Book Review Review

This post links to RAnn's Sunday Snippets

 

Sha-zayum! Maximum Catholic Media Generalissima Elizabeth Scalia says nice things about my book...or about a review of the book. I link/ you decide.

Book Review

I know what you're thinking...did he use 6 verses, or only 5?

Like a gunslinger, Christian Le Blanc’s gentle drawl belies an explosive quick-draw capability that has the Catholic townsfolk wide-eyed and Bible ignorance on the run....

The Bible Tells Me So: A Southern Gent Wows Catholic Kids with the Bible

Teaser Tuesday

 Excerpt from my new book, The Bible Tells Me So: A Year of Catechizing Directly from Scripture

"Eventually Isaacs' parents died.  Isaac married Rebekah, but they couldn’t get pregnant. Who does this remind you of? Abraham and Sarah! Yes! But “Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived.”  (Gen 25) She became pregnant with twins.  They would jostle each other in Rebekah’s tummy; they didn’t get along even before they were born.  [I take two rubber fetuses out of my prop bag.]

Hey, who're these babies? Umm, Jacob and Esau? That's right, and they already don't get along. Look, I'm Rebekah, here they are in my womb, fighting [I bang them into each other in front of my stomach like Punch & Judy puppets, accompanied by grunting sounds]. "There ain't enough room in this womb for the two of us! Then you get out! No, you get out!" And Rebekah is groaning, "Oww, y'all settle down in there!" That's weird! What's weird? Those things. What things? Those babies, they're weird looking. Oh yeah? I think they're cute [I give 'em a kiss], they look like my kids when they were growing in my wife...would you like to kiss them? No! Hey now, don't get squeamish on me, this is what you looked like when you were a couple of months old and still in your momma....and I bet she loved you even if you thought you were weird-looking.

Later on, when the first baby was being born, they saw he had more hair than most babies, so they named him Esau, which is Hebrew for 'hairy.' Ewww, gross, a hairy baby! C'mon, he wasn't hairy like a gorilla, some people just have more hair. Well, as Esau came out, they saw another little hand grabbing onto his ankle...that baby was named Jacob, which means "heel-holder." Yes, what?  Umm, how does that work?  What exactly?  You know...babies?  Oh- you mean how does sex work?  Yeah.  Ask your parents, this is a religion class, not a plumbing class."

This post links to Nancy Brandt's Teaser Tuesday.

The Five Arks of VBS

 It's almost summer now, but it's also the winter of VBS discontent: the cost, the programs, the relevance, the Catholicity, etc. I don't do Vacation Bible School so I'm not an authority; I just see VBS angst kick in on the Net each June. At a VBS thread today someone suggested that VBS could be homemade instead of following a packaged program. (Although as Jerry Seinfeld might say, there's nothing wrong with that.) So I thought for several seconds about what sort of homemade VBS I might like to do, and came up with this:

Assuming there are five days of VBS, they might be tied together by the idea of Ark:

1. Noah's Ark
2. Baby Moses' Ark
3. The Ark of the Covenant
4. Mary as the New Ark
5. The tabernacle in church as Ark.

There will be good stories to tell, read, and act out; things to draw, color, and craft. Any of the stories could be expanded per time available, e.g., Baby Moses' Ark could be preceded by Joseph and the famine that brought his family to Egypt, and/or followed by the story of the first Passover. Then the kids could choose to make or draw: the pyramids; a sphinx; Joseph in his coat; Pharaoh; Moses in his Ark; the Burning Bush; one of the plagues; the Angel of Death passing over a house marked with lamb's blood; parting the Red Sea, etc. Then they could assemble what they'd done in chronological order and as a group retell the whole story by referring to their artwork. Maybe each day's artwork would append to the previous days' such that on the last day they could tell the whole connected story to their parents or another class.

The Bible would be treated in an organized way, and the kids would see a meaningful thread of Catholicism run from the Old Testament through the New, and on into the kids' very own church. Time permitting, a 6th Ark might also be squeezed in: the cube-shaped New Jerusalem of Revelations. And as a prelude to arks, the garden of Eden.

