3.5 Time Outs: Family Life

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who is nothing if not a family kinda guy.

3.5 Time Outs Tuesday — Click and be amazed.

This weekend I met a couple of the ladies from the Society of Joyful Hope. I’d never heard of such a thing! A real-life support group for families that use NFP! A true support group, btw, not just your NFP instructor checking in to remind you what Acheiving-Related Behavior tends to achieve. The group prays together, and then kids do activities and the parents talk about parenting. Very cool.

1.A You can see their website here, and though the events page is a running behind on updates, they are an active organization. I’m in that blissful state where I am not the least bothered by people who are running a tiny bit behind on website maintenance. Ahem.

1.B The nice thing about openness-to-life is that eventually you don’t need to go visit the NFP instructor to be reminded what Achieving-Related Behavior acheives. Your children are there to remind you. All the time.

1.C I was showing around Sarah’s new pregnancy book, and the Joyful Hope lady exclaimed when she saw Hallie Lord’s endorsement on the cover. Solving the mystery of what it was that had caused Betty Beguiles to pick up and move south. Wow. I had no idea.

1.D More cool: Fr. Kirby at Charleston Vocations gave us a bunch of t-shirts to give away for prizes at our Family Life reception.

1.E Triple Cool: Eldest daughter has been reading assorted fiction and lives of saints from Pauline Media, causing her to ask all kinds of questions about the Daughters of St. Paul. Mostly: What do they wear? So it was neato to walk into the Doughnut Room and, surprise!, there was Sister Francis, whom I’d never met before, but it turns out is very good at chatting with girls interested in all things Nuns Who Publish Books. Less cool: I had no money with me for book-buying. Because of course the girls found something they liked.

Coolness aside, here’s the real topic: How Good is Your Parish at Doing Family-Friendly Ministries?

I had a conversation with a young mom, not at my parish, who had moved up from Florida (St. Agnes’s in Naples, I think?), and she really missed the number of family events and activities at her former parish. I got to thinking about it, and realized that one of the things sabotaging some of my own parish’s ministries is a lack of Stuff for the Whole Family to Do.

It’s not like families with young children are really going to turn out for ministries five nights a week, don’t mistake me. There’s only so much a person with humans for children can do, time-and-energy-wise. But in order for a family with young children to do anything. at. all., there has to be provision for the whole family. The crying people. The climbing-the-curtains people. The elementary-aged people. The teen people. The female people. The male people. All of them. And if we’re feeling broad-minded, how about the elderly-relative-living-with-you people? Or the not-so-polished-in-the-social-skills-for-reasons-beyond-their-control people?

–> Because otherwise, church stuff breaks apart the family. Oh it’s all lovely to get together with just the girls, or just the fathers-n-sons, or whatever it is. We do that here and there. Sunday afternoon our girls met for Little Flowers while our boys went mountain biking. It was good. But there are only seven nights in a week, and people keep insisting we eat dinner together at least a few of those.

[Without wishing to pull out the Evangelicals Are Smarter Than Us card, I will point out that on Wednesday nights around my town, most of the other churches are hosting an evening of this-n-that, in which you can bring your whole family, and all y’all get your faith-formation or ministering-to-people fix in one fell swoop. It’s only one night a week. But it’s one night a week. Some of the churches do the same thing Sunday nights too. Or Fridays. Or whatever.]

So anyhow, that’s my question: If your parish is successful at getting families involved in the life of the church, what is it that works so well?

Happiness is agreeing with your editor.

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fairy wings and magic wands. Works great.

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Well, that’s all for this week. Tuesday’s Link Day, which is when instead of e-mailing fun things I ought to post but forget to, you just tell the world all by yourself. Entirely optional.

Higher Ed – My Answers

Just mailed off my answers to Friday’s questions. Here they are. Now going to take a peek at everyone else’s.

1. What is your opinion of the value of college in today’s society?

College covers a wide variety of types of education. With that in mind, I see several common types of value, but they will vary from student to student:

-Professional training. In fields such as health care, engineering, accounting, and so forth, as well as smaller but still important fields such as the theoretical sciences, social sciences, and the like, there’s a lot to be learned. College provides a place to learn it.

