A thoughtful post at the Shrine.
bearing blog
bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
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Body art, body of Christ.
Ann Althouse discusses a BodyWorlds-type exhibit — to include a crucifixion. She points out that, if it’s offensive to depict crucifixion this way, it really can’t be just because it’s graphic. We have a long tradition of pious, graphic crucifixion art. There must be some other reason. (And, as I point out in the comments, the word "blasphemy" is inaccurate.)
I’ve had mixed feelings about the BodyWorlds exhibit ever since I saw it in the Science Museum of Minnesota. Some of the bodies and body systems and body parts were displayed in the tradition of anatomical models: fascinating, informative, respectful. Others are displayed as "art" and while those were also fascinating and informative, I was repelled by my own fascination. I left the exhibit uncertain about whether this use of the human body was improperly respectful of it.
Enter the thought experiment: what if, instead of being depicted riding a horse or pulling back a bowstring, the plastically preserved human body was depicted as Christ on the cross? Yeah, that would offend me. It’s more a gut reaction than an intellectual analysis, I admit, but unlike my uncertain reaction to the horseman or the archer, my reaction to the hypothetical depiction of the Crucified One is definitely repulsion and sorrow. Obviously any depiction of the Crucifixion ought to inspire repulsion and sorrow — but at the suffering of Christ, not at the art itself. This is why graphic depiction is not the problem.
I conclude that von Hagens’s art is inherently disrespectful (not to accuse von Hagens himself of a sin of disrespect, not knowing his state of mind; he may not intend it or be aware of it). If it were legitimate depiction of any human being, it would not be an inappropriate depiction of Christ. But the fact that it seems improper to use it to depict Christ, means that it should seem improper to depict any human being (an image of God) that way.
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Five things.
Ray from MN tagged me with the Five Things meme. I think this is the first time I’ve been tagged for anything since elementary school. Anyway, sez Ray, "Just make a post listing five items you have in your Freezer, a Closet, your Car, and your Backpack."
OK.
Freezer:
- Mary Jane’s placenta
- Coffee beans
- Eight pounds of butter from grass-fed cows
- Several boxes of popsicles
- Two quarts of homemade tomato soup
Closet:
- The oak dresser I had in my childhood bedroom
- A maple dresser from Mark’s grandpa that Mark stripped and refinished (the dresser, not the grandpa)
- A plastic bag containing my late mom’s jewelry
- Laundry
- Cell phone charger
Car:
- Box of emergency granola bars
- Rosary
- Spare set of clothes for each child
- Shovel
- Roll of paper towels with the core stuffed full of plastic grocery bags
Backpack’s empty right now, gathering dust in the attic…
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Irreplaceable property.
Does artificial reproductive technology lead to the attitude that children are a commodity?
Well, this is somewhat interesting: Couple sue clinic over lost embryos
In their lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Hennepin County District Court, the Keoghs argue that both Morbeck and the clinic were responsible for destroying their "irreplaceable property."
Umhm.
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A homeschooling bleg.
OK, here’s a question for the homeschooling Catholics. Answer in the combox or on your own blog; please e-mail or put it in the combox and I’ll link to it.
How do you work prayer with your kids into the school day? I have always had trouble with this and I’m looking for more ideas. Help.
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Summing it up neatly.
As reported by Amy Welborn.
"There’s a controversy in the United States [about evolution and creationism and "intelligent design"] because there is a lack of awareness of a thing called philosophy," said [Father] Fessio, whose Ignatius Press publishes Benedict’s books in English.
"Evangelicals and creationists generally lack it and Catholics have it," he said.
"When you look at the world and see what appears to be order and design, the conclusion that there is a designer is not a scientific conclusion, it’s a philosophical one."
"Intelligent design" theory, in my view, is a clumsy attempt to reconcile two opposing worldviews that are not worth reconciling because they are both fundamentally lacking. It’s not that "evolutionism" (which I define here as the view that there is certainly no Designer and that the theory of evolution coupled with the collection of data is sufficient to explain everything important about life on Earth) lacks one thing which creationism supplies, and that creationism lacks something else which evolutionism can supply, so that all that’s necessary is to bring them together and cancel out contradictions. No, what is needed is something that is different from either.
"Are you a Creationist or an Evolutionist?" is a loaded question that doesn’t deserve an answer, on par with "When did you stop beating your wife?"
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Brief conversations.
My favorite blog comment of the morning, so far, comes from Rich Leonardi’s Ten Reasons, where RL recounts the brief conversation he had with Archbishop Wuerl upon encountering him by chance in an airport. Commenter Chris writes:
I’ve had much briefer conversations with a couple cardinals, a few archbishops and several bishops. They have all been identical.
