bearing blog

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].

  • Diversity, from the pulpit.

    So, a year ago we left the university parish we’d been at since we got married, and deliberately fled to a trusty orthodox parish with an adoration chapel and all the smells and bells.  When we did that, we experienced an abrupt change in homily focus. 

    At the university parish, we were constantly exhorted to avoid prejudice and discrimination, particularly against those of a different race.  I can barely remember a homily exhortation against any other sin.  (There were other topics, for example plenty of explication of the Gospel readings and lots of God-is-good stuff.  And there were some discourses about the dangers of materialism and various antiprogressive economic policies, and encouragement to do things like volunteer in soup kitchens.  But the only exhortations I remember were against racism.)

    At our current parish, there are lots of exhortations against things.  Racism is one of them.  Materialism is a sizable chunk.  But also against pornography, divorce, contraception, abortion, too much television, the sanitization of religion from the public sphere, parents afraid to discipline their children in any way, selfishness, negligence of prayer life, irreverence towards the sacraments, etc.

    I can’t help but notice that in both cases, the homilist  was, is… well, excuse the cliche, but I mean to say "preaching to the choir."  I’m not saying it’s his fault.  Both parishes are the sort that attract people from all over the metro area, rather than only those who live in the parish boundaries.  (The college students are a special case.)  So maybe it’s a case of people flocking to hear homilies that help them feel satisfied that they are doing the right thing. 

    Not that we can’t still be challenged by them.  Even though I’m right on board with our parish priest on the whole pornography-divorce-adultery-contraception-abortion-bad-bad-bad bandwagon, his homilies still challenge me to strive for greater holiness.  I’m sure that we’re in a more challenging place now than we were before.  Perhaps this is because there is a greater diversity of exhortations.   

    Speaking of diversity:  It strikes me that racism is a pretty easy thing to rail against from the pulpit.  Not only that, but for many people — not everyone, but many people — especially in the educated, urban/suburban, largely white, middle-to-upper-class and college-student audience of the university parish I mention — isn’t it a pretty easy thing to hear from the pulpit?  Does it really challenge that demographic (which I freely  includes me) very much in daily life?  (a) Everybody already admits that racism is bad.  (b)  Most people in that demographic don’t interact deeply on a daily basis with people of a different race unless those people are very much like them in numerous other aspects, e.g. also educated and also well-to-do, perhaps employed in the same industry, etc.  We’re still a pretty segregated society when it comes to neighborhoods and schools and social circles.  Most of us can get along without having to fight racism in our hearts and actions every day, unless it’s part of our job (e.g. public school teacher, social worker, customer service in a part of town we don’t live in…) If they have to strive at all against racism, I suspect that it’s largely an interior struggle, and very easy to ignore. 

    Likewise, at the parish I’m at now, it’s like an NFP convention or something.  Young families, including us, have gravitated there to see every Sunday the almost legendary spectacle of a priest who preaches against contraception from the pulpit.   I suspect that for these families, who fill the pews to bursting, it is easy rather than challenging to hear that sort of message.  It is for us.

    Would the parochial system, rigidly enforced, make more sense?  No more choice of where to belong?  Each parish drawn from its own neighborhood, regardless of politics?  All of us subject, for better or worse, to the pastor bestowed on us by the archbishop?  Maybe overall — if all the pastors were uniformly good enough. That is, if "he’s not a very good pastor" meant only that he wasn’t a talented preacher, or that he was a bumbling manager of parish employees, or that he is hopeless at raising money.  As it is, it sometimes means he doesn’t teach the truth, or he teaches falsehood.  An uninspiring preacher or a church that can’t afford to keep the air conditioning on — those things can and should be borne in Christian submission.  But when the parish priest or the DRE teach error, we parents at least have the responsibility to flee.  Thank God we also have the right.   

    Because it wasn’t preaching against racism that made us leave the first place; it was negligence, if not abuse, of the Holy Eucharist.  And we couldn’t bear that anymore. 

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  • “Crunchy Cons.”

    This is the next book about American political culture that I want to read. 

