When Eight Days Were Fulfilled

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“When eight days were fulfilled for the circumcision of the child, his name was called Jesus, which was given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” Luke 2:21

Back in grade school, I flipped through a highly modernized version of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, and came across this definition of “Sunday”: “In Christian countries, the day of the football game.” While I imagine my sons and I will take in a few downs together some time today, observing Christmas season its full duration is a virtue, brimming with goods “internal to the practice.” Read more

On Ontology and Organizations Voluntary

In his column, which is published in many Catholic diocesan newspapers around the U.S., this week, George Weigel, who is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., criticizes Catholic candidates who are running for the presidency when they appear to bracket their Christianity “when they put on their hats as public servants.”

Specifically, Weigel writes, “when a candidate for public office avers that ‘membership in the faith community’ is deeply personal or a matter of ‘my relationship with Jesus’ then suggests that being a Catholic Christian is a compartment of life that can be hermetically sealed off from first principles of justice (abortion, euthanasia, and embryo-destructive stem-cell research), we’re dealing with a confused camper. One might even say, it’s a camper with a severe identity crisis.” Read more

Eating Locally

I recently finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, a captivating story of her family’s efforts to eat locally for an entire year. From one spring to the next, everything they consumed was either grown in their own modest garden or purchased from farmers’ markets or dairies or butchers in their rural county in southwest Virginia (though they did make a few exceptions for staples like olive oil, spices, and fair trade organic coffee).

This is the kind of book that could get all preachy and high-minded, making the reader feel bad for being such a promiscuous eater, but Kingsolver is too good a writer for that. She simply chronicles her family’s triumphs and failures; their joys and frustrations. As she puts it, this is the story of what they learned, or didn’t; what they ate, or couldn’t; and how the family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where they worked, loved their neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air (p. 20). Read more