Homemade pasta, FREE Fr. Barron DVD set . . . UPDATED

UPDATE:  The $50 prize is now gone!  

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I posted last week about Arista Pasta’s kickstarter.  A lovely Catholic homeschooling family of seven (the co-founder, Benjamin Herreid, is the brother of John Herreid, who designed my book’s cover, and the other brother of Bill Herreid, who is married to my sister!) is selling delectable handmade pasta products made from local, sustainable ingredients at their farmer’s market.

They want very much to expand their production, become more self-reliant, and bring their exquisite food to a bigger audience.  But there are only 12 days to go, and they have a long ways to go to meet their goal.

So of course you’d throw a few bucks their way, right?

NO?  It’s okay, I understand.  It sounds like a worthy cause, but you just don’t have the money to spare, unless you get something back for it.

Of course they offer some of their wonderful products and other gifts to thank donors — and they now offer to ship their amazing food.  Last night, my husband and I feasted on their incredibly flavorful mushroom ravioli, which was bursting with juicy chunks of savory mushrooms and seasonings.  I’m serious, the whole house was filled with a fragrance that would bring a tear to the eye of the most hardened ascetic.  So with added shipping, now non-local donors can also enjoy their choice of extruded pasta or ravioli or homemade pestos.

Here’s my part:

I have three audiobooks of The Sinner’s Guide to NFP to give away.

Just donate $25 or more to Arista Pasta, and note on your Kickstarter donation form that you would like the audiobook.  No raffle this time — just the first three donors of $25 or more get an audiobook (and, for extra shipping, Arista Pasta will also send you some of their lovely pasta products).  The audiobook is going for $17.46 on Amazon before shipping, so this is a nice deal.

For a larger donation, I have something really magnificent:  Catholicism: The New Evangelization by Fr. Robert Barron.

This is the four-disc set and the spiral bound study guide.  Going on Amazon for $41.00.  I only have one of these, so I will give it the first Kickstarter donor of $50 or more.  Again, that is in addition to the Kickstarter thank-you gift. Remember to note that you want the DVD set when you donate.

So if you were thinking of maybe giving the audiobook or Fr. Barron’s DVDs as a Christmas gift, this is a great chance to get these items plus help out a lovely family business.

When these prizes are claimed, they are gone, so act fast! I expect the Fr. Barron DVD set to go like *that.*  I will update this post at the top when the prizes start to be claimed.

Even if you have $5, please consider supporting Arista Pasta!

A few things

1.  Jen Fulwiler’s long-anticipated spiritual memoir, Something Other than God, is finally out! Well, it will be out in March, and available for pre-order in December. I love conversion stories, and Jen is such a clear, honest, compelling writer.  Here’s the cover, designed by John Herreid, who also did my book’s cover.

Can’t wait to read it!

 

2.  Rebecca Frech, author of Teaching in Your Tiara, has written a neat review of my book for Catholic Lane.  I was especially glad to hear from Rebecca because her immensely popular book is about homeschooling, and yet she does not treat me as a pariah for saying that, while some public schools are bad, there are others public schools where your kids can get a decent, non-soul-losing education.

I haven’t had a chance to read Rebecca’s book yet, but it sounds great — sensible and encouraging, funny and realistic.

 

3.  Something personal:  you may have noticed that I haven’t exactly written anything in a long, long time.  Just a lot of “Heyyyy, look at this neat thing” and “Boy, get a load of this.”  This is because I am feeling bad, and have been for a few months.  Can’t seem to shake it, and doing things like laundry and dishes are using up all the creative energy and ambition I can muster.  If you could say a quickie prayer for me (and my family, who of course bear the brunt of me feeling bad), I would be very grateful. Thanks.

Pope calls sick traditionalist Catholic, says criticism “important”

From Rorate Caeli:

Mario Palmaro, the Italian traditional Catholic writer and journalist who has authored many books and articles together with his friend Alessandro Gnocchi … told Italian daily Libero about [the telephone call from the Pope]. In September and October, after a very critical article published in Il Foglio, Palmaro and Gnocchi were summarily fired by Catholic broadcaster Radio Maria after several years of work in the station.

Palmaro says:

“Pope Francis told me that he was very close to me, having learned of my health condition, of my grave illness, and I clearly noticed his deep empathy, the attention for a person as such, beyond ideas and opinions, while I live through a time of trial and suffering.”

“I was astonished, amazed, above all moved: for me, as a Catholic, that which I was experiencing was one of the most beautiful experiences in my life. But I felt the duty to remind the Pope that I, together with Gnocchi, had expressed specific criticisms regarding his work, while I renewed my total fidelity [to him] as a son of the Church. The Pope almost did not let me finish the sentence, saying that he had understood that those criticisms had been made with love, and how important it had been for him to receive them.” [These words] “comforted me greatly.”

Read the rest here.

An unthinkable story of love

Devin Rose has written a harrowing account of their adoption story.  It begins,

Several years ago we adopted three children. We are no longer their parents. This is the story of what happened.

Everyone should read this.  Everyone.  It is so important.  It’s not only about adoption, it’s about making decisions in love.  God bless Devin and Katie and all of the children they love and care for.  I am so grateful to them for having the courage to express these dreadful truths so clearly.

 

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.