    When a National Review colleague teased writer Rod Dreher one day about his visit to the local food co-op to pick up a week’s supply of organic vegetables (“Ewww, that’s so lefty”), he started thinking about the ways he and his conservative family lived that put them outside the bounds of conventional Republican politics. Shortly thereafter Dreher wrote an essay about “crunchy cons,” people whose “Small Is Beautiful” style of conservative politics often put them at odds with GOP orthodoxy, and sometimes even in the same camp as lefties outside the Democratic mainstream. The response to the article was impassioned: Dreher was deluged by e-mails from conservatives across America—everyone from a pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican to an NRA staffer with a passion for organic gardening—who responded to say, “Hey, me too!”

    … At a time when the Republican party, and the conservative movement in general, is bitterly divided over what it means to be a conservative, Dreher introduces us to people who are pioneering a way back to the future by reclaiming what’s best in conservativism—people who believe that being a truly committed conservative today means protecting the environment, standing against the depredations of big business, returning to traditional religion, and living out conservative godfather Russell Kirk’s teaching that the family is the institution most necessary to preserve…

    Crunchy Cons is both a useful primer to living the crunchy con way and a passionate affirmation of those things that give our lives weight and measure. In chapters dedicated to food, religion, consumerism, education, and the environment, Dreher shows how to live in a way that preserves what Kirk called “the permanent things,” among them faith, family, community, and a legacy of ancient truths.

    Amy Welborn mentioned it on her blog today and Rod Dreher showed up in the comments.  He wrote,

    I interviewed a bunch of folks for it, and had them talk about the way they lived their lives as conservatives that put them outside the mainstream of American (esp Republican) life. What I discovered as I reported the book is that almost all the people who identify as conservatives but who live this countercultural way are religious. It was a trip to be on the phone with an Orthodox Jewish woman from Massachusetts who was going on and on about how much she loves this Pope Benedict, and how the countercultural stands he takes fills her with admiration.

    Anyway, the book is organized into eight chapters, each exploring this sensibility as it expresses itself in various aspects of our daily lives. The first chapter defines the phenomenon. Then we get into Consumerism, Food, Home, Education, The Environment, and Religion. The final chapter is called "Waiting for Benedict," a title I got from the final two paragraphs of the Thomist philosopher Alasdair Macintyre’s book "After Virtue." Macintyre says that our culture is so fragmented now that recovery in the short term is not really possible, so the only thing for men and women of virtue to do is to create their own communities, like the monks of the fifth century, did to preserve the faith and civilization against the coming of the Dark Ages. Macintyre says the world needs a new St. Benedict to inspire communities of virtue in the same way.

    My view is that the only way any of us are going to preserve for ourselves and our families our faith and our values is to live intentionally countercultural lives, and in turn to build up our own communities. I don’t advocate neo-Amishness, but I do advocate more or less seceding from the media and the mall, but not in a fearful sense; rather, I find positive joy in the good things we have, and believe that we’ve got to work to create communities where those things are preserved and affirmed, even celebrated, in our families and communities.  [emphasis mine – E.]

    I have resisted the label "conservative" for years, but all this appeals to me… I might be willing to call myself a crunchy con! 

    I read Dreher’s article — the one that spawned the book — soon after it appeared in July 2002.  An excerpt:

    After we married, Julie and I had to teach ourselves how to cook. We quickly discovered how much better food tastes if it hasn’t been processed. We’d go to farmers’ markets in the city to buy produce, and before we knew it, we were making and canning our own apple butter. Not only did the stuff taste dramatically better than what was on offer in the supermarket, but there was a real sense of pride in knowing how to do these things for ourselves, like our grandmothers did. We realized one day that pretty much the only young to middle-aged people we knew who cared about these things were … lefties.

    We were also startled to discover how large the homeschooling movement is here in New York City, and that it’s primarily a phenomenon of the left-wing counterculture. Given our backgrounds in Texas and Louisiana, we assumed religious conservatives were the only folks interested in homeschooling. I did some reporting on homeschoolers in Manhattan, and learned that most of them did it for the same reasons we plan to: an unwillingness to trust the state schools here with something as important as our children’s education.

