Reading for Conversion II

I've got a carrot cake in the oven, so I thought I would try to blast out a post, lest I fall off the blogging wagon once more.

I think my dad may be making progress towards conversion. Thursday at breakfast he told me that he had run into the word "sentient" and that it had been a long time since he had seen it. I thought I knew the definition but wasn't sure, so I googled it right then. I had it wrong. This is what the dictionary said:

able to see or feel things through the sensesMan is a sentient being.There was no sign of any sentient life or activity.

I asked him where he read it, and he told me that it was used in the physics book he is reading, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.   The book qualifies as a tome:

Definition of tome in English:

noun

chiefly humorous

A book, especially a large, heavy, scholarly one:a weighty tome

The Amazon description pegs its weight at 4 lbs.  And it is definitely scholarly.  My experience of it with Dad has indeed been "chiefly humorous."  When he was doing the prep for a colonoscopy last month--the one where you drink the gallon of nasty stuff, and it gives you death by diarrhea--to save energy he parked himself on the toilet to await the process completion.  As he finished each glass of the Liquid Plumber, he would call me for a refill.  The first time I paused before entering and asked him to please cover himself with something.   He has no discernible sense of modesty.  He said, "Ok.  I'm ready."  I walked in to find him butt naked except for the strategically place Road to Reality.  Then yesterday he had a doctor's appointment.  He can't dress himself because of his arthritis, although he does manage to put on his underwear.  Other than his boxers, his daily attire is his robe.  So when he has to wear real clothes, I dress him.  I entered his room to get him ready and found him waiting for me: sitting on the foot of the bed in his boxers, legs crossed, reading Road to Reality.  He looked so cute!

Boy, did I digress or what?  Back to "sentient."  I read aloud the paragraph with "sentient" in it.  I skimmed through some other parts too, trying to figure out if the book was anti-religion.  I hit upon this one paragraph that included a sentence stating that science without morals was a bad thing.  SCORE!  I was so happy!   I read that sentence aloud, and we discussed it briefly in the light of the book we recently finished, A Song for Nagasaki.  Dad agreed with me.  So now I know that Dad and I have something to build upon.

I mentioned that I missed having a read-aloud book going, and Mom and Dad both agreed that they missed it too.  I asked Dad what he wanted me to read next.  He asked for something about Alaska.  We talked about Jack London and The Call of the Wild and also London's book The Sea Wolf, which we had discussed when I read it in the sixth grade.  Strange to think about us still discussing books 43 years later.  I had been planning on reading With God in Russia to them to continue the Catholic in WWII theme but didn't know if choosing only Catholic books would wear thin with Dad.  That's why I asked him what he would like to read next.  So I guess we'll go to Alaska and maybe then slide over to Russia.  I want to read the companion book to With God in Russia also.  It's called He Leadeth Me.

****

The carrot cake's done, and I need to make the frosting.

A most blessed Feast of Christ the King to you all!

Reading for Conversion and A New "Bells of Nagasaki" Movie

I have been reading A Song for Nagasaki (SFN) to my mom and dad while they eat breakfast and lunch.  We're almost finished.

It's my second effort at communicating Catholicism to them in the most accessible way I know.  My mom converted a couple of years ago while still in the rehab hospital after her stroke; my dad is agnostic.  

First we read The Shadow of His Wings (SHW).  Both books are set during World War II.  This theme as a backdrop is helpful, since they can identify with it well, having both been born in 1933.  It has made it easier to have discussions because of their personal memories of events.

The two books are ideal conversion tools for my dad because of his great respect for education, which is emphasized in both books, and science in particular, which is a main theme in SFN.  It does an excellent job of debunking the idea that science is in conflict with religion, a matter of utmost importance with my dad.  The idea that a truly Catholic priestly formation includes serious study of philosophy and logic and that a priest can be both supremely masculine and celibate, as modeled by Fr. Goldmann in SHW, also got my dad's attention.

