Around St Blog's: July 2009 Archives

Bishop Hubbard supports Cap and Trade.

I guess he thinks upstate NY families don't need to be able to pay their heating bills.

Making Babies: A Very Different Look at Natural Family Planning

But another reason for NFP's allegedly high success rate is that couples who use it are prepared to welcome children and so don't blame NFP for unexpected pregnancies. Four of my own five children came the NFP way -- that is, totally unexpectedly -- and that's a good thing, because without them bouncing in as surprises, excuses to delay (the sort of excuses one might hear from a recruit in parachute training) might have gone on for a very long time. As it is, in a mere matter of ten years, my wife and I assembled a complete basketball team. And if menopause doesn't strike my wife soon, who knows what sort of team we might assemble.
Rather than bite one's nails to the quick at the prospect of baby number ten -- which, if one marries in one's early 20s and practices NFP, is a definite possibility -- we should encourage the attitude of the more the merrier, which is a far more attractive case to make than all the goo-goo language about how NFP helps couples "communicate" and about the joy of charting temperatures and discharges and plotting one's conjugal acts as a captain might chart a course for his ship.

The Anchoress - A Must Read Now!

| | Comments (0)

Caritas in Veritate, by B-16 & Pixar

The Pixar short is adorable and the tie-in to the new encyclical is inspiring brings tears to my eyes (yeah, a little inspiration goes a long way with me, alright?)

There's also a great round-up of commentary on Caritas in Veritate.

So, you don't want to be a DB?

| | Comments (0)

Let Mr. Kellemeyer show you how it's done:

For instance, I began to realize that the assertion, “I can have sex without wanting a child” was logically absurd. It’s like saying, “I can eat ice cream all day without wanting to get fat.” Sure, you can. But what does your "want" have to do with it? The biological reality was going to hit you either way.

I thought it was a good analogy, but I quickly discovered a flaw. Having sex was different from eating cupcakes all day. Every time I ate a cupcake, I added calories to my body. Every time. But it is not the case that every act of sex creates a child. The analogy wasn’t perfect.

I gnawed on that for awhile.

And I began to see… something

Something I didn’t expect.

Ultimately, it was this point - the point that sex does not always create children – that converted me back to the Faith.

This is what I saw.

Precisely because sex does not always create children, yet it always holds the promise of creating children, that sex stands for something greater than itself. Because sex is designed to produce children, yet does not always produce them, the act is transformed from a simple biological action into… there was no other word for it… poetry.

Because sex contains not a hard reality, but only a future promise, it becomes a promise, the promise of the man to the woman "I will be with you always, even if this does produce that for which it is designed."

And by this act, the man gives himself not just to the woman, he gives himself primarily to the not-yet-conceived child.

It was the poetic biology of the thing that snared me.

In the end, Ladies, real men are so much more appealing than punks who think women are good for one thing only.

http://www.americanpapist.com/2009/07/photo-archbishop-dolan-prays-at-ground.html#links


Di Fattura Caslinga: Pansy's Etsy Shop
The Sleepy Mommy Shoppe: Stuff we Like
(Disclaimer: We aren't being compensated to like this stuff.
Any loose change in referral fees goes to the Feed Pansy's Ravenous Teens Fund.)


Pansy and Peony: The Two Sleepy Mommies



Archives