… for the repose of my sister’s husband, Jimmy Duffy, who died yesterday after a long battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). To the marvel of everyone, he faced his end with the cheer and wit of a Thomas More or Lawrence of Rome. Please pray also for my sister Florence, her son Jay and his lovely family. We have all grown through Jimmy’s suffering. Now we must testify with our lives to what we have “seen with our eyes” and “looked upon and touched with our hands” (1 Jn 1:1-2).
Year: 2009
He, She, and K of C
The Knights of Columbus have posted a podcast of my Valentine’s Day Secrets.
Ladder Day Saint
Yesterday (Wednesday) — after a hiatus of twenty talks on St. Paul — the Holy Father returned to his series of audiences on the Fathers. There’s no full-text translation yet, but here’s the summary.
Today we recommence our catechesis on the great Christian writers of both East and West. John Climacus, whose name means “ladder”, was born around 575, and wrote an outstanding tract near Mount Sinai on the spiritual journey leading from renunciation of the world to perfection in love. The journey takes place in three stages. The first involves detachment from worldly goods in order to return to a state of Gospel innocence and enter into a deeper communion with God. In the second phase, the soul engages in a spiritual battle with the passions by cultivating virtues corresponding to each. When purified, these passions can show us the way to God through self-denial and grace. In the third phase, John emphasizes the importance of discernment: we must examine every aspect of our behaviour in order to ascertain our deepest motivations and reawaken a “sense of the heart”. This leads to tranquillity of soul – esichía – which prepares us to probe the depths of the divine mysteries. The last “rung” of the ladder consists in faith, hope and charity. John’s account of charity includes eros, or human love, which points towards the nuptial union of the soul with God. May John’s spiritual “ladder” remind all of us who share in the death and resurrection of Christ through Baptism that we are called to continual conversion and purification with the help of the Holy Spirit.
Indian Patristics: Rather Huge News
Regular visitors know that I am just a few shades shy of an obsession with the ancient traditions of St. Thomas’s apostolate in India. I hope to complete a book on the subject this year, and I may contribute to a documentary film. For years, Rick Hivner and Merging Currents fed my obsession by providing the subcontinent’s best religious and historical scholarship and astonishingly low prices. Then, on November 30, 2006, Rick took Merging Currents offline. Now he tells me that, after more than two years, Asian Trading Corporation in Bangalore finally has the website functioning again, with all the old book stock and helpful descriptions. I’m sharpening my credit card.
Last, But Not Medieval?
Bryn Mawr Classical reviews a newish book on the last of the western Fathers, St. Isidore of Seville.
De-Classifying the Secret History
New excavations are helping us to understand Justinian. We really need more than Procopius to go on. Hat tip to Adrian Murdoch.
Laser Searchery
David Meadow directs us to news of a laser mapping tool that will soon allow us very cool virtual tours of the Roman catacombs. (Right now, the next-best thing to being there is this book.)
The Art of the Matter
I neglected to mention: you can now view the full text of OSV’s interview with the artist Lea Marie Ravotti. It was my privilege and pleasure to have Lea collaborate with me on Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols. Her own website is here.
Mike Dubruiel, Rest in Peace
Please pray for the repose of the soul of Michael Dubruiel, who was an editor of mine and always a great encouragement. It was he who thought up the idea for Living the Mysteries: A Guide for Unfinished Christians, a patristic collection I edited with Scott Hahn, and The How-To Book of Catholic Devotions: Everything You Need to Know but No One Ever Taught You, which I wrote with Regis Flaherty.
Mike was author of (inter alia) The How-To Book of the Mass: Everything You Need to Know but No One Ever Taught You, the book I most often hand out to non-Catholics who want to understand Catholic worship.
Mike was married to blogger-author Amy Welborn. Their children are very young. Please pray, too, for their consolation. He was fifty years young.
I’m in a state of shock.
Hope-philly
Why Hope?