My mother thoroughly enjoyed SHW, often excitedly interjecting some comment that I guess could be considered as the equivalent of an "Amen!".  Father Goldmann's many escapes from death, but especially any mention of Sister Solana May's interventions, elicited these responses from her.  With SFN, she is entranced by Dr. Nagai's wife, Midori, and fretted about what had happened to her after the A-bomb was dropped.  Midori is an excellent role model for Catholic wives, and I think her way of handling difficulties was a revelation to my mom.

The fact that a movie was made in 1950, based on Takashi Nagai's Bells for Nagasaki, was mentioned several times in SFN.  This sent me scurrying to the internet to see if I could find it.  I will have to look again, because in my search results was the exciting news that a new movie is being released in English, based on Bells for Nagasaki.  The UK release date is Nov. 15, and it is called, All that Remains.  Here is a page about the filmmakers and a promo video of the film. I couldn't find any information on when it will be available in the US.

Lightning Bolt: Thunder Thighs are Part of God's Plan for Women

Titian’s  tribute to feminine beauty, the fleshy "Flora."

Those jiggly thighs you've been grieving over are actually storehouses of omega-3 fatty acid DHA for optimal development of your baby's brain during pregnancy.

That's right!  Rejoice my sisters! 

Quit fighting your body's God-given purpose: Stop buying into the globalists' media idea that women should be rail thin to be attractive.  Read more about how women's fat is stored and used differently than men's HERE.

And before you decide to follow the modernists' advice to finish college and "see the world" before you marry, you might consider that it's possible that God had something else in mind.  "Frequent and early" pregnancy may help prevent endometriosis.  This treatment was even suggested by a gynecologist to a young friend of mine who already has Stage 2 endometriosis.  So it is not just for prevention, and it's not just some crazy internet advice.  

We are wonderfully and fearfully made to conceive and nurture children.

There's beauty in that fat.

Boys Will Be Boys, But Why?

.

I spent the most enjoyable and educational interlude the other day listening to a talk by writing expert Andrew Pudewa on the differences between boys and girls.  It's called, "Teaching Boys and Other Kids Who Would Rather be Playing in Forts".

After raising a boy and a girl and homeschooling them from kindergarten through high school, you would think that I would already know these things, but I didn't.  Well, I knew how the differences were expressed.   I knew the problems they caused.  What I didn't know were the underlying reasons for them.  Now I know that they are physically different in the way they see, hear, and the way their bodies react to stress.

Pudewa bases his 2009 talk on the work of Dr. Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph. D., the author of  Why Gender Matters, (2005) Boys Adrift, (2007) and Girls on the Edge, (2010).  I am ordering the two most recent ones and will publish reviews here on my blog.  Some of the information in the talk has been updated with new research.  Go HERE for Dr. Sax's explanation.

The talk was so good I listened to it two times.  The second time I played it on my iPhone for my husband and daughter to hear as we blazed down I-10 on Saturday to attend an engagement party.  I enjoyed it just as much the second time.  And it was FREE.  You just can't beat that with a stick.  Unless you're a boy.  They can beat just about anything with a stick.  That I learned when my boy was about 18 months old.  He gleefully made music one day by whacking the ivory off the edges of most of  our piano's keys.

Go to Circe Institute's Free Audio Library and scroll to the bottom for the "Teaching Boys" talk.  Don't delay.  Apparently these talks are rotated regularly.

The Truth of Beauty and Our Health

I read an article yesterday called "The Truth of Beauty: Educating the Moral Imagination".  It was written by Benjamin G. Lockerd and gave me lots to think about.  Particularly,  I spent a great deal of time pondering this excerpt:

St. Thomas Aquinas similarly argued that beautiful things have integrity, an integration of separate parts, as well as proportion and harmony (which seems to me to be another word for integrity or wholeness, since harmony is a resolution of different elements). Aquinas also points out that the true experience of beauty is not only sensory but intellectual—that it is a kind of knowing. Perhaps he was the first to make this distinction between beauty, which has this cognitive element interfused with sensory experience, and simple physical pleasure, which is exclusively sensory. This is another way of saying that beauty has to do with truth, not just with entertainment. St. Thomas wisely admits, however, that the term “beauty” is difficult to define and has different senses when applied to different things.

