Category: A Sampler of Posts
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Satisfying bleakness.
I left Mark and his dad with my sick kiddo in her hospital room yesterday afternoon so I could go to Mass at a parish on this side of town. The rest of the family will go this morning, the usual place, the usual time. Now that the 9- and 13-yo boys are both serving…
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Temptation at home.
It’s been a long time since I was writing a great deal about weight loss and gluttony*…. (believe me, I will probably need to write more about it sometime after I have this baby… maybe even sooner, because while trying to lose weight isn’t appropriate right now, dealing with old impulses always is…) … and…
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Coming up on Lent.
One weekend left, and in a few days it'll be Ash Wednesday. All this spring I've been coming back again and again to this passage from The Imitation of Christ (Book 2, Chapter 12, "On the Royal Road of the Cross"). What I like about it is that it answers a question I have…
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The ends and the means in dialogue.
I caught part of last weekend's This American Life while I was driving around running errands on Saturday. The show is called "Red State, Blue State." (Transcripts aren't available yet, but you can listen online by clicking links from the pages I'm pointing to.) Act One, "I Know You Are, But What Am I?" discussed…
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Ground rules.
"All right, everybody." I took a sip of my beer, set it down firmly and pounded my fist once on the table. "I call this meeting to order." My friend C. put down his herbal tea and said "We're having a meeting? This is a meeting?" I looked over at M., his wife. M. and…
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Imperceptible change.
From today's Office of Readings (Prime). I arranged the paragraph breaks and indentations to highlight the parallelism. We are afflicted… but we are not crushed; full of doubts, we never despair. We are persecuted but never abandoned; we are struck down but never destroyed…. While we live we are constantly being delivered to death for…
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Six degrees to cupcakes.
When I was pregnant with my second child, I read a simple line in a parenting book (Becky Bailey, Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline) that resonated with me: "In any given moment, ask yourself, do you want to be special, or do you want to connect?" As a child and adolescent, I had wanted to…
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The difference between faith and belief.
"I do believe; help my unbelief!" — Mark 9:24 + + + Darwin excerpts a cordial discussion between some theists and some atheists about the meaning of the word "faith." It's worth reading on its own, and I am not going to respond to the entire excerpt, but just make my own comment and expand…
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A whole post on half sandwiches.
Part of the New Year’s food habits roundup. + + + So I have this problem: I don’t actually need very many calories per day. This means that I should have smaller portions than are typically served. Logically, then, I should not eat all of most sandwiches, which are standardized to maintain (or, realistically, to…
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Choosing peace, or something like peace, anyway.
ChristyP sent me a link at just the right time for me yesterday. The post, from a blog I'd not seen before (Steady Mom: On the Journey toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood) is short enough that I'm just going to repost it. Here you go (permalink here): A few days ago I sat down in the…
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Third post about science and faith: Three ways to approach the problem of “lack of scientific evidence for the divine.”
This is the third in a series of post in response to a reader’s request, asking me to write about the “lack of scientific evidence for the divine,” from the perspective of a “scientifically-minded” individual who began Church practice as an adult. In the first post, I offered a working definition of “scientific evidence” and…
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The scientific worldview and faith: Part two of a series.
(Note: I added formatting to this post a few hours after publishing it.) In a post from a few days ago, I wrote: I've been asked privately to write publicly about my perspective as a "person with a strong scientific education and worldview… coming to know or believe in God's reality and divinity." With an…
bearing blog 