Please Join Us For a Presentation Of:
Is It Possible To Live This Way? Vol. 2 Hope
By Fr. Luigi GiussaniPresented by:
Father Peter Cameron, Editor-in-Chief of Magnificat
and
Michael Aquilina, author and EWTN HostSaturday February 7, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Catholic Philopatrian Institute, 19 Philadelphia, Pa.
Steelers
I hope everyone enjoyed the game last night — and those of you who wear pacemakers have had the contraptions recalibrated.
Ich bin ein Pittsburgher, having moved here in 1986. But even when I was growing up on the east side of the state (Eagles territory), I was a Steelers fan. Since I never grew, my Franco Harris jersey fit me till it was threadbare.
I considered concocting an ironic post gleaned from Tertullian’s polemic on The Games. But I concluded that it would be unfair, today, to restart our conversation over whether the guy was a heretic.
Symbol Pleasures
Inside Catholic has posted a great review of my book Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols. It’s by no less an author than David Mills, whose patristically informed works I much admire.
Another friendly blogger has posted a roundup of reviews of Signs and Mysteries.
Available Wednesday?
Homeschooling guru Maureen Wittmann is hosting a webinar titled “How to Teach History with Real Books,” this Wednesday, February 4, at 7:30 p.m. Central Time (she’s in Michigan, so she uses these quaint conventions). The webinar’s description is great: “how to teach history with living literature.”
Do you have fond memories of your high school history textbook? Of memorizing dates in grade school? Of endless history lectures in college? If not, then toss the textbooks and join us for an uplifting and fun talk on how to teach history with living literature. Bring to your children a love for learning.
Maureen will bring lots of books with her for show and tell. You’ll leave this online seminar loaded with book titles, fresh ideas, and practical tips. You won’t want to miss it!
Maureen is the author of For the Love of Literature and other good books.
Among the works of “living literature” she’ll discuss are books by Yours Truly.
Dragon Feat
It’s clear — from the mail I get, and from the click-through to Amazon — that a lot of people out there are looking for good fiction about early Christianity. I find it only mildly irritating that books by both Michael Curtis Ford and Father Michael Giesler have outsold my own books over the last month, from my own blog.
You are apparently a great part of that elusive market for patristifiction. (I follow after Father Z, who coined the term patristiblogging.)
But what about matristifiction, you ask? What about the Mothers of the Church?
As if on cue, I received a copy of Andrea Lorenzo Molinari’s Climbing the Dragon’s Ladder: The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. It’s a fictional interpretation of the passion, written by a scholar who fell head over heels for the saint and needed to know “the rest of the story,” even if that meant writing it himself. If anachronism’s bug you, breathe easy here. This guy has the scholarly chops. He’s the author of The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles: Allegory, Ascent, and Ministry in the Wake of the Decian Persecution, published by the SBL, and Romans and Christians AD 64: An Intergenerational Catechetical Experience of Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. He teaches New Testament and early Church history at Barry University, and he’s president of the Blessed Edmund Rice School for Pastoral Ministry. The book includes a fulsome foreword from no less a scholar than Joyce Salisbury, who wrote, some years ago, a well regarded study of Perpetua and Felicity.
I’ll post more as I read more. So far (as you might suspect) I’ve been mostly hanging around the tavern owned by the narrator’s family.
But I’ll violate no secrets. Here I say only that Dr. Molinari proposes an intriguing — and dramatically satisfying — answer to the perpetually vexing question: So what about Perpetua’s husband?
The book is lavishly illustrated in the style of the graphic novels my kids love to read. So it is surpassing cool. It’s a perfect style for combat with superhuman dream-gladiators and demonic dragons. Check it out: Climbing the Dragon’s Ladder: The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas.
Soundtrack for Your Patrickstics
Speaking of Celtic spirituality: My friend Bob Pegritz, the world’s premier Irish whistler, posted a rather jazzy session on YouTube. (Here’s his whole YouTube archive.) He blogs, too.
Those of you who are, right now, feverishly plagiarizing Darrell Pursiful’s course on Celtic Christianity for classes in your own parish can use Bob’s whistle for a soundtrack.
There’s nothing in the Irish Penitentials that says you shouldn’t. Is there, Darrell?