have to pay other people to do it? It’s because childcare is actual work. Same story with making dinner, vacumning, cleaning toilets, all that stuff. When people decry the ‘high cost of childcare’ I want to shake their shoulders. Don’t you know that the nice lady who keeps your kids for you has to feed herself and her family, too? There isn’t a ‘cheap’ method of caring for children.
And the same is true of nursing care. Fine and good if you as a family have decided that expensive hospitalization and advanced medical procedures are not how you wish to spend your money for the care of ill family member. But you can’t anymore decide that therefore *nobody* should feed the poor guy, just because you don’t want to pay someone to do it for you — anymore than you could decide that since daycare is so expensive, just leave the baby home alone and unfed while you go to work all day.
And now we’re back to subsidarity. You can’t have it both ways. Does the state have a responsibility to pay for the care of your children? Then you have given up your right to decide how that child will be treated. Does the state have a responsibility to care for your elderly, disabled, father? Than you again have turned over your rights. Because these are, fundamentally, your rights. Your rights, and your responsibilities.
We are slipping more and more from the notion that the state has a legitimate role in assisting the most weak and vulnerable among us — the orphan, the childless elderly, the abandoned and helpless — to thinking that the state has the obligation to care for all of us. It isn’t so. What the state does for those most in need, it does on our behalf — the church, or some other private group or individual, could as easily do the same. In a secular nation, it is not unreasonable that our government be a logical choice for representing us in these works of mercy.
But they are, all the same, our work. Our responsibility. We have a collective responsibility to the poor in our communities. We have an individual responsibility for our own family members. And claiming and fulfilling that responsibility is the only way we can hope to hold onto our freedom. Which I suppose makes a homeschooling housewife a rather patriotic sort of worker.
. . . 1 computer. Home all day together, all weekend. Except when we’re out having fun. Glad to have the SuperFather-in-Law in town. Not placing any bets on when today’s post is going to make it’s appearance. Have a great weekend.
Darwin Catholic makes a pointed Thanksgiving observation about how far removed most Americans are from the source of their food:
. . . we modern Americans would do well to recall that food comes from somewhere — and indeed that it either comes or it doesn’t. One may talk of rights to food and shelter and medical care and such all day long. But at the most basic, human level: our existence and comfort depends on those who till the soil . . .
And what I would like to observe is this: Farming is skilled labor.
When I read about the history of education, it seems like what usually gets published is the history of literacy. The underlying assumption is that if a child isn’t taught to read and write, he isn’t taught.
Don’t mistake me, I am enormously in favor of the widespread practice of literary skills, and have the bookshelves and the blogs to prove it. But at the end of day, I know two things:
-I can’t eat books.
-I don’t know how to farm.
And from this, I make two further conclusions:
– Farming is, on the list of human pursuits, priority #1*.
-Farming is a skill that needs to be taught.
This in turns tells me that all those generations of people who taught their children how to grow food, but never did get to the business reading and writing, these were people with their priorities in order. People to whom the rest of us owe an enormous thanks, for it is their diligence that gave us our existence.
I am concerned that my generation knows so little about the growing of food. The SuperHusband & I both have grandparents who grew up on farms; as adults though they practiced other professions, they continued to grow a significant portion of their own food. The same can be said of several of my neighbors — like my grandparents, they either have very large gardens in the yard, or else own a second parcel of land they cultivate for food.
But this skill and practice has not been handed down. My parents gardened occasionally — they knew how — but not so much that they taught us. Our generation wants to have a garden, and we’re pretty happy if we get a few tomatoes out of it. It is a skill we never learned as children, and don’t integrate into our lives as adults. We seem to always be finding some other activity is more important.
We aren’t starving as a result. Specialization of labor has done what it promises: those of my generation who do know how to farm, do it amazingly well — well enough to feed the rest of us with no apparent difficulty. And I’m all about specialization of labor — I haven’t got the body for farming whether I wanted to do it or not. (And I like doing other things anyway.) But still, I think we are, as a society, over-specialized to the point of being a bit impoverished by it. It’s a poverty we don’t notice, but I think it is there all the same.
*Alongside the worship of God, of course. The two seem to go hand in hand rather naturally . . . wow, almost amazingly joined as, say, the body & soul that make up a human being. Go figure.
‘Tis the season for talking about explorers, colonizers, and the people who had to deal with them. Here are my four off-the-top-of-my-head favorite books to date. The ones that if I need to quick grab something from the shelf, here’s what I grab.
