Peony Moss: December 2009 Archives

Neuroplasticity? The Church was way ahead of the curve on that one, too:

The beginning of a New Year—and a new decade—is an an excellent time to try something new. As you make your list of resolutions and goals I want to recommend adding a simply [sic] four step process that could transform your life by, quite literally, changing your mind.

After reading the entire post the vast majority of readers will snicker at such a hyperbolic claim and never implement the method I outline. A smaller number will consider the advice intriguing, my assertion only a slight exaggeration, but will also never implement the method. A tiny minority, however, will recognize the genius behind the process and apply it to their own life. This group will later say that my claim was an understatement.

Right now, my vision for 2010 involves embroidery, paint, and training my brain to crave cleanliness and order. This could fit right in with that....

Blah blah Internets blah blah easily distracted changing the way we think ooo linky to Amazon blah blah hold on let's read this more carefully (emphasis added):

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

...In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”

Cf. Leisure: The Basis of Culture acedia, any one of the swarms of ignorant pundits out there.

Over at the Crescat, Kat's announced the winners of the Tacky Nativity contest. (The winner is completely worthy of the award.)

Among the nominees was this fine work of art, the Simpsons Nativity:

Silly as it is, the Magi and the shepherds are well cast.

My dad's elder brother John used to enthrall me with this story when I was a kid. At family gatherings, I used to sit on the floor by his chair (on the beer can side, not the cigarette side – he always had both going) and listen to him tell stories until I was told to go play with the other children.

Anyway, this is the story he told every Christmas when I was a little girl. I can’t attest to how truthful it is – John being John – but it’s a good story nonetheless....

This strange story about the wild elephants in Orissa, India, has been making the rounds. I was telling my pal Iris about it, starting with the background of the persecutions and then about the elephants, when she gasped, "Ganesh!"

I hadn't even thought of Ganesh! That just adds another level of strangeness to this story....

If Shakespeare had an MBA:

O Muse, reach out to me –we’ll synergize; Auditors, patience, while I break down silos: I’ll tee it up, like Nestor lord of Pylos, And impact you with lore to utilize....

Hint: it wasn't an attempt to co-opt solar festivals:

Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.

Despite its popularity today, this theory of Christmas’s origins has its problems. It is not found in any ancient Christian writings, for one thing. Christian authors of the time do note a connection between the solstice and Jesus’ birth: The church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order. But early Christian writers never hint at any recent calendrical engineering; they clearly don’t think the date was chosen by the church. Rather they see the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods.

HT: Father Longenecker

An interview with Pierluigi Molla, son of St Gianna Beretta Molla:

As Catholics, we need to learn how to be coherent with our values and beliefs. My mother grew up in a family where she received the faith and values from her father and mother, and how to live life in a correct way. She was consistent in these values which she learned in the first years of her life, and she was consistent to the end.

"Thoughts from a Conservative Mom" was taken down by Blogger/ Google on 12/4 and has not yet been restored. And apparently other conservative (or even just non-left) blogs have had similar problems.

I love GMail, but is it getting on time to switch?

Just lovely:

Joseph in his very self, being a man, was a gift to Blessed Virgin. Against the rougher background of his manliness, the delicate, shimmering beauty of her holy femininity glowed with more luster. His was the hand that steadied her step over rocky ground. His the powerful arms that wrestled loads from their beasts and heavy furniture into place in their home. His the deep and reassuring voice that bid her a good night and his the protective gaze under which she slept.

Did Jesus need Joseph? Not in an absolute sense, for perfectly complete in both his humanity and divinity, with a Mother who is the Seat of Wisdom, Jesus could have grown into a psychologically healthy man without Joseph. But what an inestimable gift this man, this foster father, was to Jesus. To Jesus, infant, laid to sleep upon Joseph’s broad, muscular chest. To Jesus at one, tossed giggling into the air. To Jesus at three, playing with wood scraps. To Jesus, 6, prospecting the countryside for likely trees. To Jesus, 9, bent over the plane, while Joseph, smelling of sweat and sawdust, trains his movement. To Jesus, 12, at the other end of the saw, sinews straining to match Joseph lunge for lunge and pull for pull.