    All sorts of things started to occur to us. The music we like — jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son — is something you can only hear on, umm, public radio or see on public television. When we began talking about buying a house, we realized we wanted something old and funky, in the sort of neighborhood that your average Republican would disdain.

    The underlying quality that crunchy-cons and …. crunchy-libs(?) are both seeking, implies Dreher, is authenticity.  Another anecdote I like:

    Catholic Julianne says she absorbed a lot of her "natural" ideas through her anti-abortion activism. Awe over the miracle of birth led her to study natural-childbirth practices, which hooked her up with herb-savvy Earth Mother types in Birkenstocks — "and before you know it, I was eating nutritional yeast on my baked potatoes. Eeuh! Liberal!"

    Teaching her kids to read early made Julianne think that maybe the intellectually deadening public school wasn’t the best thing for them, and she became a homeschooler without quite realizing what was happening. "That’s supposed to be right-wing," she wrote. "But I was first introduced to homeschooling by John Holt, who was left-wing. How do I know? There were certain telltale phrases he used. He didn’t trust the Establishment. He didn’t trust the government schools. But that’s right wing now. Funny how I went straight from left wing to right wing without ever once passing through a phase where I trusted the government."

    I can relate, oh yes.  Especially to the homeschooling connection.  Despite my protestations, I can’t deny that I’m a "religious conservative" in the pop-cultural sense, although it’s more precise just to identify as an orthodox Catholic.  (I mean, does "religious conservative" imply that I’m opposed to the teaching of evolution or that I want public-school teachers to lead students in prayer?  For the record, um, no and no.)  And yeah, part of the reason I homeschool is because the school environment isn’t conducive to developing moral values.  But it’s not just morality I value here — I want each child of mine to develop a skepticism towards pretended authority, a strongly independent mine, and confidence in the goodness of his own self as well as that of others.   Not to mention the fact that I want to give them so much more intellectual freedom than I had as a child.  These are, cough, liberal concerns (but shouldn’t they be everyone’s?)

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  • Another great kid lunch: Pink Spaghetti.

    OK, here’s one for feeding a crowd of kids:

    • Cook some spaghetti, but not all the way.  Leave it a bit too firm.
    • Make some really watery, simple tomato sauce.  We sauteed one chopped onion in olive oil, added about two ounces of crumbled leftover meatloaf, and then threw four 15-oz cans of diced tomatoes into the pan, undrained.  Also there was some broth in there.  But it could have been just the canned tomatoes, heated up.
    • Stir the drained spaghetti into the watery sauce so that it absorbs some of the water.  Salt to taste.
    • Add scoops of a smooth, whole-milk ricotta cheese (I recommend Sargento brand) and stir it in until it’s a creamy, rich consistency (with chunks of tomato) and a lovely pink color.
    • Serve to many children.  And to yourself, ’cause it’s really lovely this way.  Some minced fresh parsley would be nice if you have it, but not at all necessary.

    Ricotta’s cheaper than parmesan, too!

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  • Proper beef stew, part two.

    A few days ago I blogged about how I’d finally learned how to make a proper beef stew, and included a recipe.  The secret appears to be baking the covered pot in the oven rather than on the stovetop.

    That recipe was a somewhat complicated French one.  Wednesday I tried a "classic American" beef stew using the same technique.   It was much simpler, based on "Beef Stew with Bacon" from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, but employing the daube technique instead of the stovetop simmer:

    • 4 oz       portabella mushrooms
    • 1            boneless beef chuck eye roast (I used plain chuck), 3.5 lb, in 2-inch   cubes
    • 1.5 tsp       salt
    • 1     tsp       ground black pepper
    • 4 Tbsp      olive oil
    • 4 oz           smoky, salty bacon, snipped into small pieces
    • 5                large carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks
    • 2 med        onions, sliced
    • 2 large      baking potatoes peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks
    • Some garlic — probably 4 cloves.  I don’t remember.
    • 2 Tbsp      tomato paste
    • 1/3 c          all purpose flour
    • 2 c              red wine (I used a boxed Merlot — classic American, remember?)
    • 1 qt            beef stock
    • 1 c              frozen peas
    • 1/4 c          minced fresh parsley

    Heat oven to 325 F.  Heat bacon and olive oil over medium-high heat; cook until bacon is crisp.  Remove to paper towels.  Crush one garlic clove and cook in the hot fat for a minute, then remove and discard  the garlic. 

