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The United States Navy has basically admitted that UFOs are real. Here’s the weird: Very few people seem to care.

“If like me, you claim unofficial membership in the League of Enthusiastic Americans with Slightly Overactive Imaginations, the past few weeks have brought both exciting and weird news. Here’s the exciting: The United States Navy has basically admitted that UFOs are real. Here’s the weird: Very few people seem to care.”

#ufo #faith #epistemology

Michael Pakaluk: Students arrive at college alienated from nature and needing space, and freedom, simply to discover in an unstructured way what is real.

Students were encouraged to master calligraphy as an easily accessible art of beauty. This detail about calligraphy fascinated me. In college, the great sociologist David Riesman told me that he had advocated, to no avail, that Harvard too institute an undergraduate requirement to learn calligraphy, precisely on John Senior’s reasoning. He was dismayed that the college gave no credit to any course for the making of music or art, only courses of theory.

#the restoration of christian culture #beauty #calligraphy #curriculum #holy_house

The quiet of an Alexandria neighborhood was interrupted by the sound of a bell ringing from the top of the Mary, Mother of the Church Monastery of the Poor Clares Jan. 26. The sound..

"This morning, we are witnessing a very unusual event, an event which is foreign to the culture in which we live: A woman is pledging her commitment to live as a vowed cloistered religious, to serve for the rest of her life. The culture around us speaks of 'temporary,' 'for a while,' 'maybe,' but this woman, Sister Mary Damiana, is proclaiming 'permanent,' 'for the rest of my life,' 'forever yes!' This disciple of the Lord has crossed out all maybes from her lexicon and her life," said Bishop Loverde. "How encouraged we are - and strengthened as well - by the definitive 'yes,' which Sister Mary Damiana will proclaim in our midst."

#marriage #poor_clares #vows

She left her family, friends and basketball career to become a cloistered nun. Now, more than two decades later, Sister Rose Marie reaffirms her choice of faith over fortune.

One year, she was invited to a retreat, where she was asked to read a Bible verse, John 6:56: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him."

And that, she said, is when it hit her. She felt that God was right there, 20 feet in front of her. She kept reading, and when she closed the Bible, she said a silent prayer. She was stunned. She walked into church the next day, genuflected at the tabernacle like she always did, and realized that she was no longer alone.

#pennefather #eucharist #corpus_christi #maundy_thursday #adoration

A man without limits is as incapable of satisfaction as a man without hope.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/08/mass-shootings-and-mile-durkheim

#despair #suicide #alienation #mass_shootings

The pattern of mass shootings may be a symptom of a culture conducive to suicide.

In Suicide, Émile Durkheim posited that the source of suicide is to be found in the collective rather than the individual sphere. His theory derived from the relative stability of suicide rates within particular societies, contrasted with the variability existing between even adjoining societies. If each suicide is due to particular individualized (e.g., psychiatric) circumstances, he asked, why are there consistent patterns in the statistics of specific societies? Each society, he concluded, has a “definite aptitude” for suicide. “The numerical equality of annual contingents,” he wrote, “can only be due to the permanent action of some impersonal cause which transcends all individual cases.” Individuals, by uniting, form new psychic beings with distinctive ways of thinking and feeling.

#suicide #culture #despair #mass_shootings #violence

Our attitude toward the Eucharistic sacrament is an attitude toward what is there.

Anscombe was making two points. First, that a child’s instruction in the faith should be primarily “as part of an action; as concerning something going on before it; as actually unifying and connecting beliefs, which is clearer and more vivifying than being taught only later, in a classroom perhaps, that we have all these beliefs.” Catechetical instruction in precise formulae and official doctrine is relevant to religious formation. But such explicit teaching is dependent on a foundation of prior formation in religious praxis.

Anscombe’s other point was that the words used in the formulation of official Church teaching are often not the words we should use to explain what Catholics believe. “Transubstantiation” is her example of such a word, but there are more: “divine nature,” “human nature,” “hypostatic union,” “consubstantial,” and in some contexts even “presence” and “sign.” These words are not unsuitable because the concepts they express are too difficult for most people to grasp, but because they belong to a specialized vocabulary and most people do not have a prior understanding of what they mean. Use of these words can do the opposite of what teaching about doctrine is supposed to do: muddy, rather than clarify, the matters we are trying to speak about.

Toni Morrison's novels explore race and gender, but also show Morrison's refusal to be scandalized by evil.

That kind of composure, I now think, springs from a patience that is also forgiveness. Morrison doesn’t rush to condemn anyone in her fiction or essays, but rather casts a little light so that those wandering in error have a better chance of finding the path. When they get on the path is up to them; forcing them wouldn’t do her or them any good. But she also knows that we’ll all be better off when they arrive.

‎Show Square Notes: The Sacred Music Podcast, Ep Episode 12 – The Participation of Little Children in the Sacred Liturgy – with Dr. Timothy O’Malley - May 30, 2019

#music #children #catechesis #liturgy #chant

Social media traps users in patterns of addictive behavior; like gambling, cigarettes, and alcohol, it needs to be regulated.

#addiction #iphone #screentime

(via True, False and mostly in-between)

#amy_welborn #mesdia

By its nature, dance poses unique challenges for scholars. There’s no universal notation system, and the various ways we have to document it are incomplete and unreliable. There is no full way to capture the presence of dance except through dance itself. This tension—between dance and the representation of dance—is always at the heart of dance; dancers feel it, too, and so do the people who watch dance and the people who write about it. The recent exhibition “Hymn to Apollo: The Ancient World and the Ballets Russes” at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World reminded me how intriguing this tension is.

#ballet #prayer #knowledge #liturgy

An article appears in today’s Catholic Herald co-authored by me and Fr Michael Rear (author of Walsingham: Pilgrims and Pilgrimage) about the mysterious Langham Madonna, a 13th-century (appar…

#walsingham #bvm

A MILKWEED

Anonymous as cherubs Over the crib of God, White seeds are floating Out of my burst pod. What power had I Before I learned to yield? Shatter me, great wind: I shall possess the field.

#whitsunday #pentecost #holy_spirit #richard_wilbur

The prospect of mortality shakes even the firmest faith.

I had never been one for reflecting on my mortality. I assumed I had grasped the essentials of the human situation and come to live with them. In that forty-eight-hour window, however, the abstract nature of these beliefs became clear.

What I experienced was not a “fear of death”—at least, not a fear of what might follow my departure from this life. It was a fear of losing all that my life had given me: the loss of those I love, my work and the places I had come to call home, the hopes and expectations unfulfilled. It revealed itself most definitively as a terror of saying goodbye. I prayed by rote, repeating prayers collected at various points in my life, but with no clear sense of connection. Usually, the prayers were short: “This too shall pass.”

#death #dying #Ash Wednesday #cancer #sickness #suffering

Regarding the purported rules of English syntax, we tend to divide into mutually hostile camps. Hip, open-minded types relish the never-ending transformations of the way we speak and write. They care about the integrity of our language only insofar as to ensure that we can still roughly understand one another. In the opposite corner glower the curmudgeons. These joyless, uptight authoritarians are forever muttering about clunky concepts such as "the unreal conditional" that nobody's ever heard of.

#grammer #pedantry #prescriptivism

Just as devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is older than the liturgical feast of Corpus Christi, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus preda...

however, the new Parisian Missal did fulfill one aspect of the request made by the Lord to St Margaret Mary. Among the collection of votive Masses is a special Mass “for the reparation of injuries done to Christ in the Most Holy Sacrament.” This Mass is placed between the votive Mass of the Sacrament and that of the Passion

#sacred_heart #corpus_christi #adoration #eucharist

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