Yet again, lost the last batch (are mom and dad snacking on them? It seems likely). New batch hatched this morning — I almost saw it, I must have missed them by about five minutes.
I couldn’t resist commenting on Mark’s noticing protesters about trained chickens. And indulging in a moment of schadenfreude in learning via Google that Buckey Egg Farm owner might be jailed for contempt — although further reading indicates jail time probably won’t happen for this scoundrel.
Karen Marie Knapp, who saw much more of the Bishop’s conference than I could hear, tells me that when the motion (for episcopal penance) was reintroduced, that the bishops did agree to a day of fasting and abstinence in reparation for their faults and set the date as August 14.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re doing that much. But do the math, this is 1/270th of the nine months of penance that Abp. Flores proposed.
While I’m not a moral theologian, and I don’t know how to quantify penance, it seems to me that a single day of fasting fails to address the gravity of the bishops’ failure and complicity in this terrible scandal.
Anne Wilson notes a Washington Post article on “alingual” children.
All I can say is: God have mercy.
No, I can say one more thing: this is not limited to children of immigrants. I have witnessed this myself. The Children of Television are not all the children of immigrants.
I cannot comprehend this. I feel like I spend so little time talking with my children, yet the numbers show that I’m actually way ahead of the national curve, and they are all wonderfully expressive and verbal. (Giving us the “problem” of getting them to stop talking sometimes …)
We have achieved free-swimming status and survived it for the last day! Three cheers for the smallest small fry at the Frey house!
Following a link from Doug’s blog, I find RazorMouth and the essay Victory by Infiltration or Isolation? (“Why the impulse to split is wrong and why staying the course is right”) by P. Andrew Sandlin. I would normally take this as encouragement to stay and fight the good fight within the Episcopal church regarding our current struggles with the “human sexuality” question and (even more profoundly) the wholesale abandonment of the faith in any recognizable form in exchange for Spongian/Jesus Seminar secularist mushiness.
On the other hand, I’m also reading Steve Ray’s book, Upon this Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the Early Church. And it occurs to me: Sandlin’s essay is practically a Catholic apologetic tract. I mean, if it’s a Bad Thing™ to leave and start a new church rather than stay and fight for reform, shouldn’t we apply that same logic to the efforts of Martin Luther and John Calvin?
Still alive; still in the “wriggler” phase. Hopefully, they’ll be freeswimming in a day or two (and not simply become Protein Pills™ for mom and dad).
The new eggs have hatched. “This time for sure!”
You know, you’d think that after seven years of fatherhood (and four children!) that I’d have understood this a little bit before now.
But it’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day struggles, that you forget what a gift your children are. And just how much grace we can receive through them.
But today: I am, face it, a grump. I am tired, I am feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders from what I haven’t gotten done at work and at home, and I have more self-pity about this than I know what to do with.
And Andrew, bless him, knows nothing of this. He just knows that Daddy is home. And he laughs, a pure bubbling laugh to cure what ails ya. And smiles at me with his million-dollar smile that says I am full of joy and I love you, Daddy even though it comes out more like “HA-ha! A goo ga ga SQUEAK! HA-ha!”
(After that, how can I mind cleaning the baby food off of his face?)
This is what Grace looks like, transmitted through a 12-month old.
Not that I always agree with everything Orson Scott Card writes, but he nailed it perfectly with Why We Should Not Rebuild on the Site of the World Trade Center :
The place where six thousand people were slaughtered all at once for no other crime than being at work in an American skyscraper is no longer just real estate.
It is holy ground.
…
Whether we like it or not, that pile of debris is their grave. And I, for one, believe it would be wrong to haul the entire thing away and dispose of it as landfill.
…
One of the reasons our enemies who did this thing despise us is because they believe we value making money more than we care about anything else. More than we care about each other. More than we care about God.
To erect a commercial building on the site of the two towers, to continue to make money there, would, I believe, prove that our enemies were right about us. [Emphasis mine]
Too bad this is advice unheeded.
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