Author: JenniferFitz

‘5th Friday’ – Playing Around with History and Languages

Okay, so it is no longer the 5th Friday, and won’t even be the 1st Saturday much longer, but I’ve finally got your new links for you.

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First a quick mention of a couple I put up on my other blog this week, just FYI:  In addition to my reputable vendors list, I’ve gone and sneaked on a small ‘prayer on the internet’ category of links over at the other blog.  Look if you like, but the one you should know about yesterday is:  NaPraMoGo 2008 – Pray 15 More Minutes a Day, led by the Ironic Catholic. Who observes, “The Ironic Catholic blog is silly and satire, but praying is not. This is for real.”

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And now for this site, putting up a few of what I think of as history links, though most of them aren’t going into the ‘history’ folder:

The Society for Creative Ananchronism – A bunch of goofy history buffs having too much fun — but also doing a little bit of historical research in the process. Oh come on, you know you want to dress up in funny clothes, adopt a medieval name, and bash someone on the helm with a wooden sword.  You know you do, don’t deny it.

The Web Gallery of Art – What it sounds like.  Searchable art gallery covering European Art from 1100 to 1850. Kind of like going to the Louvre, only instead of sore feet you can get carpal tunnel (and, if you live any distance from Paris, save a little time and money while you’re at it).

The Lexique d’Ancien Français is a searchable database of old French, but you need to know the new french in order to use it.  Stuck it into a new folder called, generically, ‘Foreign Languages’.  What with having so few links in the category yet, it didn’t seem right to specialize into “Languages People Only Spoke Very Briefly”, tempting though it was.  I would observe that these transitory languages can be quite fun, because if you know the before-and-after languages, you can quickly get a dose of the in-between language without a whole lot of work.

While I’m at it, here’s a handy Wikipedia article on the topic (again, you need to know new french to read about the old).

Chantez-Vous Français? Is more of the same.  If the subtitle, <<Remarques curieuses sur le français chanté du Moyen Age à la période baroque>> means anything to you, go check it out.

And at long last, if you desperately wanted to learn about Old French but had hoped to do so in English, Old French Online, courtesy of the Linguistics Research Center at UT – Austin has come to your rescue.

If you wish to test your Old-ish French reading skills, the project Gutenberg has a copy of Le Chevalier Deliberé posted.  Circa 1500, so beginning to be quite manageable for the junior linguist.

And to finish, something that isn’t history at all is the fun (but with a maddeningly busy intro page) Les langues de France en chanson, specializing in music of the various languages spoken in France today.  (If you were under the impression that “French” was the language of France, there’s something we need to tell you . . .)

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That will do it for today.  Happy All Souls Day, and thanks for your patience this round.

Catholic Writers’ Conference

The Catholic Writers’ Guild is putting on another on-line Catholic Writers’ Conference coming up at the beginning of February.  Registration is free, and you can participate as much or as little as you want.  If you enjoy writing I recommend you give it a try.

Go ahead and register now at http://www.catholicwritersconference.com/index.php.

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BTW: I happen to know that several of my readers here are qualified to lead workshops at this conference.   So you might, ahem, go volunteer to lend your expertise.  Good for business.

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I attended last year, and found the conference to be very enjoyable and informative.* The conference included workshops on all genres, and is relevant whether you tend to write for the ‘catholic’ market or for the wider public.  Workshops covered both writing skills and getting-yourself-published skills.  Definitely a bias towards helping you become A Person Who Gets Paid to Write — good focus, I suppose, since being a volunteer writer doesn’t require much training.

You will benefit most if you are able to participate, and to be able to participate, you will need to clear your schedule a bit.   At the very least, plan to substitute participation in the conference for your other goofing-off activities that week.  I lucked out last year — the conference fell on a week when my schedule was wide open, complete with borrowed children to keep my own occupied.  This allowed me to participate in one workshop intensively, dabble in a few others, and browse the rest; in order to do that, I probably spent 2-4 hours a day either at the conference or on my own doing homework.   (I could have spent less time on the homework, but I got more out of the conference by putting more into it.)

Format was a combination of discussion-forum workshops and live chatroom discussions on various topics, led by catholic authors and editors with expertise in the subject at hand.  There were also pitching sessions with catholic publishers and agents, which of course were not of any direct use to me since I had (and still have) no manuscripts for sale, but I learned quite a bit about that part of the industry from the related workshops.