(I should note that I will be grabbing from other people’s shelves: three from my local public library, and the fourth from my dad’s house. 3 of the 4 come with a ‘buy’ recommendation, but since I don’t have to do so myself, I won’t.)
Read all four, and you should be well on your way to being able to discuss all the hot Thanksgiving-related history topics that will be no doubt swirling around the table next week.
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Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned by Kenneth C. Davis
This one showed up on the New Books shelf of my local library either last winter or the year before, and I grabbed it despite myself. From the title and cover it sounded like it was going to be one of those cute little wow-your-friends-with-trivia books written in large print with lots of bulleted lists of amazing factoids, destined to circle the internet in spamlets for years to come. Not so. Far from it.
Each chapter is devoted to a famous moment in American History, as usually taught in American public schools. Columbus, Pilgrims, all that stuff. (You can look at the table of contents on amazon). The content is the setting-the-record-straight work that college professors do to incoming freshman, essentially filling in the details and nuances to stories that are too-often summarized in three sentences through most of k-12.
I think I must have found the book tedious at times — I had to make myself finish it for the purpose of being able to write a review. For certain there are moments when Davis gets on roll and his politics start showing, especially when he steps beyond his area of expertise. And of course if you read the book this week, you may find yourself an insufferable dinner companion at Thanksgiving next week when a well-meaning relative tries to tell the neices and nephews about ‘The story of Thanksgiving’ and you feel compelled to offer additions and corrections.
All that said, it is still a useful reference for anyone who is interested in US history but hasn’t been through a good college-level course lately. Loaded with details and facts surrounding various controversial moments in US history. If you have your brain intact and can therefore read critically and reserve the right to form your own opinion, this book is a good starting point for making the transition from a sound-bite ‘knowledge’ of history to a competent understanding of what actually happened, to whom, by whom, when and how.
–> I recommend it as a library find. Not sure I’d pay for it (above and beyond my regularly scheduled tax dollars), but I’m glad I read it.
Mayflower 1620 published by the National Geographic Society is one we bring home every year from the library. If I couldn’t get it there, I would buy it. The topic is the historic voyage of the Mayflower, with photos from the travels of the living history group that re-enacted the trip. Lots of good, solid, detail-laden historic evidence.
Look for it in your children’s department, but the book would be of interest to anybody who wants a thorough primer on the topic. The text is for older-elementary years and up. As a read-aloud to younger children, I find myself having to do way too much explaining. Younger kids, however, will enjoy the photos, and you can tell a pared-down version of events as you browse.
(Nerd-person tip of the week: Because it is easily readable, illustrated with lots of captions, and interesting across age ranges, this would be a fun one to bring along to Thanksgiving, for the browsing pleasure of people who don’t do football, and are otherwise at a loss for post-dinner conversation. If yours is the sort of family where perusing a history book could count as ‘fun’. It probably is, if you read this blog.)
And here are two that longtime readers may remember:
I just re-posted my original review of Squanto’s Journey. Excellent book, beautifully illustrated and told. Best for middle-elementary age and up — a touch too detailed for little listeners.
And finally, moving off the whole Thanksgiving topic, but still very much concerned with the early encounters between europeans and native americans is the novel Cacique by Bishop Robert Baker. Unless you’re from Florida (and even then) you may not have studied the history of the early spanish missions in that state. This is a very fun way to learn a good bit about the topic, if you like breezy action-adventure tales. (Who doesn’t? And written by a real live catholic bishop, so you can feel virtuous for reading it.) My original review is re-posted immediately below.
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That does it for this week. Have a great Thanksgiving, and try to be gentle with your fellow diners as you whip out all your newly-acquired historical knowledge.
And here’s another one for the round-up, originally posted on the old site in February 2007.
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Cacique: A Novel of Florida’s Heroic Mission HIstory
By Bishop Robert J. Baker with Tony Sands
St. Catherine of Sienna Press, 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-9762284-4-8
ISBN-10: 0-9762284-4-0
I sent this book to my dad for Christmas, thinking it was more his genre than mine. The plan was for him to read it, and then if he thought I’d like it, I’d read it over vacation. First part of the plan didn’t work out — Dad has been short on reading time lately — so we skipped directly to step 2. I read it, it was good.
Bishop Baker’s novel (pronounced ca-SEE-kay) is a fictional account of a franciscan mission to the Potano tribe in northern Florida. The genre is Hardy Boys meets Butler’s Lives. The writing is clear and concise, not artsy — the prose serves as a vehicle for the story, not the end in itself.
