Children are good for society, fiscally and in every other way. Children who are well-cared for, who aren’t forced to go to school sick or spend lots of time alone, and parents who aren’t utterly exhausted and wracked with guilt at all times, make families who give stability and peace to society as a whole. So even if we’re only looking out for our own self-interest, it’s best for everyone when parents are given as much freedom and flexibility as possible to devote to their children. Children are not a hobby or a side interest: they are life itself. It only makes sense for employers to take that into account.
Tag: national catholic register
Don’t bubble-wrap your kids
PIC deformed tree
My son, who is twelve, recently wanted to buy a comic book, and as he leafed through the pages, he liked the story, but was disturbed by some of the gory images he saw. The comic book guy reassured him that he would get used to it over time. And I agreed. Sure, you can get used to it, and eventually it wouldn’t even bother you any more. But why would you want to do that to yourself?
At Synod, Sex-Obsessed Catholic Church Finally Talks About Sex, Finally
It is stunning that the Bishops are talking about sex! As long as you are the kind of person who wakes up stunned to see the sun rise, stunned to find that you have feet at the end of your legs, stunned to discover that the floor under those feet is still made out of wood, just like it has been for decades and decades.
Read the rest at the Register.
PIC John Paul II waving
Believe it or not, having ten kids changes you.
Baby #1: Uh oh, I think the jelly I had on my toast yesterday might have had some GMOs in it. I better call my midwife … if I can get myself to admit to her what I did. I wonder if she will want to run some tests to make sure everything is still okay. No, wait, tests are bad, too! Oh, I’ve ruined everything, I’ve ruined the baby, and I haven’t even given birth yet!
Baby #10: Someone call your father and tell him we are out of wine.
Read the rest at the Register.
How welcoming is your parish?
You have ideas, I know you do!
The one rule is: it has to be fairly cheap, and cannot cause major upheaval or headaches for the pastor. No “replace everything with marble” or “assign a 24-hour on-call spiritual adviser to each parishioner” or “install heated holy water fonts” or “ban banjos.”
Well, maybe that last one.
Catholics, Cotton Candy, and Comeuppance
PIC Care Bear farting a rainbow
And I says to myself, I says, Sorry, Shakespeare! Sorry, Homer! Sorry, Flannery O’Connor and Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Mark Twain, Faulkner, Melville, Doestoevsky, Chaucer, Joseph Conrad, Dickens, and Thomas “Joyboy” Mann. Sorry to you all, but you have got to go, because I’m fairly sure that on page 243, right where nice little college girls and college boys could read it, someone got in someone else’s pants and didn’t drop dead of the clap before the end of the book. And on the very next page, someone used God’s name in vain and even though a perfectly good crevasse could have plausibly opened up and swallowed him without doing much violence to the dramatic integrity of the work as a whole, IT DIDN’T HAPPEN. Is outrage!
Should Catholics read anti-Catholic materials?
Do you know what happens when you only read things that you already know you are going to agree with? Your brain becomes a marshmallow: soft, white, undifferentiated, and incapable of doing anything besides sitting there harmlessly until someone decides to take a bite of you.
Read the rest at the Register, which includes a picture of a German Medieval sculpture which is either Mary or an ancient Babylonian deity, an extended comparison to a hot air balloon because I saw one on a truck the other day, a quickie reference to vaccinations because what the hell, the phrase “hog to the ever loving wash,” and at least one “yarr.”
What are you doing for catechism this year?
All right, YOU catechise this, if you’re so smart.
For the older kids, in 7th, 8th, 10th, and 11th grades, I give up. Wait, no, that’s not what I meant to say out loud. What I meant to say is that we haven’t found either EDGE or LifeTeen to be a good match for our family, and every time I try to read something aloud to the kids, or do a pre-packaged curriculum with them, something happens to capsize the whole endeavor. It’s some combination of the kids being in three different schools, and me and my husband working four different jobs, and the kids having this dumb idea about having social lives, and me falling into a prenatal coma around 6:00 every night, that just makes it difficult to keep up with the diligent inquiry into beginner’s theology that I always imagined enjoying in the soft quiet of evening with my older kids. And no, we can’t do anything in the car. I don’t want to explain why. We just can’t.
What About Behavioral and Spiritual Arguments Against Vaccines?
PIC vaccine
As we can see from Tuesday’s post and the response to it, it’s not necessarily clear what we mean when we say “science” or “medicine.” So let’s put science and medicine aside entirely for a moment, and let’s focus on two arguments against vaccines that I keep hearing — arguments which don’t appeal to science at all, but which are spiritual and behavioral.
Read the rest at the Register. Note: any snark, condescension, lack of charity, arrogance, self-pity, logical fallacies or otherwise insufferable behavior in this post is unintentional. If you think I’ve missed the mark, please pray for me and respond with as much kindness as you can, because I really am trying here.
Science, Catholics, and Fear
PIC doctor pocking cash
More and more, religious people are pitching their tents in the vast, squashy wilderness that calls itself “natural living” or “alternative medicine,” and are rejecting science and modern medicine — not some of it, but all of it. Their creed is this: drugs are evil, chemicals are evil, doctors are evil.You can cure most diseases, mental or physical, with a handful of seeds and a few essential oils squirted into the proper orifices. Above all, be afraid.e