[Are you thinking of leading a workshop? Know that last year many of the leaders of one workshop participated as a student in other workshops.  You can do both. ]

I found all the workshop leaders (agents, authors, publishers, editors) to be polite, encouraging, and no-nonsense.  Their goal is to bring more catholic writers to the reading public, and they will not pamper you in the process.  If you are looking for someone to tell you how wonderful you are and how whatever you want to do is just fine, call your mother; if you are looking for someone to help you with your writing, try the conference.

*Same danger, of course, as reading a book on how to improve your writing: You may end up like myself, not a better writer, just a guiltier one.  Nothing quite like a new improved awareness of all your faults.

Don’t Make Me Take You To Nebraska

Like something out The Onion, The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that parents — even those from out of state — are taking advantage of a loophole in Nebraska’s new Safe Haven law in order to drop off their teenagers. Apparently the legislature wants to close the loophole.

I’m a bit mystified. On the one hand, I understand that when you set up a law intending to protect newborns from abuse and infanticide, it is disconcerting to discover that all the ‘wrong’ people are taking advantage of your law. On the other hand, if you’ve just uncovered a serious societal problem, covering it back over hardly seems like the solution.

–> And frankly, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The abuse, abandonment, and even murder by parents of older children is not exactly news. What is new, is that instead of waiting for the authorities to discover the abuse and take action after the fact, parents in Nebraska now have an option for coming forward for help before the problem reaches the danger point. I can see arguments for why the Safe Haven law is not the best mechanism for abuse-prevention of older children, but I don’t see why it is such a terrible thing. It seems to me that it is doing a valuable service.

The Journal reports that 19 children have been dropped off since the law went into place in July. Not an insignificant number [though nearly half of them apparently came from a single family – the father was feeling overwhelmed after the death of his wife – so take the total figure as not quite representative of the number of families involved], but given that the Nebraska foster care system is currently serving some 6,000 children, and the state is not reporting that the system is overloaded, this is hardly a dire emergency. It seems to me that rather calling a special session of the legislature to quick close the loophole, better to take the time to understand the situation and figure out how to best address the whole problem.

Book Review: The Fathers

The Fathers

Pope Benedict XVI

Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-59276-440-2

Summary: Wow. This is a good book. You should go buy it.

The details:

I was very daunted, as you may recall, at the prospect of having to actually read this book. Although I very much wanted to read it, or specifically, I wanted to have read it, I was afraid that it would be much too hard for myself, a junior intellectual. Fear not. The most difficult chapter is the first, and even in that one, there was only one sentence that I could not understand. And which, on a second reading, I do understand. So here it is, the very hardest sentence in the whole book, found at the bottom of page 8, emphasis in the original:

Clement’s letter touches on topics that were dear to St. Paul, who had written two important letters to the Corinthians, in particular the theological dialectic, perennially curent, between the indicative of salvation and the imperative of moral commitment.

If you can read that, you can read the whole book. And if you can’t read that, you can probably still read all the other sentences, which aren’t nearly so bad. I read the entire rest of the book not knowing what that sentence meant, and never really suffered for my want of knowledge.

What is in the book?

The Fathers is a series of twenty-six biographies of church fathers, starting with St. Clement of Rome and finishing with St. Augustine of Hippo, one person per chapter. The text is taken from the Holy Father’s weekly general audiences from March 7, 2007 to February 27, 2008; depending on the person, the chapter might have been covered in a single talk, divided into two separate talks (usually “life” first and “teachings” second), or in the case of St. Augustine, three talks. So, almost blog-like in format. If, say, you had a blog written by the pope.

As a result each biography can stand alone, although they form a continuous whole if you have the time and interest for reading the book cover to cover. I recommend doing that, by the way, if you can. But if you can’t, don’t panic. You could also put the book out in a convenient space and just pick it up periodically to read a chapter at random, and you will still benefit significantly.

Each entry gives a history of the life of the church Father (all but three are saints), including the context in which they lived. It will help if you have some knowledge of the history and geography of ancient Rome. If not, this is as good a place as any to get your introduction. I had only one place-name that left me completely stumped: Aquilea. Never heard of it before. Usually the text gives some clue – the modern name of a city, for example, but for this one all we were told was that it was in the Decima Regione. I, sadly, did not know my Regione – though I do now. At least that particular one. The rest of the biographies, though, gave me no geography trouble at all.

Following the history is a section on the father’s teachings. Here again, a junior scholar’s serving of theology is helpful. I would say that if you are comfortable with the Catechism of the Catholic Church – that is to say, you can pick it up and read it and make good sense of whatever it is you are reading – then you can probably work through this book with similar confidence.