Unlike the Hardy brothers, the heroes in this story do actually grow old and even die, such that in order to cover the entire life of the mission, Bishop Baker uses a sucession of main characters. We begin with Fr. Tomas, the young and determined priest who founded the mission which is the subject of the book. We end with the perspective of Felipe-Toloca, the cacique of the Potano village at the time the mission is disbanded by the Spanish. The transition from one principal character to the next flows smoothly, and helps build the overall study of the life of the mission, which lasted over 100 years. In moving from generation to generation we gain a sense of the history of the community, as well as a meditation on the communion of saints.
Also unlike the Hardy boys, our heroes are concerned with more than just fighting crime in Bayport. The overarching theme of the many adventures is nothing short of evangelization and the bringing about of the kingdom of God. Here Bishop Baker does a great service for catholic characters everywhere, for once rendering a series of faithful catholic heroes — first and foremost a priest — whose interior life is solid and sound. Their struggles are not with the holy faith, but with how to live out that faith in the particular time and place given to them.
The novel succeeds where history books sometimes fail, in keeping the people real. Neither the Spanish nor the Indians are made out to be a homogeneous pool of Good Guys or Bad Guys; we get individuals of all stripes, none perfect, and none are beyond the hope of forgiveness, mercy and redemption.
One of the risks of historical fiction is that we learn more about the author than about history. Those looking for clues into Bishop Baker’s secret thoughts will discover the same messages that he has proclaimed throughout the diocese in his public life. None of this was heavy-handed in my opinion; even if our heroes are extraordinary for their own time — or our time — they are nonetheless consistent in action and attitude with other missionary saints of the 1600’s.
If you like an action-packed adventure story, this one is fun. There are martial arts, traps, disguises, battles, shipwrecks, the whole nine yards. If you are looking for a peek inside the mind of a missionary priest, that’s there too. And at the end of the book there is brief note about the history that inspired the novel, as well as a bibliography for those who want to do further research.
Good book, very readable, very enjoyable.
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And a bonus feature This book deserves an award for making a major advance in the world of southern literature: It treats the landscape of northern Florida as if it were, well, a perfectly normal place to live. No long odes to Spanish Moss or treatises on the humidity — mosquitoes are mentioned so infrequently you might temporarily forget where this story is set. The land is simply there. Alligators, springs, quicksand, palmettos — they are all present, but mentioned only when they are relevant to action at hand. There is a time and place, of course, for seeing a well-known landscape with the eyes of an outsider; but frankly it is a relief to see a novel that is not only set in the south, but told through southern eyes.
Rather than linking to the old site, putting the text of my review of Squanto’s Journey here. Originally posted in November 2006. Still a good book. Part of my book round-up post coming in a few minutes.
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Squanto’s Journey: The Story of the First Thanksgiving
by Joseph Bruchac, illustrated by Greg Shed
Harcourt “Silver Whistle”, 2000.
ISBN 0-15-201817-4
In anticipation of Thanksgiving, I picked up a handful of children’s books from the local library. This is a good one.
The book tells the story of Squanto’s life from 1614 to 1621. Each major element of the story is told on one page, with an accompanying painted illustration. The perspective is firmly Native American, but in a positive way that is respectful of non-Indians. Because the story ends at the time of the famous first Thanksgiving, it is up to the parents to fill in the ensuing history.
In its precision and thoroughness, the book includes Indian names that may be unfamiliar to those learning this history in detail for the first time. There is a glossary in the back, but unfortunately it does not include a pronunciation guide. So if you are reading aloud, be prepared to have to do some sounding-out as you go. Also, because of the detailed nature of the account, it will be helpfu to summarize what is happening as you go along, to keep track of the story, especially for younger listeners. As a result, though, this book would be quite helpful to an older student (junior high through college aged) that wanted an approachable summary of these events. The Author’s Note at the end of the book gives some interesting background on how the story was researched.
In all, just a lovely book. It would make a nice jumping-off point for students all of ages to study this part of American history.
Busy busy here, but luckily there is a whole world out there of other internet places. Our topic for this weekend is was medieval chess — that is, I had meant to be playing some. Looks like my plans are thwarted — I have *lost* our chess set, and will have to settle for awele. Will take that as a sign. All the same, three interesting links for your reading pleasure.