What Christianity added to the ideas of the ancient philosophers on this topic was the assurance that God had created the universe in such a way that it was inherently meaningful. According to the Christian view, everything in the world is a creature of God and a reflection of one part of His infinite goodness. The universe itself is the ultimate work of art, exhibiting to an astonishing degree that integration of parts within the whole. Thus the beautiful orderliness of the world is itself a reflection of God and a proof of His existence.

This excerpt stood out for me because I had been thinking about how the brain is affected by seemingly unrelated parts of the body.  I related it to things I have been reading about circumcision and gut bacteria.  In the case of circumcision, I read about MRI results of a baby boy who was circumcised.  The tests were run before the circumcision, during it, and afterwards:  

A neurologist who saw the results postulated that the data indicated that circumcision affected most intensely the portions of the victim's brain associated with reasoning, perception and emotions. Follow up tests on the infant one day, one week and one month after the surgery indicated that the child's brain never returned to its baseline configuration. In other words, the evidence generated by this research indicated that the brain of the circumcised infant was permanently changed by the surgery.

In the case of the gut bacteria, I listened to a talk on NPR about research conducted on rats and probiotics.  A control group was fed the standard rat chow for a period of time, then the individual rats were each dropped into water.  Each rat chow rat swam for five minutes and then gave up.  Another group was fed a probiotic-laced broth.  When they were dropped into the bucket, they kept swimming and did not give up.  The scientists removed them from the water after seven minutes, I believe, still swimming vigorously.  Tests were done on both groups to determine the level of stress hormones that were released during the rats' time in the water.  The rat chow rats had high levels of stress.  The probiotic rats did not.  Their brains had released GABA, a relaxing neurotransmitter.  So then the scientists cut the vagus nerve on the probiotic rats and repeated the test.  They swam for five minutes and gave up and had high levels of stress hormones, just like the rat chow rats.  Of course, this research was on rats, not humans, but my own experience with healing the gut and taking probiotics and GABA leads me to believe the same would be true in humans.

Clearly, there is a wholeness, an integrity, to our bodies that has not been being considered by standard Western medicine.  We are wonderfully and fearfully made.  Our bodies are beautiful, in the image of our Creator, and we cannot know the truth of them without considering the body as a functioning whole.  Modern medicine is all about specialties--looking at our bodies as a jumble of parts.  That's why modern medicine has been such a failure.  It denies the beautiful and the true.  It denies God's role in our creation and deifies "Science" instead.  We need to recover a truly Catholic idea of medicine.  

Will You Circumcise?

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision: but faith that worketh by charity. Galatians 5:6

I am learning a lot from Emma's research into how she wants to parent.  One of the subjects she studied and discussed with me was circumcision.  Although I was already against it for the simple fact that God must have designed boys' bodies the way he did for a good reason, her research turned up a whole slew of medical reasons not to circumcise.  An important distinction must be made at the outset, though.  What passes for circumcision these days is a drastic surgery and can even be deadly.  It is not what God prescribed for the Jews of the Old Testament.

I think this is an important subject for women to study.  Even if you are already against it, you will be able to defend your decision in a well-informed manner and share the information with other women in your sphere of influence.  Future grandmas, you too can be a source of information.  For Catholics, "Catholics Against Circumcision"  is a good start.  Particularly troubling for me was their page titled, "Human Foreskins Sold for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research, Cloning, and the Creation of Chimeras (Animal/Human Hybrids)".   This page from drmomma.org, "Are You Fully Informed?" provides an array of links and book titles for further study. 

Too Much Information

One of the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin's opera, Prince Igor, captivated Emma for a long time, though she knew nothing of the story. She just enjoyed the music so much that she would play it every day on the piano. Because she was so enamored of it, I decided that I would play the song, "Stranger in Paradise" for her from the musical, Kismet, which is based on the theme that she was playing. I thought that it would be good for her to learn how this theme had been used in a popular song. I remembered my college music appreciation professor doing the same thing with some other classical pieces.