Is it a boring book?

No!

Here are the three things I found most interesting:

1. You get a real sense of the depth of the catholicness of the early church. You cannot come away from this book persuaded that early church history is just a bunch of myths shrouded in the mists of time, nor that our (catholic) understanding of it is based on a few scraps of paper interpreted how we want to read them. You really get a sense for the weight and substance of our catholic heritage.

[One possible pitfall: After reading this, if someone pulls one of those anti-catholic ‘just a medieval invention lines’, you’ll probably just stare at them dumbly and wonder where they came up with that nonsense. You’ll be thinking some piece of apologetic brilliance along the lines of ‘Are you one of those people who has twenty cats and tin foil on your windows?’ So be warned. Knowledge of history really is knowledge of the catholic church. They aren’t making that up.]

2. The biographies find a beautiful balance between breadth and depth. Each entry is substantial enough to give you something to chew on, but not overwhelming. You will feel like you’ve ‘met’ the church father – if it is your first meeting, you come away with a good idea of who he is and what he thinks, and will want to get to know him better; if he is an old friend, you’ll enjoy the chance to say hello again, and be reminded of the reasons for your friendship. Even more, if you read the whole book front to back, you will get a sense of who the fathers are as a group – how they fit together, how they fit into church history, and how their theology fits into the history of catholic doctrine.

3. There is Pope Benedict XVI’s ever fresh and practical spirituality. There is just nothing dry in any of these biographies. Every one of these church fathers could be your parish priest, speaking to you, today, about the spiritual challenges you face. The holy father isn’t trying to ‘make’ the ancient fathers of church ‘relevant for today’ – he shows you that they what they teach, both by their lives and their writings, really is as inspiring and applicable to us in the 21st century as it was so many centuries earlier.

Conclusion: This is a book to keep around the house. I definitely give it a ‘buy’ recommendation. If not for All Saints (really, you should), then put it on your Christmas wish list. Good for reading, and good as a reference for your all your quick-look-up-a-church-father needs. It isn’t an easy book, but it isn’t a hard one either. If you are a basic model catholic blog reader, it should be about your speed, challenging but not overwhelming. If you’re more advanced, it will be light and refreshing. If you are a junior junior catholic, you’ll have to work through it, but the format is such that you can bite off just a little at a time and still benefit, without having to feel like you have to read the whole thing right away.

Good book. Get yourself a copy.

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And now a word from our sponsor . . .

This review was written as part of the Catholic book Reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on The Fathers.

. . . The opinions, of course, are entirely my own. When I say it’s a good book, it’s because it’s a good book. That said, it’s not like I’m going to sign up to review anything that looks like it’s a bad book, heh.

The Catholic Company is still accepting new reviewers, by the way. Here’s the link: http://www.catholiccompany.com/content/Catholic-Product-Reviewer-Program.cfm Free books, but of course you have to actually read them, and then tell people what you think. Not that you don’t do that with your books anyway.

Revolutionary War Book Review Bonanza

2nd Friday so we’re back to history again, and it looks like this month you’re getting a book bonanza – next week I’ll post my review of The Fathers, which leaves me this week to toss out a handful of childrens’ history books we’ve enjoyed over the past month.

Despite our passion for medieval history, a certain mother has determined one must, nonetheless, study other eras. So our official topic for this school year is American History. We started out with reading about various renaissance-era European explorers; whipped out the timeline notebook and determined that Christopher Columbus followed right on the heels of Joan of Arc. I think in the usual method of studying history in American schools, we tend to lose some of that sense of continuity: Chris C. belongs firmly to the course called American History, St. Joan belongs to another course in a different year, called European History or Medieval History or some other thing, and we never quite grasp that the events of the Hundred Years’ War would have been part of the renaissance explorers’ heritage, much the way the legacy World War II is still felt today.

Anyhow, we’ve since slipped into the colonial era, and I’ve got three nice books concerning the Revolutionary War era to share with you this month:

Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride by Stephen Krensky, illustrated by Greg Harlin; the topic is exactly as it says. Harlin’s watercolors elegantly capture the mood of the night’s events – so brilliantly done I’d recommend this book to aspiring artists and photographers. I can’t do them justice, so just go look. The text is clear and effective – you learn the technical details of the ride, and also the real danger, urgency, and excitement – but spare enough that it won’t be overwhelming to a competent but young reader, or to the parent charged with the read-aloud. A map at the start of the book shows the route of the ride (you will need a larger US map of your own to put the location into context), and an epilogue summarizes in three paragraphs the rest of the Revolutionary War and it’s ultimate conclusion.

