It was happening night after night; my husband or I would decide
after the children were in bed to “do a quick email check.” The other
would join in and before we knew it half an hour had passed and all we
had done was give into the temptation to idle curiosity and lose
ourselves in distraction.
We have fought this vice our whole lives—distraction, the bane of a
recollected life. It pulls one from one thing to the next, never
allowing a task to be completed well, never giving one time just to
think. The philosopher Dietrich Von Hildebrand in his book Transformation in Christ described
distraction as the “exact antithesis to recollection” and “a state of
being dragged along from one object to another, never touching any of
them by superficially” (Ch. 6). The time sap of social media and the
gossip-ridden sites of the internet are just another symptom of this
fallen human state, one that we came into when we first gave into the
vice of curiosity.
What is Von Hildebrand’s solution to being distracted? Learn how to become recollected.
Read the rest at the National Catholic Register...
Confessions of a Catholic Mom and Philosopher's Wife
Friday, August 18, 2017
Sunday, July 30, 2017
NCRegister: "Inloveness," Virtue, and NFP
The professor and I co-wrote this one:
We began to fall in love in the early spring during college.
The chemistry was quite obvious. During the summer before we got engaged, we read A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken, in which he tells the story of the deep “inloveness” between himself and his wife, Davy.
We, too, like Davy and Sheldon, wanted to preserve and deepen our inloveness. In our marriage, our use of natural family planning, with all of its struggles and suffering, plus the joy of our children, has been a key instrument in deepening our inloveness; it has aided our growth in virtue...
Read the rest at the National Catholic Register...
We began to fall in love in the early spring during college.
The chemistry was quite obvious. During the summer before we got engaged, we read A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken, in which he tells the story of the deep “inloveness” between himself and his wife, Davy.
We, too, like Davy and Sheldon, wanted to preserve and deepen our inloveness. In our marriage, our use of natural family planning, with all of its struggles and suffering, plus the joy of our children, has been a key instrument in deepening our inloveness; it has aided our growth in virtue...
Read the rest at the National Catholic Register...
Saturday, July 29, 2017
NCRegister Blog: 15 Suggestions for Literature That Will Feed Your Soul
A couple of months ago I explained why
fellow mothers in my situation in life (lots of little kids, lots of
mundane tasks) should make an effort to exercise their brains through
reading books on a regular basis. And while I was targeting moms in that
post, all Christians need to take seriously the call to form our minds
and seek truth. Yet, most of us do not realize the immense value we can
draw from reading good literature in the form of novels and short
stories.
I have always been a lover of novel reading, but as my reading has been largely self-directed I have always had trouble choosing good books to read. I came across a list of novels compiled by John Senior, a great professor of the humanities, which he called “the Good Books List” in the appendix of his book The Death of Christian Culture, and it is from this list that I have drawn most of my reading choices of late. Through reading these good books I have been slowly discovering how a novel forms one’s moral sense by allowing a reader to enter into various scenarios and seeing how characters are affected by those choices. This is helpful because we can learn so much about sin and the human condition through our imaginations to help us form our consciences without muddying our souls.
Read the rest at the National Catholic Register...
I have always been a lover of novel reading, but as my reading has been largely self-directed I have always had trouble choosing good books to read. I came across a list of novels compiled by John Senior, a great professor of the humanities, which he called “the Good Books List” in the appendix of his book The Death of Christian Culture, and it is from this list that I have drawn most of my reading choices of late. Through reading these good books I have been slowly discovering how a novel forms one’s moral sense by allowing a reader to enter into various scenarios and seeing how characters are affected by those choices. This is helpful because we can learn so much about sin and the human condition through our imaginations to help us form our consciences without muddying our souls.
Read the rest at the National Catholic Register...
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