Them: The Body of Christ!
Me: AMEN!One was slightly longer.
He said: Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternm. Amen.And I stuck my tongue out at him.
Hm, I seem to be encountering the same sort of conversation stopper with my parish priest.
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Schoolroom pics.
UPDATE: Other people’s learning rooms.
Today I treat you to pictures of our schoolroom, as is. (That is, I just walked in — didn’t clean up at all.)
We moved into the house this winter, and decoration has been a low priority, so the walls are pretty bare. Yesterday I taped a weekly schedule to the wall above the big worktable, for Oscar to see. Later Mark plans to screw to the wall there a thumbtack-board made from a spare half-sheet of drywall, wrapped in colorful fabric. I still haven’t gone to get the fabric.
Yes, we have an IKEA around here. How can you tell?
The room is a little disproportionately narrow, so I took over some of the adjacent "foyer" space. A small shelf is meant to hold work for the now-three-year-old to use at the little table. As soon as I figure out what that will be.Here’s another view. The cabinets hold supplies. The base cabinet is recycled from our old house, and the tall cabinets are just ordinary steel locking cabinets. We added combination padlocks because I kept losing my keys. See the clothespin bag hanging on the left wall? There’s a clothesline running across the top, just out of the frame, but you can see some paintings that are hanging from it in front of the curtain valance. Red, blue, green. I’d say they are hanging "to dry" except that Milo probably painted them weeks ago and are just hanging around.
Let’s look inside the tall cabinets. First, the one that I open every day because it contains each day’s work:
Ahh, I’m so proud of this nice, neat cabinet. The white dishtubs are labeled "Math," "Reading," etc. There’s a lot of odds and ends, manipulatives and flashcards and stuff; the dishtub is easy to retrieve.Paint and glue are in secondary containment, always an important consideration when working with hazardous materials. The little file thingy holds upcoming math masters and the files for the reading program I devised (with help). Subjects that require only a couple of workbooks or so live in magazine files. The tubs on the bottom hold manipulatives.
Less tidy: The Cabinet I Hold Extra Stuff In!
Just don’t ask.The underside of the base cabinet isn’t locked and contains things I want the children to have ready access to. For example, certain craft supplies (certain = "the ones that do not spill") and a box of folders with Oscar’s more independent work. Theoretically, I can say "Go get your red folder and do the worksheets in it" now.
Last but not least, the window through which we can wat
ch the yellow school buses speed by: -
Milopropisms.
Milo’s become quite the master of the amusing turn of phrase. Yesterday I noted that he turned a somersault and called it a "spring roll." Today on seeing a many-legged arthropod walking up the pantry wall, he asked: Is that a spider, or is it a recipe?
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Homeschool rooms.
While I’m waiting for Valerie to post pictures of her schoolroom, I’ve been drooling over Elizabeth’s family’s learning room. (Someone has, anyway. When was the last time I cleaned this keyboard?)
Go see her pics. I’ll add mine when the baby’s not sleeping on me.
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Last day.
Last night, as the Labor Day sun slipped away, our family hopped in the car to take a walk.
There are many nice places to walk in the Twin Cities, but few of them are within walking distance of my house.
We decided on a local triumvirate (trium-virent? does that pun work?) of parks: Roberts Bird Sanctuary, the Rose Garden, and the Peace Garden. They’re all adjacent to one another, near Lake Harriet. At the Peace Garden, we enjoyed a brand-new, still-incomplete sculpture. It’s called "Spirit of Peace," and it commemorates the children who died as a result of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings. But it’s the sculpture itself that I admired; it’s really a lovely idea for outdoor art. This article from last year describes the sculpture setting.
Bronze plaques set into boulders surrounding the sculpture will show the steps involved in folding a crane. Moving from boulder to boulder, visitors to the site can fold a crane to be taken home or left at the garden.
The sculpture isn’t there yet, but the plaques and the surrounding boulders are. There are fourteen of them, surrounding a larger one that will be the sculptures’ pedestal. I rather liked the pedestal the way it is, without the sculpture. It was covered with others’ paper cranes, some more avian-looking than others.
There’s a little box off to the side containing squares of paper. Mark took two, handed me one, sat down by himself on the first boulder to see if he could fold the crane from memory. I wandered from stone to stone following the directions. Finally I came to the seventh or eight stone and couldn’t figure out the next step. That stone was surrounded by partially completed, crumpled, discarded cranes, so I must have been in good company.
The children ran around, played with their pieces of paper. Later they almost fell in the fountain. A nice last day of summer.
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Wrong season, kid.
Milo showed off yesterday to a family friend: he bent over at the waist, touched his head to the floor, and tumbled heels over head.
"Look! I can do a spring roll!"
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