Can’t recommend this book enough – interesting to adults who never had a chance to learn more about this famous event, and engaging to children who like a little adventure with their history. Frankly, if I had a student of any age who was history-resistant, I’d put this book in front of him, and mine it for all it was worth.

By the Sword: A Young Man Meets the War by Selene Castrovilla, illustrated by Bill Farnsworth, tells the story of Benjamin Tallmadge’s first foray into battle in August 1776. This is a more demanding text than Paul Revere’s Ride, and focuses as much on Tallmadge’s inner life as a new recruit in the colonial army as with the outward adventure of the Battle of Long Island. The intentionally-hazy oil-painted illustrations support the feeling of inward reflection, and of a man looking back on a turning point in his youth.

[Does introspection make good history? At our house,  mothers were unanimously in favor of this exploration of the danger and emotional turmoil of warfare; a certain boy complained that the story ended just as it was getting to the good parts – I suppose he wanted to read the rest of war while he was at it.]

At the end of the book is a detailed timeline of Tallmadge’s life, a list of relevant historic sites to visit around modern-day New York City, a page in which the author explains how she researched her book and how she made certain literary decisions, and then a very detailed bibliography. There is also a brief note from the illustrator about his art research techniques, and from the typographer about the choice of fonts.  Good stuff — really helps the student catch on to the study of history.

I’d say this book is more appropriate for older children – third grade and up.  The level of detail and discussion of historical research could be helpful even for much older students, as this is the same kind of work that would go into better term papers for highschool and beyond — perhaps more effective than a lecture from the instructor, and would be a quick, easy read for the teen who must be plagued with this lesson.  (Okay, let’s be frank: your average college history TA would give anything to get to grade an undergraduate history paper as well-researched as what the author models here.)

Finally I wanted to mention Welcome to Felicity’s World, 1774: Growing Up in Colonial America. Written by Catherine Gourley, though you will be hard-pressed to find the author’s name in this publication, which is part of the “American Girl’s Collection” as something of an accessory to that popular childrens’ historical fiction series. Not a bad book though – there’s a reason the American Girls franchise has done so well. The concept is something like DK’s Eyewitness Series, exploring colonial life and the Revolutionary War through many illustrations, photographs, short captions, moving stories, and sometimes more detailed narrative explanations, all divided into topical sections and subsections. It therefore makes a good browsing book – you can pick it up anywhere and look through just the bits of special interest.

This is most definitely a girl’s book, but subtly so – Mr. Boy has been reading it enthusiastically, and so far does not seem to have noticed the feminine bent. Maybe some month when I’m scrapping for a history topic I’ll walk you through the differences between girl-books and boy-books in more detail, to show you how it’s done; for now I’ll just say that it nicely combines social history with the usual names-‘n-dates type outline of a traditional textbook. Good reliable backbone for an elementary-years history program, and probably fairly easy to get hold of, since it is part of such a well-known brandline.  Felicity lives in Williamsburg, VA, by the way, for those who are looking for a text to coordinate with a field trip.

Wealth, Abstraction, and the Too-Vivid Imagination

An internet friend asks: Why do I find this economics stuff so confusing?

I could only guess, but knowing her to be an intelligent, financially-responsible type of person, as well as the mother of four children, my thoughts immediately went to potty training.

Potty training? Here’s why:

One of the famous potty-training motivation techniques is the Sticker Chart. We used a sticker chart once, and it was spectactularly unsucessful, but other people find the stickers quite helpful. You put up a calendar-type chart, and each time the child uses the potty, you put a sticker on the chart. If yours is a child who is highly motivated by the earning of stickers, this can be just the thing to motivate the ready-but-reluctant preschooler to make the move into world of No More Diapers.

What does this have to do with the ecomony? (Sorry, no it isn’t the potential for toilet humor.) It is this: The stickers provide a record of your childs’ potty-training accomplishments. More stickers on the chart is evidence of more sucessful trips to the bathroom. Nice little visual indicator to see how the whole program is progressing.

