a link for you

Abby Johnson: Only Modern Pro-Life Women’s Centers Can Beat Planned Parenthood

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/abby-johnson-only-modern-pro-life-womens-centers-can-beat-planned-parenthoo/#ixzz2toAmMIRc

(great thoughts here: how can the pro-life movement encounter and transform the culture? I'd say pray for willing benefactors, #1. The eugenics assault has Bill & Melinda Gates, and we need similar muscle. God knows who they are...)

Order, Wonder and the Historical Trauma of last-minute Christmas Shopping

So, a few weeks ago I was ogling Advent wreaths online, wondering if I could swing across the modernist divide and embrace something like this:

*****
NEVERMIND, the picture won't load and my friend in Texas wrote something better than my planned drivel about overconceptualized (crappy) religious art.

Even better than blogs about schedules (my subtopic), which are admittedly my favorite kind of blog posts to read.

In any case, please heed her warning at the top, because it's sincere. She has a certain vantage point --- it may not be for everyone. But I would ask anyone who wants to bristle at her style to consider the potential audience. I've been thinking lately about how much of the dysfunction we seem to mourn can be traced back to the cultural expectation of living in a state of unending gratification --- sexual, consumerist or otherwise. "If it feels good, Do it" is quite the mantra. We pay.

Much like Peter Hitchens being unfazed by Dan Savage's juvenile attempts at antagonism, the world needs women who can talk like this to girls out there. And priests who can talk to both. We all have that God-shaped hole in our heart, and those who minister to us do well to accept the ways habitual sin has made us blind. And to carry on, with a burning love of souls. God bless you, Mrs. Stacey Adams.

From Ho to Housewife, How Jesus Changed Everything

{insert here Diego Rivera, Woman at a Well. If photos would load to Blogger today.}

We "Translate Doctrine Into Form and Color": Hail, Blogger

"The proper sphere of a Catholic craftsman who is responsive to the appeal of the liturgical movement is to translate its doctrine into terms of form and color, and so help in presenting it to his fellow men through the medium of the senses. Let us be quite clear about this. His work is not that of a teacher, but of a translator of others' teaching. His normal function is to get on with the job without explaining what he is doing or why he is doing it.

He may well consider the job important enough in itself, if he accepts the definition of Catholic philosophy that all truth has to pass through the senses before reaching the understanding. Nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu." -- Geoffrey Webb, Liturgical Arts Quarterly, 1942

In a recent teleclass, Laura Berquist spoke extensively about the process of thinking, and it's always fascinating to reflect on the steps required to have a single thought. (Wait, is there such a thing? It seems like thoughts, by definition, multiply without cause or consciousness.) It is a truth that the senses are the first to record an image, and the image must be outside ourselves before we can process it. All thinking is a function of sorting --- matching a momentary impression to one similar or dissimilar in past experience. She used the example of a baby's shape sorter: we possess the triangle block, and we hunt for the triangular-shaped hole.


I think of our first associations with sex, and how powerful they are. Our role in the encounter, the general goals of the affair, and so on, these provide the tone of so much of our future searching. Those who are abused or preyed upon have much to overcome. Those who are derailed by selfish lust have themselves to overcome. Good news there, directly from Aristotle:

"I count him braver who overcomes his desires

than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self."

If that's all too vague, perhaps Raquel Welch's take will be useful.


Realizing that blogging is not liturgical, as it were, but a venue for those who are called to the avocation of writing -- I'm a wife and mother first, but I desire to more widely share the truth which has set me free. You won't find many original thoughts here at Lox Populi, but I aim to translate the Big Ideas which have deeply impacted my family. Also, I think the opening quotation, taken very generally, means that fiddling with my blog's color and decorations ad infinitum is totally fruitful.


God Bless You!

We have a dream.

Here are two somewhat competing visions of protest against being failed by institutions. Both make plentiful points which are worth thinking and talking about, and both are stylistically attractive. I look forward to seeing more work from each of the producers. Personally, this called to mind a moment in 2009 when our leader, a Dominican friar, bravely proposed that "YouTube is catechizing your children. It's your responsibility as laity to offer their Faith in a way that will draw them to the Lord."

His invitation to package our timeless faith in a contemporary way caught me off guard. I confess a certain reverse snobbery, even a preference for dusty "ditto sheets", but Father Francis was speaking truth. (And he was addressing us as youth catechists; the role of parents arguably includes protecting our children --- and ourselves -- from crude and objectifying images on every level.)

As a fairly recent convert to Catholicism, I'm still unwrapping the scope and diversity of the church. I can say with confidence that participation in the sacraments is the answer to the second video's complaints, and turning off the screen solves the first's. Fox News and the U.S. Senate are not the source and summit of human existence. While Ms. Newsom's video has content that I enjoy pondering, it's a superficial take on women's potential.