    Season beef with salt and pepper.  Brown in batches in hot fat and set beef aside.   Brown the carrots, onions, mushrooms, the rest of the garlic minced, and tomato paste in the pot, 2 minutes.  Add flour and stir 1 minute.  Deglaze pan with red wine.  Add broth and beef and potatoes, and bring to a simmer.  Cover and place in oven for 2.5 to 3 hours.

    Remove from oven.  Allow stew to settle, 5 min.  Skim excess fat off the top.  Stir in parsley, peas, and bacon and serve.

    Comments:

    I deliberately omitted the thyme and bay that Bittman called for in order to test something more like my grandmother might have made (except she probably wouldn’t have used so much garlic.  The depth of flavor was still remarkable.  The sauce was beautifully thick, again more so the second day (when we fed it to Hannah and the other Mark in an impromptu potluck.)

    Were I to make this stew again:  I think I might have left the potatoes in larger chunks, as they had almost disintegrated at the end of the long cooking time.  I also would have added something green, maybe green beans, a vegetable that I think is very nice when long-stewed.  A little cabbage might have been good too:  The other Mark claimed that he desired to mix sauerkraut into it.  Maybe he was wanting something acidic?  Perhaps I should have kept the sour little capers, or added tomatoes at the end.

    I also think I would add back the anchovies called for in the Cook’s Illustrated recipe.  They really add a lot of depth of flavor.  Alternatively I could have spiked the stew with Asian fish sauce (nam pla or nuoc mam). 

    The next thing I want to try is making one that’s gluten-free.  Hannah suggests that potato starch might be the best flour substitute, as it thickens things in an appetizing way (unlike, say, arrowroot or tapioca, which turn stuff kind of mucilaginous) and also has decent browning characteristics.

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  • Mistakes.

    Today, towards the end of schoolwork, Oscar burst into tears and threw his math worksheet on the floor.

    What is it?  I came over to look.  He shook his head and pointed.  Under the direction "Color the triangles red," he had colored the first shape — a square.  It’s okay, I said.  You know what the right answer is.   Just exx it out, and then you can do the rest of them.  It’s not a big deal.  But he kept sobbing and crying that his paper was ruined.

    I gathered him up in my arms.  Honey, you made a mistake.  That’s all — just a mistake.  It doesn’t mean your whole paper is bad — you’ve already done a lot of good work on that paper.  People make mistakes all the time.  Don’t I?  I searched my memory for an example.  What if I put too much salt in the soup?  Should I just throw all the soup away?

    He said, no.  I guess you would just eat it anyway.

    Bad example, I guess.  Well, first I would try to fix it.   I wouldn’t throw it away, because there’s still good stuff in there.

    He sniffled.  When I make a mistake, it makes me think that I am a bad boy.

    Where did he get that idea?  Carefully now; don’t want him to think that good work doesn’t matter, but at the same time, that coloring a square instead of a triangle is not going to land him in San Quentin.  Oh, that’s not right.  You are a good person.  Everybody makes mistakes.  Even really good people make mistakes. 

    I pulled back so I could look in his eyes.  It is important, very important, to try to do your work well.  But that doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes.  And it’s okay to make mistakes.  The important thing — do you know what’s the most important thing about making mistakes?  Can you guess?

    What?

    The most important thing is — well, two things.  First of all, to see when you’ve made a mistake and to try to fix it if you can.   Second, to remember when you’ve made a mistake, and then you can try not to do it again.

    He put his head on my shoulder and was quiet for a while.  When he spoke, he said:  I think that people who don’t want to please God don’t care about their mistakes.

    Maybe so.  It’s good to care about your mistakes.  But you mustn’t let that stop you from doing things.  Now, what will we do about your paper?