Economics is like this. Instead of sticker charts, we used things like “GDP” to represent national wealth production or “the Unemployment Rate” to represent how many people are looking for work.  [We call these types of calculations ‘economic indicators’.  Just like the number of stickers on the chart is an ‘indicator’ of how potty training is coming along.] It should all be pretty simple. You have to learn a little more than Shiny Star = Pants Clean and Dry, but the concept is the same. Most people understand the real-world concepts behind unemployment or GDP, so learning the technical terms and how they are calculated is not all that hard. If you’re a person who can balance your own checkbook (my friend is such a person) you can learn economics. Given a good instructor, anyway. (I was blessed with a handful of these.)

But the trouble is this: Sometimes economic-policy talk degenerates into sticker management. Rather than focusing on “is my child making progress in using the potty”, we work on managing the indicator – how many stickers are on the chart? How can I get more stickers up? If I can just get a few more stickers up, that means I’m closer to Diaper Emancipation, right? Maybe I should start giving more stickers per trip to the potty, that’ll help my chart fill up faster . . .

Think I’m kidding?  I once read an actual economics professor (remaining nameless to protect the guilty) state something along the lines of, “Hurricane Katrina will result in increased wealth because of all the proceeds from insurance companies and the employment due to rebuilding.” That’s right. Money is changing hands, which increases GDP, and unemployment will be helped by all the new jobs in construction, therefore, we as a nation are richer because the gulf coast was just destroyed? No no no. The hurricane *destroyed* wealth. The fact that we’re going to replace a portion of what was lost does not make us wealthier.

Put concretely: I had six apples. Five were destroyed. I picked two more off my tree. So I’m richer than before, because I just earned two apples? No. I’m still three apples poorer than when I began. Looking at income alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

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We get into economic trouble, whether in our personal life or as a nation, when we lose track of our economic reality. When we get too focused on managing a calculation, and too little on the facts behind that calculation.

The mortgage crisis, and the resulting credit crisis, are a classic example of imaginations run wild followed by sober reality. I [the hypothetical homebuyer] imagined I could afford a house, because I qualified for some kind of loan and was, at the time, capable of making the payments. My lender imagined I could afford the house for the same reasons. We used the fact that we were able to make up a financial instrument – a calculation – that ‘proved it’ to us. Perhaps we persuaded ourselves that rising housing costs were based on some inherent increase in the value of homes, rather than a temporary surge in demand over supply, and used the ‘promise’ of a continued rise to justify excessive borrowing.

And then reality struck. Now we have a ‘credit crisis’, in which lenders are doing crazy stuff like saying that if can’t you afford to pay for a particular car, perhaps you should buy a less expensive one. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that about 64% of car loans are being approved as of Sept. 20th. Down significantly from an 83% approval rate a year earlier – but knowing what we know about American’s spending and lending habits a year earlier, one has to wonder if maybe it is simply lenders catching on to the financial reality a little bit more quickly than borrowers?

I’m not saying there is no crisis whatsoever. The normal thing for humans to do in the face of disaster is to over-compensate. After a fire, we become hyper-vigilante about fire safety. After a car wreck, we become excessively cautious drivers. After a credit fiasco, we become overly cautious about lending. (And we ought to become more cautious about borrowing as well.) The potential for a real downward economic spiral is certainly there.

But we kid ourselves if we think that we, as a nation, ought to try to manipulate the markets in order to return to the old ‘normal’. Because the old normal was built on imagination, not reality. Large amounts of debt are a sign that we are pretending to have wealth we simply don’t posess. We were pretending, as a nation, to be richer than we were. In potty-training speak, we were handing out too many stickers. We are not significantly poorer now than we were a few months ago – but our numbers look quite a lot worse, because they are now closer to reality.

I don’t think nothing should be done. We are in the post-traumatic-stress phase of an economic eye-opener, and we need to make sure that we, as a nation, don’t curl up into an economic corner become completely dysfunctional. We do need to make sure that those who are most vulnerable economically can ride out the wave of post-crisis panic without suffering physical harm (hunger, lack of medical care, sleeping out-of-doors, etc.).

As I write this, the bailout just passed the House. I’m afraid at this time the best I can manage is a gape-mouthed, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money.’ (Same reaction I’ve been having for the past week or so – apparently I’m consistent this way.) But I will say: Inasmuch as the bailout is based on trying to bring the American economy to a viable, stable, realistic level of activity, it has the potential to be helpful. To the extent that the bailout is designed to make things look good, to build up a ‘confidence’ in the economy that is really foolish bravado, it will only be a very expensive way of putting ourselves back into trouble.

[BTW, I promised my friend I would try to fish out a really good library book that teaches Econ 101 in a readable, understandable manner. If I find it I will post it here.]