Category: Uncategorized

Wow! China “eases” one-child policy

I’ve been hearing for years that this was possible, but I didn’t expect to see it:  the Chinese government will now “allow” some of its citizens to bear up to two children.

From Reuters:

Couples in which one parent is an only child will now be able to have a second child, one of the highlights of a sweeping raft of reforms announced three days after the ruling Communist Party ended a meeting that mapped out policy for the next decade.

Besides being an outrageous assault on human dignity, the government’s decades-long one child policy has led to economic disaster, with no where near enough young people to support and care for aging parents, or to keep the economy in general growing.

Worse, because of a cultural preference for boys, baby girls are aborted or abandoned at a horrifying rate. According to the Reuters article,  “About 118 boys are born for every 100 girls, against a global average of 103-107 boys per 100 girls.”  In a country with a population of 1.354 billion, that is a lot of dead baby girls.

And of course there are so many horror stories of women being legally beaten, tortured and forcibly aborted for the crime of getting pregnant twice.   I know you have seen them; I can’t bring myself to search for them now.

I hope and pray that we will see fewer of these stories, although I am sure that any change will be small and gradual.  What a hellish perversion of governance the one-child policy has been.

 

Gut yontiff, Pontiff!

That’s what the Jewish Daily Forward can say to Pope Francis, because they just named him one of the 50 most influential Jews in the United States.  (Apparently they traditionally choose two non-Jewish candidates who show “respect and an understanding of Jewish culture”).

Of course, they could just as easily have chosen Benedict XVI

 

or John Paul II

Or Pope Paul VI

or Pope John XXIII

and of course Pope Pius XII.

So next time you meet the pope and want to wish him “happy holidays,” go ahead and sing out, “Gut Yontiff, Pontiff!”  He’s the Pope.  He’ll get it.

My interview with JoAnna Wahlund at Catholic Stand

JoAnna Wahlund asked some killer questions.  Here’s how the interview ends:

Are you and your family being pursued by albino monk assassins dispatched by the “NFP-Is-A-Heresy” Cabal?

Yeah, but I reminded them that self flagellation and the wearing of the cilice barely registers as suffering when you compare it with trying to figure out a postpartum chart. Ba bing!

So much fun.  Click here to read the rest.

I have been flogging my brain all day

for something to write about.  So far, this is what I got:

Just in case plain old Facebook wasn’t utterly destroying your productivity

. . . now we have What Would I Say? — the app that sifts through your old Facebook statuses and comments, scrumbles them around, and makes them into new statuses which sound almost human, and almost just like you.

A couple of my favorites from SomechopBot (“Somechop” is my Facebook name because never mind):

“Benny has tucked her halfeaten apple inside my shirt and her hand in a bona fide theologian!”

“Update he’s lost four new tires, and a skirt, two separate solutions, if possible.”

“We’re just too stupid tired”

“I too have children, we do the corrections I ask for, but never overreact, that’s me.”

“Im just trying to persuade us NOT to make fake blood”

 

Honestly, I laughed even harder when I plugged in my husband’s Facebook statuses.  It sounds just like him having an angry fever.

“No one but a giant, mustached man in a serious argument against sobriety.”

“At 13, he was apprenticed to kill some maggots.”

“The worst To be sure, if Herman Cain were the second helping on potato chips? Daddy Supper.”

“Killed 97 zombies, not the next best day in some cases like the opposite of deodorant.”

“Wonderpets, what do not support the current Pope.”

“I need to find a 2002 Taurus station wagon and a shoot out”

Aw, go ahead, try it.  All the cool kids are doing it, somewhat with a brittle and sticky anniversary, anyway.

Sex is about lovers, not about sex

People need to hear this more.  Will Duquette (are you reading Will Duquette?  You should be!) says

It is true that the first stages of Eros are like shooting the rapids on a river: exciting and scary, and great fun, especially if you’re an adrenalin junky. But mature Eros is that like that same river, downstream: wide and deep, flowing strongly, deeply peaceful but in no way static or stagnant.

Oh, yes: and sometimes there’s sex involved, and it gets better over time, especially when you get over the need for thrills. No, really. The sex is supposed to be about the two of you, not about the sex, and it’s difficult to get there if you’re focussed on the thrills.