    I don’t know.  It’s messed up.

    I think there are two things you can do when you make a mistake on a math worksheet, I offered.  You could try to erase it, if you can.  Or you could just exx it out.

    I can’t erase the crayon, he murmured.   I was about to suggest something else when he brightened up.  I know!  he said.  If I draw a black line here — he indicated the diagonal of the red square — it will make TWO triangles.  And then it will not be a mistake anymore, because the triangles will be red!

    I told him that was an elegant solution.  Together we chose a black pen, bisected the square, and admired the two red triangles.  Then he finished his worksheet, with no more problems.

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  • Advent: Waiting to celebrate.

    Advent is my favorite of the seasons, perhaps because we’re called to live it so differently from the world.  Most "holiday" parties take place during Advent; most holiday cards are sent during Advent; most of the trees are put up, most of the outdoor lights are lit, most of the cookies are eaten, most of the carols are sung, during Advent.  Not to mention the holiday displays, which appear before Advent even begins.*

    Although we can enjoy those things in charity, it’s a good idea for us to avoid contributing to this general hubbub.  We fast before the feast.  Advent is a time of prayer and penance and waiting; a "little Lent."  In the Eastern Church the fasting is pronounced:  meatless days, for example, except on the great solemnities and feasts that fall in that season.  In the Western Church we haven’t been called to such obligatory austerities, but it is still in the spirit of the season to put off the celebration until Christmas Eve. 

    So what can we do?  The easiest is just to take care to do all the ordinary things during the Christmas Season, not before.  Wait till Christmas Eve and afterwards to eat the Christmas cookies.  Sing "O Come O Come Emmanuel" and "O Come Divine Messiah;" save "Angels We Have Heard On High" for after Christmas.  Have your Christmas party on January 3rd instead of December 15th.  Mail your Christmas cards after Christmas.  Leave the tree bare till Christmas Eve. 

    I don’t want to spend Christmas Eve baking cookies and writing Christmas cards.  Well, no problem.  Advent is a time of preparation, isn’t it?  Cookies freeze well, so bake them early and put them in the freezer.  Write the Christmas Cards during Advent but mail them after Christmas.  Shop during Advent and give during Christmas.  Not so hard. 

    Add to the "putting-it-off" spirit by some Advent traditions such as the family Advent wreath, and there you go — getting in the spirit of the season. 

    My small self-deprivation this year is to decline all sweets, especially Christmas cookies, until after Christmas Eve Mass.  It’s small, especially since we’re not a sweet-baking family, but it helps me.

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    *Let them all be anathema, except let there be a special dispensation for craft-stores.  People need extra time if they’re going to MAKE Christmas stuff.

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  • That Document.

    On Priesthood and Those with Homosexual Tendencies, that is.  Here’s my translation of what the document says, for those of you who don’t feel like reading the whole thing (which is pretty short).

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    Introduction:  We have already taught plenty about homosexuality.  This document answers only one question:  "whether to admit to the seminary and to holy orders candidates who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies."

    I.  Only men can be priests.  The priest represents Christ as "head, shepherd, and spouse" to the Church.  The priest makes a gift of his whole personhood to the Church.  Therefore only mature men who can relate correctly to both men and women may be ordained.

    II.  Homosexual acts and homosexual tendencies are different.  Homosexual acts are inherently wrong.  Homosexual tendencies are disorders which are difficult for many who suffer them.  Today we must state clearly that men who have sexual contact with other men, who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or who "support the so-called ‘gay culture’" cannot enter the seminary or be ordained.

    This is because men who have sexual contact with other men, who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or who support the so-called "gay culture" are hindered from relating correctly to men and women.  Bad things can happen if men with deep-seated homosexual tendencies are ordained. 

    Not all homosexual tendencies are deep-seated.  Some are the expression of a transitory problem, for example, of immaturity.  Such tendencies must be overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate [which is a prerequisite for ordination as a priest].

