They're very similar. "Restored" is more careful about pronouncing Latin exactly the way (we think) the ancient Romans actually spoke: elisions, omitted final 'm,' and so on. I don't know, that always seemed a little precious to me; I mean, I'm not out to order lunch with Caesar's wife and concerned the waiter might not understand me.

We use Artes Latinae, which teaches Latin using a structural linguistics approach. (See http://www.umich.edu/~cfc/rosslatin.htm .) It uses CD-ROMs, but isn't very flashy; it was formerly a workbook and tapes (I think a book-and-CD version may still be available), and was transferred to a digital format. There is a reader for practice, and a teacher's guide for the reader, but the course is very self-guided; though younger children may need a parent next to them for occasional help. You don't need to have any Latin for your kids to use it. It's secular, and offers a choice between American Scholastic ("classical"), Ecclesiastical, and Restored Classical pronunciations. There are two levels, constituting (theoretically) two years of high school Latin; but Great Girl found it put her ahead of other college freshmen who had taken three years of Latin. My older two enjoyed it, and more importantly after both levels my older could read Latin reasonably well, and found herself more than prepared for a university Virgil class.

Where would psychological horror fall? I'm thinking of Henry James and Shirley Jackson.

Free is good! Is there any Latin/English version besides the Loeb? Even used, that's $15, a little steep.

Ay-ops, Amy, and em-tee-ess. Also, MEE-quon, though I've heard three other variants.

Your marriage, assuming there were no impediments (neither of you married before; not first cousins; not mentally incompetent; not married under false pretenses; you didn't murder your previous spouse in order to remarry*; you were both of age when you married; etc.) is valid. Since you weren't baptized, the marriage isn't considered a sacrament. However, if you both get baptized, the marriage will be sacramental, as a valid marriage between two Christians is sacramental. You may get told you need to have your marriage convalidated. That should not be true, though you would want to verify that if your parish priest insists. (Many priests get confused about this; don't ask me how I know.) *My personal favorite. Can you imagine applying for an annulment on the grounds that you'd done in your first husband, so your marriage to the second didn't count, and you should be free to move on to the third?

I know, and I felt guilty even thinking it. Though not guilty enough not to say it. Could we sacrifice Padre? It could be fixed up in time for Spring Break.

Oh please let it veer toward Texas, sit over Houston a few days, and refill our Hill Country lakes. (Sorry Houstonians.)

One fun bit of trivia from Five Hundred Years of Printing, which I read earlier this year, was that when the Index (the ill-advised list of books Catholics were prohibited from reading without ecclesial permission) was established, almost immediately writers and publishers started angling to get their books listed, as it made sales go up so much.

33. Gert Ledig, The Stalin Front. This was one of the NYRB books on sale to which I (and then dh, with a little gentle nudging) was alerted by a Certain Someone on this board, who apparently just likes to see people spend money on books. ;) It's a war novel, quite grisly, with light gallows humor, set at the German-Russian front in the Second World War. As a nod, I presume, to the dehumanizing nature of combat, few characters have names, being instead referred to as "the Sergeant" or "the NCO." Don't read it over breakfast. But very good. Catching up from behind, I decided Genet wasn't good enough for banned books, and ordered Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I'm not interested in the "why on earth would someone challenge that?" kind of book; I want my book good and banned, and put up on some high shelf away from the kids when I'm done. Alas, when dh went to check out a copy from the campus library, all the copies (a dozen English translations purportedly available) were missing, checked out, or theoretically but not actually on the shelf. Someone must have assigned it this semester; a drawback to a huge university town. (Compensated for by the appearance at the end of each semester of dozens of copies of classic literature on clearance at the main Half Price. Beware of highlighting.) Still mostly reading Emerson. The Yankee neo-Romanticism that was the Transcendentalist movement wears thin after a while; but "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul" were (predictably) interesting, even personally challenging. Also reading Burton's original Arabian Nights. Oh my. I'll shelve it away from the fairy tales, nearer to Apuleius than to Grimm.

This reminds me of when Great Girl and I studied the labor movement, and she was genuinely radicalized and insisted, quite seriously, on partial control over the means of production. When I explained that what we had here was a benign despotism, she actually wept tears of frustration. Now she holds out for a feudal system with primogeniture. At least that what she tells Middle Girl the system is. ETA: She tells me that the part that made her cry was my explaining that, under the law, everything of hers actually belonged to dh and me - even money she earned - and we had a legal right to dispose of it at will. Not that we would.

My Grandma was born to German immigrant parents, and told me once how her parents would "whip" her and her sister if they were caught speaking German (her parents spoke it at home, because their English wasn't good). When she was older, she understood that the punishment was out of fear for their daughters.

Writing this before reading the other replies... I see the reference to one's ethnic background as stemming from the early-20th-century American focus on the "melting pot" as a social corrective to prejudice based on national origin. You can see a lot of this in popular culture around the time of the Second World War. To say "I'm Irish-German" is a shorthand way of affirming "I make no prior moral claim based on being a 'native.'" It's a perpetuation of the American mythos that we're a country of immigrants, uniquely welcoming to those newly arrived. Cf. the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, which all American schoolchildren used to memorize.

32. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. A wide-ranging scholarly work on the reading habits and engagement of British laborers with both intellectual and popular culture. Fascinating reading. While this isn't at all in Rose's purview, I found myself, while reading his accounts of turn-of-the-century British workers who stumbled upon serious literature and intellectual culture as teenagers or young adults, thinking how similar their reported experiences (Rose uses primarily memoirs for his research) were to the experiences of homeschooling parents who discover, in the course of their reading and teaching, the same hidden cultural treasures. Here's a bit on the generous reading habits of the working class that made me think of this awesome book group: --------------------- This Third Way was a distinctively working-class approach to literature, what could be called critical populism. Autodidacts certainly worshipped the classics, but they could also be charitable toward the lesser ranks of literature. While they generally had a conservative sense of literary hierarchies, they tended to grade books on a sliding scale rather than pass-fail. Once the old Evangelical hostility to secular literature had been overcome, even serious autodidacts could treat fairly rubbishy books with remarkable tolerance, and they were not distressgd by the jumbling together of high and low culture.... These readers tended to approach any literary work on its own terms, from Julius Caesar to advertising bills, and take from it whatever they found valuable. After all, as one workhouse veteran noted, there was more mental stimulus in a boys' weekly than in the typical Victorian schoolbook. ------------ Still reading Emerson's Essays and The Stalin Front, and soon to start a collection of essays by Kenneth Grahame. All reading of The Bad Catholic's Guide to Etc. halted; Great Girl found I had her book and retrieved it. Ungrateful child.

My oldest girls, at about that age, loved the venerable Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet.

Many prayers. I'm glad you are there for her in her need.

Mom-ninja, I'm sorry. This is a hard burden.

No, very few of them, numerically speaking, are sedevacantists. I'm certainly not. You might take a look at that Wikipedia article. It seems pretty accurate.

Just as a boring technical matter, Pope Francis is not a traditionalist, as that term is generally understood among Catholics. (Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Traditionalist Catholics.)

I admit I haven't scoured the Challenged Books list, but our branch library had a little sale of donated books that had been banned or challenged, $1 each. I snatched up a nice Everyman volume 2 of Euripides - so, what, Medea I suppose? - Deszó Kosztolányi's Skylark (NYRB reprint), The Education of Henry Adams, and a Dover edition of The Ship of Fools (1494). Still enjoying The Bad Catholic's Guide to Wine, Whiskey, and Song. My favorite chapter is "Kahlua and Ecclesiastical Land Reform."

Well, usually when someone says something "isn't for the easily offended," I assume it's actually going to be something fairly offensive. It's like "Some of my best friends are..." or "Don't take this the wrong way, but...."

Shoved aside my Currently Reading stack to, um, borrow Great Girl's newly acquired The Bad Catholic's Guide to Wine, Whiskey and Song. Written by fellow Trad Catholic John Zmirak, it's sort of an encyclopedia of alcohol as a history of the world as seen through self-consciously triumphalist Catholic lenses, with lots of in-jokes and drive-by snark aimed at Protestants, liberal Catholics, and Trads alike. And recipes. Not for the humor-impaired, easily offended, or enemies of the Habsburgs. This one shouldn't take very long. ETA: Dang, that description made the book actually sound pretty mean-spirited. Mostly trying to say it's a book that pokes at everybody and everything, but not at all in a mean-spirited way, while being a very interesting history of alcoholic drinks.

Nancy Ann, I want to take seriously your mention of feeling depressed since this thread started. It is a completely normal and understandable human reaction to become anxious and depressed when one feels opposed by one's community, even if it's an ad hoc and temporary kind of "community" like a forum thread. It doesn't matter if you "ought" to feel ganged up on or not; you do, and it's a crummy feeling. I'm sorry. Take a break from this thread. Seriously. You're certainly right, there are undoubtedly people who share your opinions who aren't posting. You've spoken up for yourself and for them. Nobody thinks badly of you for having spoken up; nobody is going to think badly of you for being done speaking up. And absolutely nobody here wants your children's mom to feel anxious or angry or depressed over an internet forum. I may disagree with you about evolution, but if you were here in my living room, I'd get you a cup of tea, and I think we'd have a lot in common to talk about. :)

It is indeed sad. I'm a mouth-breathing reactionary Trad, and my kids know their Bible, but even I don't buy the fixer-upper version of a Creator whose creation doesn't reflect the nature of the Logos and whose existence is incompatible with randomness understood in any meaningful way. Fortunately my job is to just tell the kids the stories. I admit to having been a little light-headed at the thought of a science class teaching children creation stories from a wide variety of traditions and classic literatures. Maybe it wouldn't be science, but at least it would be education in something. Maybe on those days, the Language Arts teacher could explain natural selection and adaptation?

Unfortunately way too many, judging by my Sunday School classes. I used to be able to count on third-graders at least having heard of 7 Days of Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark, and David and Goliath. For a while, most of them had videos of Prince of Egypt at home, and were excited to learn that the Bible had done a version of their favorite Disney. Now? Cultural illiteracy has made the Old Testament a complete mystery to most of them, and the stories are an excitingly new part of their long slog toward Confirmation and the blessed release from religious education that follows. However, if you restricted your question to "How many kids from families that care what their kids are taught, I think your answer will be much closer to zero.