Ya can't beat that.

Behold the West 2

This post links to RAnn's Sunday Snippets 

This past winter on successive Thursday evenings our parish showed the ten episodes of Catholicism, the series featuring Fr. Robert Barron. My Wife the Art Historian asked me if I wanted to go.

Well, I've seen a ton of Fr. B's bits on YouTube, and he's kinda overexposed there, y'know? And besides, isn't this for people who don't know squat about the Catholic Church? That includes us out. On the other hand, lots of my friends'll be there and we can schmooze. And the pastor will be leading some discussion after each episode. So even if none of it's new to me I can still have a good time; at least I can give the first Thursday a shot, right?

So we go to the first one...and it is the best. It's a spectacle of painting, theology, architecture, faith, music, philosophy, the Bible, sculpture, literature, saints; every spoke on the huge wheel of Catholicism, all treated as a one big thing, like a softly whirling spiral galaxy. Which Catholicism is: the complete foundation and underpinning of the West. But Fr. Barron isn't so obvious as to say so. He simply spends 10 hours (less, really) talking about the Catholic worldview so comprehensively that it'd be hard not reach that conclusion on your own.

And the wonder is that he does it so well in a mere 10 episodes. Janet & I discuss the problem: treat the faith in all its aspects in 10 hours, and speak to the well-catechized as well as the unchurched. What would I cover; what would I leave out; how many seconds to spend on each idea; how to knit the parts into a whole, etc.,etc. So I liked the series, and was better off by far for having seen it. Plus much of how he treated things reminded me of my class, which was gratifying in the shallowest way.

But here's the real surprise: Janet bought the DVD set, and we're watching it again. It's better the second time around. 

Galaxy photo by the European Southern Observatory

O Fortuna

 This post links to RAnn's Sunday Snippets

A Little House

Most Americans have heard the song O Fortuna in the movies or on TV, although they may not know its name or its composer. It's one of a suite of poems from the Middle-Ages (Carmina Burana, Bavarian Songs) which were set to music by the 20th century German composer Carl Orff. Carmina's a terrific array of moods and musics: Fortuna is epic; others are reflective; some langorous; and some boisterous, once sung in medieval pubs. The drinking songs are grouped under the heading In Taberna, i.e., In the Tavern. In the English sense of a 'public house' being a place to buy a beer, a taberna is a house; or a shed attached to the side of the house as a store or shop.

If you ever get the chance to see Carmina live- do so.

New topic, sort of: you may recall that when the LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reestablished his covenant with the Hebrews, he gave Moses very specific instructions as to how his dwelling, the Meeting Tent, should be constructed. In Hebrew, the 'tent' is ohel/ אהל;  the 'dwelling' is mishkan/ משכן  In the Old Testament their uses frequently overlap where the portability of a nomad's tent melds with the security and serenity of abiding within one's extended family.

In the New Testament, the Epistle to the Hebrews uses the Greek word skene/σκηνή (skein, tent) to describe both God's earthly and heavenly dwellings.

When St. Jerome later translated the Hebrew and Greek Testaments into the Vulgate, he used the existing Latin word tabernaculum, the diminutive of taberna, for the assorted older terms. The Roman Army, which was certainly practical about its religion if not particularly pious, had for centuries built a tabernaculum augurale, a tent, a "little house," in all of its camps for checking the auspices. How nice of Jerome not to invent a new word, but to baptize an old one instead.

[Is augurale related to inaugural? Why, yes it is.]

And how nice that the Church applies that same term to the little houses in which the Lord has dwelled among his people these last two millennia. As the New Testament fulfills the Old, the Church extends and deepens the connection between God and his people.

The Catholic Church doesn't invent anything.

Greenville- Ephrathah 6

Tonight Li'l 'Phrathah hosts Transitional Deacon Jon Chalmers' ordination.