    III.   Desire alone doesn’t give a man the right to be a priest.  The Church gets to decide, from among the candidates, who enters the seminary, how seminarians are formed, and who gets to be ordained.  It’s the bishop’s or the superior’s responsibility, and if he has a serious doubt about a candidate, he mustn’t admit him to Holy Orders.   The rector of the seminary must tell the bishop or superior what he thinks of each candidate.  The spiritual director is bound by secrecy, but he has the duty to try to dissuade an unsuitable candidate from seeking ordination.  The candidate has the most responsibility and he has to be honest and trust the judgment of his superiors.  Dishonesty does not characterize someone who believes he is called to serve Christ and his Church.

    Conclusion:  Bishops, bishops’ conferences, and superiors must observe this document for the good of the candidates and to make sure that we always have good priests.

    —————————————————————-

    OK, so what here is new?  Only a clarification: 

       — Homosexual tendencies (by which I think they mean same-sex attraction, or SSA) and homosexual contact in the past do not automatically exclude a man from ordination.  If a man has not had sexual contact with other males for three years; and if he can show that his SSA is insignificant, or that it has been outgrown, or that it does not prevent him from relating correctly to men and to women; and if the latter has been true for at least three years — then he may be admitted to the diaconate.

      — But if the candidate has "deep-seated homosexual tendencies," or is currently sexually active as a homosexual, or "supports the so-called ‘gay culture’" at this time, he may not be ordained.  Period.

    On first reading, I thought that there were two serious flaws in the document:  a failure to define the term "deep-seated," and a failure to define "the so-called ‘gay culture.’"  Surely these definitions are necessary to make the appropriate distinctions? 

    But on further thought, I decided that given the other content of the document, the terms are clear enough.   

    What is deep-seated?  If a candidate can overcome his homosexual tendencies and remain victorious over them for three years, then they’re not deep-seated and he can be ordained, assuming he meets other qualifications.  If he hasn’t done that yet, they might be, and he shouldn’t be ordained.

    And what is the "support of gay culture" that makes otherwise suitable candidates unsuitable?  At minimum, to "support" something is to believe in it.  It might also mean political support. What sort of beliefs and politics would render an otherwise suitable person unsuitable for the priesthood?  Only heretical beliefs; only politics contrary to Church moral teachings.  Therefore, the document must mean that those who contradict Church teaching in their beliefs and politics, relative to homosexuality and homosexual persons, can’t be ordained. 

    So what this comes down to is:  To be ordained a priest, you have to be faithful to Church teachings, and you can’t be currently struggling with homosexuality or permanently self-identified as a homosexual.

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  • Using words in sentences.

    Today I required Oscar (age five) to read words from a list and use each one in a sentence.  These are the sentences he came up with.

    Soon:  The pizza man I hope’s coming soon.

    Bless:  Father D____ [our parish priest] blesses children.

    Dress:  I weared my sparklest dress.

    Ice:  I freezed with ice.  No!  I freezed like ice.

    Place:  I placed the Ten Commandments in a holy… um… tomb?  So the people couldn’t touch it ’cause they would get dead.

    Fasten:  I need to fasten up my seatbelt because there’s an emergency.

    Muscle:  My muscles are getting stronger when I eat food.

    Part:  I am building a race car.  But I need the parts!

    Arm:  My arm is strong!

    Yard:  I builded in my yard a flowerpot.

    Star:  I’m looking at the stars for nights.

    Borrow:  I am gonna borrow your race car to race.

    Sorry:  I am sorry I breaked your race car.

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  • Group B Strep: To test or not?

    I commented to a pregnant friend a few weeks ago that I had never been tested for Group B Strep colonization with either of my two pregnancies, and that I would rather not be tested as I might have to do somaething about it if I found out I were GBS+.  She reacted with a bit of shock, and after thinking about it I realized that I actually didn’t have a handle on how rare GBS is and whether it was a good idea to avoid testing.

    GBS is a bacterium that normally inhabits the digestive tract but occasionally poses a risk of disease, particularly to newborns.   Nobody was really talking about it much when I was preparing for my first birth, but these days it seems to be the latest scare.   And there  a little bit of reason for it:  If mothers transmit GBS to their newborns during delivery, 20% of those babies will die, and many of the survivors will have ongoing problems.  Scary, as I said.   Because of the standard protocol for GBS+ mothers is to administer IV antibiotics, which reduces transmission by 70%. 