-Learning how to think. Whether through a rigorous liberal arts program, or through the study of the sciences, or honestly any subject studied in depth, something college can do, but doesn’t always, is give the student training in how to study, how to research a question, how to think about a topic in a mature and thoughtful way, and ideally, how to act on the findings.

-Signaling to employers. This to me is the most common reason students today attend college, and an unfortunately necessary one, but one which I think is wasteful. Completing a college degree tells employers, “I can do the work”. Getting a high school diploma was once this signal. Getting an 8th grade diploma was once this signal. Now we find people getting masters degrees, and employers requiring them, just to signal who stands out from the crowd as college becomes watered-down as well. I don’t think this is a good trend.

-As I mentioned on the phone, I think sadly, one purpose of our state and community colleges is to provide a high school education. In SC the quality of high schools varies tremendously. As a result, many students who finish high school with decent grades have not yet received a high school education. They come to college and are given courses in algebra, basic writing skills, and supplemental tutoring for their other courses, to make up for what they did not learn, and should have, in high school. This reality is shameful for our public schools, but of course I am glad that there is some means that students who persevere through their lousy high school can in the end get the education they deserve.

2. Do you believe in the theory that everyone should have a college education?

No. I think college is being used for the average student as a substitute for a good 8th grade education. Read through a copy of the McGuffy Reader Book 6. It’s a school reading book series published in 1879, once widely used throughout the US in pre-high-school education. The selections are what students now read in college. I do think that this kind of education — a well-rounded liberal arts education — combined with professional training either in secondary schools, or trade schools, or college, or on-the-job, I do think this is necessary for nearly everyone. But it’s a pathetic state of affairs when what used to pass for 8th grade is now being taught at University.

I think that teens who resist being forced to sit still, and to “learn” virtually nothing for years, when they are at the peak of their energy level, and ready to prove themselves and learn on the job, I think these teens are feeling a normal, healthy impulse. It’s normal to want to *do* something, not just sit around. It’s silly to water down school and then wonder why kids drop out. It’s a travesty that there are no good options for young people who want to go right into the working world, whether before or after high school, and come back to higher education later in life. I think for many young people, some real-life work experience first would add value to their education when they are ready to resume their studies in a more serious way.

I think also the emphasis on official certifications (“getting the piece of paper”) versus real learning is embarrassing. How can it be more valuable to be forced to learn something for a test, than to go out and learn it on your own, out a pure desire to gather the knowledge? Silly.

3. According to Louis Menand, author of “Live and Learn”, there are three theories of why people attend college. The first theory is that college is an intelligent test meaning people go to college to prove they are smart. The second theory people go to college is for the social benefits since college should theoretically be getting people ready to enter society. The third theory is that college is job training. How does this align with you own theory of the purpose of college? Do you believe in these some values?

Per my answer in #1, I somewhat agree with this. I’d like to talk, though, about the “getting people ready to enter society”. College does try to do this to you. As a simple fact, the professors and staff do try to impart their values on their students, and are often successful. (And wish you well in the process — they are trying to do you a service). And this is a concern to me, because we can see that some widely-held values in our society are in fact quite harmful. But let me clarify: The problem here isn’t that students learn the values of their professors; it’s that our culture is warped to a point that the values being taught are simply wrong. In those schools where students are taught to live well and think clearly, college can be an immense help.

I’ll also observe that in preparing to enter the adult world, long hours spent goofing off with other teenagers is . . . maybe not the most effective method? That what we end up with is not young people who learn to act like grown-ups, but rather grown-ups who go on to spend their whole life acting like children. They think they’re being grown-up, because they’re still doing what they learned to do in college.

(This is nothing new, by the way. From the very invention of the university, students were notorious for plaguing the townspeople with their binge drinking and other misbehavior. Maybe it’s time to reconsider how we do student housing?)

4. Growing up was your value of a college education influenced in any way? If so was it family? Teachers? Or some other form?

In our family, the expectation was that we’d go to college. Normal as drinking water or decorating a Christmas tree. Just what you do. Not a question, just a way of life.

5. In recent years the availability of a college education has changed and become more accessible to more people. For example there are online Universities, certain states offer scholarships to many high school graduates, and there is government funding to minorities. Do you agree or disagree with this?