Emma listened, and as she listened her face became somewhat troubled. Then she walked away.

A few days later she started to play the Prince Igor piece on the piano but stopped after only a few measures. "It's ruined," she whispered from the piano bench.

"What's wrong?" I asked, confused.

"I used to see horses and a mysterious oriental court and wonder about what happened to Prince Igor whenever I played this. . ." she explained wistfully. "Now it's all gone."

The enchantment destroyed, she never played it again.

NINE MONTHS LATER

This story flooded back to my memory as I was reading Life is a Miracle by Wendell Berry. It is one that Emma is reading for school. Mr. Berry was talking about how most scientists practice reductionism, the method of analyzing things down to their tiniest components. They do this without first determining whether it would be a good thing to do, proceeding as if knowledge for its own sake is always good. Mr. Berry says that man thrives on mystery, and knowing everything about something not only destroys mystery, it can lead to even worse consequences. Mr. Berry says,

"For quite a while it has been possible for a free and thoughtful person to see that to treat life as mechanical or predictable or understandable is to reduce it. Now, almost suddenly, it is becoming clear that to reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever "model" we use) is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale.

This is to give up on life, to carry it beyond change and redemption and to increase the proximity of despair."

The incident with the music from Prince Igor helped me understand the point the author was making. By giving Emma the information about how Prince Igor had been used in a pop song, I stole the mystery of it from her. Looking back, I see how presumptuous of me it was to assume that I could enrich her experience in that way, when I had no clue what her experience was. It made me wonder how much we lose every day by being bombarded with the popular culture.

How fragile are the pictures that we paint on the canvas of our minds!


Artwork: Via Turgenev and Russian Music, "Prince Igor takes leave from Yaroslavna before departing on his campaign against the Polovtsy," an illustration by James Mayhew.

Save the Humans: Use DDT to Fight Malaria

I received the latest Access to Energy newsletters the other day. Written and published by Dr. Arthur B. Robinson, they give me insight into many science topics that I normally would not read about.

One of these topics is the use of DDT to combat malaria. I was a little surprised that Dr. Robinson favored its use. I generally think pesticides are bad and try to buy organic food when I can. DDT, in particular, had a horrible association in my mind with damaging bird eggs. I don't know where that idea came from, possibly My Weekly Reader when I was in elementary school. Whatever the source of my information was, it failed to impress upon me how many human lives were saved by DDT. Access to Energy did that. I did some other reading, and I found out that the kind of spraying that is done for malaria is very restricted and is done inside the home, not outdoors.

"The same organization and people that demand an end to our use of coal, oil, and natural gas, have deliberately killed tens of millions of people--mostly children--in sub-Saharan Africa and other underdeveloped regions. After DDT was used to eradicate malaria in the developed world, it was denied to the underdeveloped countries--just as it was beginning to eradicate malaria there," Dr. Robinson said.

He was responding to an article in a May 2009 issue of The Wall Street Journal that reported the World Health Organization's (WHO) reversal of its 2006 decision to endorse DDT's use. The 2006 decision reversed a 25-year ban on DDT. During the 25-year ban, the WSJ article says that there were 50 million deaths from malaria.

Environmentalists like Medha Chandra of Pesticide Action Network say that new, safer, and more effective methods of fighting malaria are now available. What's the first one she lists? Mosquito netting for beds. Hmmm. I wouldn't describe mosquito netting as new, and I wonder if Chandra is saying that it is safer for the environment or the people. It certainly can't be more effective than DDT. Of course the netting must be used in conjunction with other methods, but from what I read, nothing new has been developed that is as effective as DDT. When that true solution comes, I will wholeheartedly endorse it, but sacrificing human lives in the meantime is not acceptable--unless you're a career environmentalist.

Obviously, career environmentalists have different priorities than people who value human life. I have thought about the similarities between environmentalists and pro-abortionists in the past. I did a little searching and found the connection I was looking for. This post on the Wintery Knight blog tells what the environmentalists' goals are and lists solid quotations for proof.