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If you secretly were hoping I’d have a short post this week, here’s a very short explanation of how medieval chess differs from the modern version:
http://chess.eusa.ed.ac.uk/Chess/History/medieval.html
For those who wanted much, much more, here’s a long explanation of the process of how it all happened, with illustrations. I, being a person with no prior knowledge of this topic, can’t offer any critique. But well worth a look:
http://www.island.net/~hamill/id24.htm
And if you wished this blog had more photos, here you are: A collection of medieval chess pieces, primarily from the middle east. Click on a photo for more information:
http://www.crumiller.com/chess/chess_pages/chess_medieval_pieces.htm
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Have a good weekend!
Ridiculously tired today, and as I’m finally getting around to writing tonight, my head is about as foggy as I’ve ever known it. So rather than try to put together a good article for you (lost cause), I’ll just let loose on something funny I read during the last weeks of the presidential election campaigns.
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So the Wall Street Journal ran a series on the editorial page comparing the two major candidates’ stances on various topics. Shoehorned into the ‘education’ category was the topic of volunteering. Working from memory, here’s the executive summary:
McCain: Tells people they really ought to volunteer more.
Obama: Plans to expand the Peace Corps and launch a handful of similar government-run, tax-funded volunteer organizations to target other areas of need (education, local community service, etc.). Encourage mandatory ‘volunteering’ by tying certain federal education funding to community service requirements for students.
Not to jump all over our president-elect (really, if this were his only fault, I’d be a very happy person), but what?! It’s volunteering. I have never, ever, in all my long life, had difficulty finding an outlet for my freely-offered labor. Hard time finding a paying job? Yes. Yes indeed. Hard time finding people willing to hire me for no pay? Nope. Not once.
And here we are, a government in debt, with expensive wars and corporate bailouts going on, and we are going to spend more money on more programs . . . so people can work for no pay? Um, really, they can do that without a government program. If you have to pay people to do a given job, it is not actually volunteering. It is a federal program that pays a very low wage.
(–> Now if what you want is a low-wage jobs program, just come out and say so.)
I expect the origin of this particular plank of the campaign platform came from two bad habits we’ve gotten into. The first, is thinking that if our country has a problem, or a perceived problem in this case, the president ought to have a plan for how to fix it. When really, some of the time, the president ought to look us sternly in the face and say:
Well, get your act together.
But I suppose that is not very popular with voters, and we have thus trained our candidates to pretend they can fix us.
And then from there, it is only a matter of what kind of fix the candidate is used to tossing out. As a democrat, a shiny new program, or a beefed-up old program, is just the thing. If a republican felt the need to propose a fix, it would be a tax deduction, a tax credit, or maybe a special law allowing employers in certain altruistic industries to hire workers at lower-than-minimum wage.
[Republicans are at an advantage in this particular example, because we already have the tax deduction thing in place. Now they can just smile and tell their voter base to go start a 501(c)3 and be done with it. I agree. But don’t kid yourselves, if republican voters were still itching for more help in the ‘volunteering’ department, I am sure, just sure, there is a way to make a corporate subsidy for the purpose.]
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What significance for the junior economist? Well, a couple summary points:
Our candidates can’t necessarily add, it isn’t your imagination. I think ‘economic platform’ ought to be read as a kind of form of poetry, one of those genres that you must not read literally. Luckily much of what they put on their economic platforms would never pass through congress anyhow, so in the off chance they really mean what they say (the policy-platform equivalent of discovering that someone really does have butterflies in their stomach, or that cats and dogs truly are falling from the sky), there is still hope that it won’t come to pass.
Really smart people can still come up with dumb ideas. (Just ask my children about their mother.) As I mentioned in my ‘why economics is so confusing’ post, sometimes when something doesn’t make any sense to you, it is because it doesn’t make any sense, period.
If we voters actually want ‘change’, we are some of the people who are going to have to change. We can’t be pushing for a federal program or a new law or some other government action every time we see a problem, and then be surprised that our politicians are always trying to come up with new programs and laws for us. Do you want a shorter tax form? Quit asking for so many tax credits.
–> And so long as we evaluate a candidate’s stance on a given issue based on whether they voted to fund this or that special program, or put into place this or that new law, we are going to keep getting the programs and laws. It is entirely possible to be, say, in favor of helping the poor, without necessarily voting in favor of every bill that is labeled ‘help for the poor’.
And this last bit is tricky. Because if your representative voted against this or that social justice bill, how do you know whether it was because of an anti-social-justice bias, or just a disagreement with that particular bill? It means you have to know the candidate much better, over a much longer term. Which is not easy.