    For mothers who birth in the hospital, this intervention is a small matter.  There are already so many interventions going on — what’s a little IV?  And a lot of those mothers were going to have an IV anyway.  So it’s not a big deal, relatively speaking, to add yet another layer of intervention.

    But for a mother who was planning to minimize intervention, adding an IV can be a big deal — they tend to restrict movement.  And for a mother who planned a homebirth, adding an IV means changing everything — because it usually means moving from home to hospital.  Is this layer of protection worth it?

    To know this, we need to know the risks of transmission in the first place.  (The  numbers in what follows are from the CDC.)  Before GBS prevention strategies were implemented widely, the incidence was 1.8/1000 live births in the U. S.  If this still reflects the risk of transmission overall, the chances of delivering a baby free of GBS disease are 99.82% if the mother’s culture is unknown and if she does not undergo IV antibiotics.

    Women who test positive for GBS are 25 times more likely than women who test negative to have a baby with GBS disease.   Let’s be conservative (on the side of testing) and assume, for the moment, that virtually all of the infections come from women who would test positive if they were tested.  Ten to 30% of women are colonized.  If ten, then the chances of GBS disease among babies of women known to be positive would be 1.8 percent; if thirty, 0.6 percent.

    IV antibiotics reduce the risk of transmission by 70 percent: from a range of 0.6-1.8%, to a range of 0.18-0.54%.

    So let’s take a look at the case for testing. 

    If you don’t test and don’t do anything:

    • Chances are 99.82% that you won’t infect a baby with GBS disease.
    • Chances are 99.96% that your baby won’t die of GBS disease.

    If you take the test:

    • Chances are 10-30% that you will test positive.

    If you are positive and you don’t undergo IV antibiotics:

    • Chances are 98.2-99.4% that you won’t infect an infant.

    If you are positive AND you undergo IV antibiotics:

    • Chances are 99.46-99.82% that you won’t infect a baby with GBS disease.

    So let’s see.  Since I am deciding whether to (a) not test or (b) test and, if positive, use antibiotics, I am deciding whether to take a step that would improve my perception of the outcome from, at best, 99.82% favorable to… at best, 99.82% favorable.

    The real outcome is improved more than that, because the real outcome includes the 70-90% chance that I would test negative.   Including that, the outcomes with testing and prophylaxis are improved to 99.95 percent.

    To sum up: 

    Going from unknown GBS status to testing and planning to use IVA if positive: improves chances from 99.82% to 99.95%  (reduces risk from 0.18% to 0.005%)

    Going from positive GBS status, no IVA, to positive GBS status, using IVA:  improves chances from 98.2% to a maximum of 99.82% (reduces risk from 1.8% t0 0.18%)

    My conclusion is that it’s not worth testing.  But that’s me.  What do you think?

    (UPDATE.  Perspective.  Total neonatal mortality in the U. S. from all causes was, in 2001, 4.5/1000 live births — your chances that your baby will not die in the first 28 days of life are "only" 99.55%.)

    UPDATE AGAIN.  Only a culture taken in the last five weeks of pregnancy is predictive.  Testing before the 35th week is useless!

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  • Belloc: A continuum-concept writer?

    (Pardon the formatting — I’m using a different computer and the buttons have mysteriously disappeared.) UPDATE.  Formatting fixed and some more information added.

    I’ve been reading Hilaire Belloc’s 1902 book The Path to Rome, the story of a pilgrimage he made on foot. He made this comment after wondering why it is so satisfying to attend Mass in the morning:

    And the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is
    that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon
    thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment
    that I am astonished people hear of it so little.

    Whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can really be very happy for long–but I mean reasonably happy), and, what is more important, decent and secure of our souls.

    Thus one should from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark; one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one’s
    food–and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on
    the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and
    one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God
    put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul.
    Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said
    lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should
    do a little work with his hands.