Read the rest (it’s short!).  Lots to ponder here.

 

Mother to one, mother to all

In-between shifts, social worker breastfeeds babies in Zamboanga evac center

MANILA – For literally giving all she can, Evalinda Jimeno, a social worker of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), has earned the admiration of evacuees sheltered at the Joaquin F. Enriquez Sports Complex in Zamboanga City.

According to the DSWD, Jimeno was hailed by the refugees evacuated from the chaos and violence wrought by an ongoing standoff between the military and a faction of the Moro National Liberation Front, when she breastfed a hungry baby of one of the evacuees.

Over the past week, she has breastfed far more than one child, and far more than her own. Jimeno, a social worker of Zamboanga Sibugay has been breastfeeding in-between her official hours tasked with registering evacuees for the family access card.

(read more)

Once you become a mother,  you become everybody’s mother.  Where have I seen that happen before?  Ah yes –

For more images of Mary nursing baby (or toddler!) Jesus, see here.

GAH!!!!!!

Uh, I mean, uh, um, OHHHHH, how beautiful is the body of woman in all her mystery!  Ovulation filmed in close-up for the first time (this is in 2008).

BTW, this would totally be me, in the middle of having surgery to have my uterus removed, and still squeezing out another egg just in case, because you never, never know.

I am so tired.

He’s #1! *sob* He’s #1!!

Wellity, wellity, wellity.

Look who’s the number one bestseller in Catholicism (and a number of other categories) on Amazon with Saints and Social Justice:  A Guide to Changing the World.  BRANDON VOGT, the young upstart!  And all because

(a) he had the wonderful idea of putting together a book about what Catholic social justice really means, and the saints who lived it; and
(b) he’s introducing the e-book for only $3.19.

Brandon says on his blog:

[A]s a Protestant college-student bent on changing the world, I discovered these teachings [about Catholic social teaching] and they blew me away. I read the relevant encyclicals, studied the principles, and saw them lived out in people like Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and Dorothy Day. They ended up playing a crucial role in my conversion to Catholicism.

Yet since becoming Catholic, I’ve discovered just how controversial Catholic social teaching can be. Whenever I express excitement about these teachings I’m often met with nervous glances or heavy sighs. Thanks to years of distortion and confusion, many Catholics literally cringe at their mention.

Oh, yes.

The book aims to reclaim Catholic social teaching and unveil it through the lives of the saints. It’s framed using the seven major themes of Catholic social teaching, as defined by the U.S. bishops, and for each theme I highlight two saints who especially embodied it.

The resulting book is a narrative packed with stories, from those saints and others in the sidebars, of people putting these teachings into action.

My hope is that the book imitates stained glass windows throughout the world, using the saints as conduits of light, allowing these brilliant social teachings to shine through them with new vividness, splendor, and truth.

Brandon Vogt has a special talent for putting his finger right on the question that people are asking right now, and answering it in a clear, profound, accessible way.

I wants one. I will be the first to admit that I am confused about what social justice really means, and I definitely need an upgrade on my education on the saints, beyond what I learned in 57 Saints for Girls and Boys. You can pre-order the e-book for a limited time for $3.19.  Before long, you will have to pay a normal old reasonable price of $9.99.  My goodness, you have $3.19.  Get it while it’s crazy cheap!

 

My interview with Ignitum Today

Great interview with Bonnie Engstrom of Ignitum Today is up today.  An excerpt:

You talk a lot about how you and Damien have grown and overcome a lot of the struggles you had early on in your marriage. Was here a specific turning point for you? A moment where you said, “Aha! So this is what God wants me to do/say/understand!” If so, when was that moment, and what precipitated it?

No one specific moment, no.  There were several “believe so that you may understand” moments, though — when we just decided we were going to grit our teeth and do our best to live with impossible situations . . .  and then they cleared up in unexpected ways.  It was a lot easier to see God’s gentleness and mercy after we had decided to bow to His law.

We also constantly work on making the shift from “my needs vs. your needs” to “what’s best for our marriage and family?”

I think that even when people do have startling, revolutionary epiphanies in their lives, they usually still have to follow up with a long, gradual process of putting that epiphany into practice.

Read the rest here.