I think it is good to make college more accessible, to not have it be the province of the wealthy, as it once was. I don’t always care for the particulars of every way this happens — for example, I don’t like scholarship programs that pressure students into attending college before they are ready for it.. I am strongly in favor of education that is universally available at modest cost, throughout the lifetime of the citizen.

6. What will you teach your own kids about the value of a college education? What influences this?

I’m encouraging my kids to discern their vocation: What does God want me to do with my life? College is something that will either fit in with that, or not. I think of my kids as being “college material”, because yes, they’re smart, inquisitive, talented . . . everything points towards “should go to college”. But ultimately I don’t want them to just follow a set path. I want them to follow *their* path, whatever that is. I thinks it’s dangerous to approach life by doing what you’re “supposed to do” because that’s what “everyone does” or “it’s the thing to do”. Rather contrary to the point of a university, don’t you think? To accept something as true without testing it? Without probing and asking, “Is this really right?”. There’s no sense sending a kid to learn critical thinking, if you only came up with that decision due to a failure in critical thinking. :-).

3.5 Time Outs: The Distracted Life

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who has exceeded himself once again. Go look!

On Tuesday mornings we’ve been watching Fr. Barron’s Catholicism DVD’s at the nearby parish (not ours) that has the most convenient times. Excellent. BUT, episode three is a ~~little~~ a lot abstract for the kids. I’m hoping it goes back to more concrete story-telling type episodes in the weeks ahead.

I could tell my 3rd-grader was not fully paying attention, because her feet were in the air. You know how you raise your hand to ask a question in class? Or you raise two hands in air to communicate secret messages from referee to fans, or from evangelical praise-and-worshiper to God? It was just like that, only with feet.

I’d told the group leader we’d be slipping out right after the DVD, and not staying for the group discussion, so that we could get home and get started on school work. Kids and I discussed the Problem of Evil (subject of episode 3) on the way, and curiously, the boy proposed “God testing us” as one of the possible explanations for evil things in the world.

I challenged that notion, but I’ll tell you I do think it’s one of the explanations for good things in the world. Because as we pulled in, our shy-but-friendly bachelor neighbor, who never comes over, was poking around our entry way, looking for us. Because he’d found this:

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The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error.

True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth.

In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them.

But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop.

(Paragraph breaks added for legibility in blog format. See the source here.)

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I see that I’ve hit my deadline for sidebar updating, so I guess I’ll officially slide that onto my to-do list. But I’m open to suggestions as long as the work in is progress. And of course, Tuesday’s Link Day, which is when instead of e-mailing fun things I ought to post but forget to, you just tell the world all by yourself. Entirely optional.

3.5 Time Outs: New Things

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who’s also doing a time-travel edition today.

Blogging Popes. That’s my topic for today. Not the kind you’re thinking of, though.

See, here’s what happened: Saturday night I was bored, tired, and itching for something to read. Something fun and relaxing and novel. Meaning, new-to-me. I usually grab one of my daughter’s library books for this purpose — just enough entertainment to get me through a non-digital Sunday, but not so much that I’ll be out of service, glued to a book, for 10,000 hours waiting for Br. Cadfael to tell me who did it. But I needed novelty.

So I went to Papal Encyclicals Online. I’m sure that’s what you do, too. But before you get too impressed, keep in mind that the three reasons this was a possible source of reading material were:

I’d never read most of them before. Strike one against my Catholic-nerd credentials.
They’re usually very short. This is why I’ve read the minor prophets, but *still* never gotten through all of Isaiah.
There was no chance I’d let the cat starve, or grouse at my children for interrupting me during an especially gripping scene.

And the thing is, they tend to cover that same juicy ground as your average Catholic blogger, only you get bonus credit for not being stuck to the computer all day while you work up your angry frenzy at the injustice in the world. Of course, no Star Trek screen shots for illustrations, but look, I was desperate for entertainment.

And the one I picked was Rerum Novarum. Which is basically a series of blog posts on economics. Perfect.

(Let me just say right now, JPII’s follow-up work is not blog-genre. Waaay more wordy. Waaay more. I haven’t finished it yet. But I’m half thinking, “What more is there to say? Leo.Encyclicalpress.com already covered the whole territory. But you know how it is, people need to explain the obvious. Or maybe people needed the obvious re-explained.)