    Oh! what good philosophy this is, and how much better it would be if
    rich people, instead of raining the influence of their rank and
    spending their money on leagues for this or that exceptional thing,
    were to spend it in converting the middle-class to ordinary living and
    to the tradition of the race.

    Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig; and those that would not should be compelled by force.

    Reminds me of the Continuum Concept: 

    the continuum concept is the idea that in order to achieve optimal physical, mental and emotional development, human beings — especially babies — require the kind of experience to which our species adapted during the long process of our evolution.

    I mostly spend my time trying to apply it to raising my children, but it is nice to be reminded — even from a 1902 European — of its importance to the lives of adults, too.

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  • Two-year-old fury.

    Milo, age two, was feeling thwarted by me the other day.  I can’t even remember what it was exactly — I stopped him from doing something he wanted to do?  He wanted something and I told him No?  Something along those lines.

    Furious, his little face screwed up and tears welling up in his eyes, he pointed at me and screamed:  "POOPY!"

    Then he immediately dissolved into giggles.  I couldn’t help snickering, too.  I think the whole idea of calling me Poopy must have been so funny to him, it completely relieved the tension between us.   He wasn’t angry after that, and he happily went without whatever it was he had been denied.

    The same thing has played out a few times since then.  Ordinarily I would tell a child that it’s not okay to call someone names, but I can’t help thinking of this as more funny than anything else.  It’s almost turning into a joke between us.

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  • Three Advent suggestions for diving into Scripture.

    Rich Leonardi suggests a number of online resources to mark the start of Advent.  One that looks pretty good to me:  Basic Scripture, an e-course of sorts hosted at Catholic Culture. 

    Rich also notes:  This season’s Sunday readings focus on the Gospel of Mark, which is the shortest and easiest Gospel to read.  Why not kick off Advent by reading the whole thing in one sitting?  If you like the NAB, which has its faults but is certainly a comfortable translation to read, you can begin at Chapter 1 and click through all 16 chapters.

    Finally:  I finished last night reading the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s  Life of Christ (1977).   This was my first exposure to Archbishop Sheen’s writing (I have heard some recordings of his radio broadcasts).   It’s excellent!  It’s not dry at all, but neither is it dumbed down in any way.  He’s writing it like a storyteller.  He points out many little details from the Gospels that I had never noticed or thought about.  I enjoyed reading it the way I enjoy Lewis and Chesterton.

    I think the best parts of it are the ones that deal with the Mother of Our Lord — because they are so deeply rooted in the texts of the Gospels, I think they can help us explain to non-Catholics, in a framework we share with them, our devotions to the Blessed Mother.   Here’s a bit from his section on the wedding at Cana, discussing why Jesus addresses her as "Woman," then and from the Cross:

    As soon as He had consented to begin His "Hour," He proceeded immediately to tell her that her relations with Him would be henceforth changed.  Until then, during His hidden life, she had been known as the mother of Jesus.  But now that he was launched on the work of Redemption, she would no longer be just His mother, but also the mother of all His human brethren whom He would redeem.  To indicate this new relationship, He now addressed her, not as "Mother" but as the "Universal Mother" or "Woman…" 

    The moment the "Hour" began, she became "the Woman"; she would have other children too, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.  If He was to be the new Adam, the founder of a redeemed humanity, she would be the new Eve and the mother of that new humanity.  As Our Lord was a man, she was His mother; and as He was a Savior, she was also the mother of all whom He would save.  John, who was present at that wedding, was also present at the climax of the "Hour" on Calvary.  He heard our Lord calling her "Woman" from the Cross and then saying to her, "Behold thy son."  It was as if he, John, was now the symbol of her new family… On the Cross, He consoled His mother by giving her another son, John, and with him the whole of redeemed humanity.

    Even  though the book is pushing 30 years old, it’s still fresh.  It’s only a little bit dated (there are some references to Communists!)  I heartily recommend it.  I think it would make great "daily reading" for a season of the Church year, too, because each of the 62 chapters  is pretty self-contained and short.  (OK, for Advent you’d have to do 3 chapters a day.  Maybe it’s better Lenten reading.  Still, not so bad.)

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