My Wild Week of Weading

So here are the books I have been chewing on this past week: The Power of Eight: Harnessing the Miraculous Energies of a Small Group to Heal Others, Your Life, and the World by Lynne McTaggart; Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse by Timothy P. Carney; and A Manual of Catholic Action by Monsignor Luigi Ciardi, published in 1935. I also read a popular work of fiction by a New York Times bestselling author that ended up being an advertisement for divorcing your husband if he doesn't make you happy and thinking of yourself as a doormat if you live to serve your family. I happily tossed that one in the library book return yesterday.

The Power of Eight is divided into two parts. I read through Chapter 4 in Part 1. So far it is all about the experiments that were conducted trying to show results from a group of people concentrating/praying on one intention.  I am not inclined to read the remaining 17 chapters to complete this part. I've got the idea, and what I am really looking for, the implementation, appears to be in the one chapter that comprises Part 2, "Creating Your Own Power of Eight Circle".  I want to read it with a Catholic lens and see if I can reach a deeper understanding of prayer from looking at it from McTaggart's perspective.


Alienated America: I got interested in this book after listening to a long interview with the author. I find the goal of restoring Christendom highly motivating, and so I am deeply interested in what makes communities thrive. Carney posits that those places that have strong community bonds through a shared culture believe they are living the American dream and therefore did not vote for Trump in the Republican primaries. His "Make America Great Again" mantra did not resonate with them. My take on that is that those communities have the basics of a medieval Christendom village via caring for each other through a shared religion, even if that religion is liberalism, as in the case of Chevy Chase, MD. The rest of the book looks at the communities that did vote for Trump and examines the actual circumstances of their daily lives that have brought them to see America as broken. It's not discussed, but I know that the American government worked to destroy the close-knit Catholic "ghettoes" in the 1960s. Also, Vatican II caused huge losses in Sunday Mass attendance. I'm still in the first chapter, but I did jump ahead and read some of Chapter 2, "Progress at a Price". Here is a tantalizing excerpt from that chapter. It's about the 1950s era and serves as background for exploring our current situation:

Good breadwinner jobs for white-collar and blue-collar men allowed 80 percent of wives with young children to stay at home.

America was fairly equal, economically, and inequality was shrinking. The average household was within striking distance of the top 10 percent of households, with income about 33 percent lower (these days the shortfall is about 60 percent).

That relative equality extended beyond the economic and into the social realm.

Marriage was the norm. Nearly 90 percent of all adults were married by age thirty in the mid-1950s. This norm applied roughly equally to both white-collar adults and working-class adults. Almost all babies were born to married couples. Ninety percent of al first births occurred after the parents' marriage (about one in nine of those infants was conceived before the marriage).

Wealthy Americans were a bit more likely to go to church than middle-class and poorer Americans, but that difference was shrinking. Religion was on the rise. "Ever since the nation's founding," religious historian Phillip Hammond would note, "a higher and higher proportion of Americans have affiliated with a church or synagogue--right through the 1950s."

"Churches and synagogues were packed," sociologist Robert Putnam would write decades later, "as more Americans worshiped together than only a few decades earlier, perhaps more than ever in American history."

I can't wait till I get to Chapter 7, "It's about Church: America's Indispensable Institution".

I've read the first two chapters of the Catholic Action book, "The Idea of Catholic Action" and "The Ends of Catholic Action". It's wonderful how clearly and logically the material is presented. I especially enjoy the papal quotes from letters and encyclicals like this one:

"It is clear that Catholic Action merits every favour and support, not only from bishops and priests, who know well that it is to us as the apple of our eye, but also from the heads and magistratures of any and of every State. And if it indeed shall rejoice in this common support, it will certainly issue into a magnificent abundance of fruit for Catholic peoples, and, by reawakening the religious sentiment in souls, will forward not a little civil prosperity as well" (Letter to Cardinal Bertram).

Pope Pius XI is simply stating that Catholic Action benefits the State as well, as it works to restore all things in Christ, which idea is really the unifying element of the three books I am reading this week.