Here’s a sample snippet of the Leonine goodness:

Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.

And this:

The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men.

Followed by this:

To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

See? I spent my weekend reading 64 Cath-Econ-blog posts, 19th century edition.

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And although I could pretty much shut my eyes and point my finger anywhere in the document to find a good quotable quote, one of my underlined favorites is

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Well that’s all for today. Still accepting suggestions for additions to the sidebar, so tell me who to add. But do just one link per comment, because otherwise the robotic spam-dragon will consume the whole lot of them. Thanks!

Labor Day, Slavery, and the Mercy Project

There’s a pile of us blogging today about The Mercy Project, a non-sectarian effort to free children from slavery in Ghana. I have no affiliation with the project myself, so if you decide to support it financially, do your own due diligence. But I think the project deserves attention as a model for serious anti-slavery efforts.

Why does slavery persist? It is difficult to maintain the unbridled hatred that inspires forced labor camps, Nazi-style. Over the longer run, the humanity of the slave is undeniable; to calmly take lifetime ownership of another person requires the unshakeable certainty that somehow, for some reason, we simply must have slaves. To be convinced it’s an unavoidable fact of life, one of those regrettable difficulties we must chin-up and endure, hand in hand with long work days, mosquitoes, blisters — all that we suffer in this fallen world.

In Ghana, parents relinquish their children in desperation — the alternative is death. [My own former-slave-state’s motto seems to particularly apt. Probably not what the founders had in mind.] The fishermen on Lake Volta who use the children as slaves are in a similar situation: I need this free labor, or I can’t stay in business. The Mercy Project’s method is to think up a village-scaled sustainable new business project that eliminates the financial need for slaves, and then to partner with a particular village to coordinate an emancipation day in conjunction with the implementation of that new opportunity.

[There’s then a process for helping the newly-liberated former slaves to recover from their experience and to rebuild their lives back home with their family of origin, with family assistance to prevent re-trafficking.]

The reported success of the Mercy Project’s first initiative suggests that given any viable alternative, the local slave-owners really are willing to move on to some better business model. You can read about their second project-in-progress here — same model, slightly different details.

So that’s the Mercy Project. Take a look.

Thanks to Heather Hendricks for coordinating the giant blog-a-thon.

My vote for Most Important Book of 2012

I just spent 3 days in the largest Catholic bookstore in the world. I bought one book. This is it:

Then I was stuck in an airport for five hours. Perfect timing.

What it is: Tiến Dương is a real guy about your age (born 1963) who is now a priest in the diocese of Charlotte, NC. Deanna Klingel persuaded him to let her tell his story, and she worked with him over I-don’t-know-how-long to get it right. Fr. Tien is a bit embarrassed to be singled out this way, because his story is no different from that of thousands upon thousands of his countryman. But as Deanna pointed out, if you write, “X,000 people endured blah blah blah . . .” it’s boring. Tell one story well, and you see by extension the story of 10,000 others.

The book is told like historical fiction, except that it’s non-fiction verified by the subject — unlike posthumous saints’ biographies, there’s no conjecture here. It’s what happened. The reading level is middle-grades and up, though some of the topics may be too mature for your middle-schooler. (Among others, there is a passing reference to a rape/suicide.) The drama is riveting, but the violence is told with just enough distance that you won’t have nightmares, but you will understand what happened — Deanna has a real talent for telling a bigger story by honing in on powerful but less-disturbing details. Like, say, nearly drowning, twice; or crawling out of a refugee camp, and up the hill to the medical clinic.

–> I’m going to talk about the writing style once, right now: There are about seven to ten paragraphs interspersed through the book that I think are not the strongest style the author could have chosen. If I were the editor, I would have used a different expository method for those few. Otherwise, the writing gets my 100% stamp of approval — clear, solid prose, page-turning action sequences, deft handling of a zillion difficult or personal topics.

Why “Most Important Book?”

This is a story that needs to be known. It is the story of people in your town and in your parish, living with you, today. And of course I’m an easy sell, because the books touches on some of my favorite topics, including but not limited to:

Economics
Politics
Diplomacy
Poverty
Immigration
Freedom of Religion
Freedom, Period
Refugee Camps
Cultural Clashes
Corruption
Goodness and Virtue
Faith
Priestly Vocations
Religious Vocations
Marriage and Family Life as a Vocation
Lying
Rape
Suicide
Generosity
Orphans
Welfare
Stinky Mud
Used Cars
Huggy vs. Not-Huggy

You get the idea. There’s more. Without a single moment of preaching. Just an action-packed, readable story, well told.

Buy Bread Upon the Water by Deanna K. Klingel, published by St. Rafka press.

7 Takes: The Ease With Which We Lie

Pootstert — Lighter fare this way. Click as needed.

I would like to thank all of you who have prayed for me. I’m lousy at praying, but I do pray for my benefactors, and that would be you. Because your work has been, thus far, very effective. I would like to double-thank those who have been patient in practical matters as my attendance at this or that has been spotty.

Tuesday morning I learned a friend had been deceiving me for some time. Not lying, not outright. She’d made a (perfectly legitimate) decision that she knew I wouldn’t like. She put off telling me, presumably in the hopes it would simply never become an issue. That I wouldn’t, in the end, need to know after all.

2468 Truth as uprightness in human action and speech is called truthfulness, sincerity, or candor. Truth or truthfulness is the virtue which consists in showing oneself true in deeds and truthful in words, and in guarding against duplicity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy.

What began as prudence and discretion, looking for the right moment to share the news I needed to know, turned into a lack of candor as the months dragged out. Sometimes I worry about doing the same thing. Is there something I should be saying, and haven’t? It is easy enough to be misunderstood. It is possible to deceive without intending to, without any sin at all.

2469 “Men could not live with one another if there were not mutual confidence that they were being truthful to one another.”²⁶² The virtue of truth gives another his just due. Truthfulness keeps to the just mean between what ought to be expressed and what ought to be kept secret: it entails honesty and discretion. In justice, “as a matter of honor, one man owes it to another to manifest the truth.”²⁶³

I should note here that my own fault runs more often the other way — I had already strained our relationship by being quite blunt in a matter where I felt absolute candor trumped sparing of feelings. There are long passages in the catechism about the importance of not saying too much. I stink at that.

Even when I am trying to be prudent, to actually shut up and think for a change, there’s always the wondering. Does someone truly need to know this thing I know? Will I be more guilty for speaking, or for not?

2483 Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth. By injuring man’s relation to truth and to his neighbor, a lie offends against the fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord.

So I was composing this post in my head this morning before mass. After, I had the privilege of being outright lied to, in a mortal-sin kind of way, if my fact-checking turns out to be correct. (Completely different scenario, different people.) It was . . . very strange.

But it happens. People do evil things. People who are kind and generous and pious sometimes do evil things.

Why do Mark Shea and Chris Tollefsen get told off every time they point out lying is wrong? I think it’s because we’re so used to it.*

We have a cultural fear of the truth. Faced with a difficult thing to say about even the most trivial matter, we tend to look for away to skirt the truth. How can I get my girlfriend to purchase a different outfit, without telling her this one she loves makes her look awful / is terribly tacky / is exactly the one I’m wearing to the same event?

We are so used to thinking of deceit as necessary for police work, or some similar situation, that it is unimaginable, truly unthinkable, that it might, possibly, be the wrong thing to do. We so fear harming innocent children or the frail elderly with difficult facts, that I’ve been accused of great cruelty for suggesting that such people can, in fact, be given difficult but necessary news in some sensitive but honest way.

And it cannot be denied: the moral life is not the easier life. The freedom truth brings is bought at a cost. A willingness to risk not nabbing the criminal, of making the little girl cry for the rest of her life, of causing grandma’s heart to fail. Or a boycott by angry customers. Or martyrdom.

Mostly, doing what is right is also doing what feels better. What, in the end, makes like easier. Our conscience is clear, our friendships are solid, people want to work with and help others they know to be decent, honest folk. Mostly.

Not always.

Don’t forget to pray for Allie Hathaway, then go read more takes at the home of our lovely hostess Jen F. at ConversionDiary.com.

*Not telling them off. Lying. Though we’re also getting used to telling them off. Curiously, my Mark Shea link has no negative comments on it, at this writing.

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