OrdinaryTime
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Posts posted by OrdinaryTime
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Pope Benedict has almost made this crisis of faith among our own numbers the focus of his papacy with the call for a Year of Faith and his call for the New Evangelization. In his letter on the opening of the Synod on the New Evanlelization this month, he wrote, "We need to offer a specific response to a moment of crisis in Christian life which is occurring in many countries, especially those of ancient Christian tradition."
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Asenik, I'm so glad you've had such a positive experience with Catholics truly knowing Christ. I suppose maybe I've had a less than stellar experience. I don't think we should just limit Catholics to the demographic we want, though. If an Evangelical meets a Christmas/Easter-only mass going Catholic (which sadly is the becoming the majority of Catholics), they are not going to say to themselves, "Oh, that is not a real Catholic." They see a lack of faith among Catholics because among those baptized there is a serious crisis of faith in the western Church. Only 30% of those baptized and raised Catholic in this generation are still practicing - defined as attending Mass once a month!
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Also, I think how you view this issue stems a lot from your personal experiences in the Church. I've known (and try to be one!) Catholics with deep personal relationships with God that stem out of the sacramental life of the Church. So I know that the Church is offering the best path to a forming a deep relationship with God. But I also know even more Catholics who have been going through the motions of the sacraments and the liturgy, but in such a passive way that they have almost no personal interaction with God. The sacraments aren't magic. God always works, but it takes an active recipient to actually recieve the abundance of grace. This is where I see the "personal relationship" idea to be critical. The sacraments can't do it all by themselves; they need recipients disposed to recieve them. I think this is what I was trying to get across.
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I think there is a difference between evangelizing and teaching. Evangelizing usually involves sharing a bit about our own personal encounter with God in some way (and equal amount of listening to the other and their encounter with God). My personal experience is that most Catholics are wildly uncomfortable evangelizing and much more comfortable teaching. I think this adds to the misconception that Catholics don't believe a personal relationship with God is important.
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Totally, nono. I agree with you basically. We are all supposed to be striving for a relationship with the Trinity, not just the Second Person. I am in no way trying to say anything to the contrary. I think most people (not all) often encounter Christ first and most powerfully since He is the Person of the Trinity to enter time and space to lead us to the Father and send us the Spirit. Plus He has a human nature as well, which is easier for many to relate to at first. But the larger point I was trying to make is that Catholics should talk about their relationship with God in any shape or form.
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Glad your appointment went well. I'll keep you and the baby in my prayers!
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In fact, my own father and grandfather received excellent catechesis and training in the Catholic faith and frequented the sacraments, but never really had any true relationship with Christ until they encountered some Evangelicals (my father in his 20s, my grandfather in his 60s). My dad was ready to leave the Church when they had these powerful interior conversion, but my grandfather insisted that the Church had the deep wells of living water, though they had not realized it before. Thankfully, my father listened, stayed in the Church, and came to understand Her riches anew. Still, the Church at that time hadn't completely evangelized its own members. This is what the New Evangelization is all about! You have to have the sacraments and the teaching of the Church integrated into an actual relationship with Jesus Christ. If you have either living separately from each other, they tend to wither and die.
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Also, I think sometimes Catholics, especially devout ones, begin to put so much emphasis on catechesis because of the confusion and heresy rampant in the Church in the last 50 years, that we overlook the first step of conversion. Christ first called his Apostles to, "Follow me," then He taught them. We seem to sometimes skip over the first step in the Church these days, forgetting the need to make a personal decision to follow Christ as a kind of preparation for deeper catechesis. You can know every tenant of the Churhc, but not be a disciple of Christ. I've see this happen a lot in culturally Catholic areas.
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The Catholics that do have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ often do not actually tell anyone. it seems to me we've taken the whole "preach the Gospel always, use words when necessary" bit, a little too far sometimes. Others outside the Church will never understand the spiritual riches of the Church if we do not share our own personal experience of them. I know many Catholics who are very uncomfortable to even hear the words "how is your relationship with Jesus Christ" - in a retreat setting!! Not in the supermarket or a the dinner table, but at a retreat where we are supposed to be coming closer to Christ.
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I don't agree with the conclusion, though. I think many evangelicals don't think Catholics have a personal relationship with God is ....because most of them don't. I say this out of personal experience and from stats. According to the latest Pew Religious Survey over 1/3 of Catholics believe in an IMpersonal God. Only 48% of Catholics were absolutely certain that the God they believed in was one they could have a personal relationship with. Hard to have a relationship when you don't even believe in a personal God.
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Hmmm... I read the article, and I completely agree that the best way to have a personal relationship with Christ is to embrace all the avenues of grace and all the truth the Church gives us. They are all there for one express purpose: to lead us to Jesus Christ, who leads us to the Father.
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I think I found the thread you were referring to; I remembered readinG in a couple of weeks ago, but it took awhile for the ol' brain matter to remember it. http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/showthread.php?t=422109&highlight=Dyscalculia
I also second Rosie's videos. My kids adore watching the videos and playing the games.
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If you have an ipad or iphone, there are some interesting apps that help build number sense through games, IMHO.
One that my kids really like is Wings by Motion Math. The game has you fly your bird through groups of blocks in grids, always steering your bird towards the biggest group. It is a fun way to work on quickly visually groups of numbers in an arrary, basically, multiplication tables.
Hungry Guppy is an app for younger students, but helps with a visual representation of simple addition/subtraction facts. It starts out with a concrete representation of numbers, then slowly adds in the use of actual numerals. It mixes the use of concrete items and numerals in an interesting way that could be helpful in developing number sense.
Zoom, also by Motion Math, is a visually interesting presentation of place value. Each place value is representated by a different size animal (tenths are bees, 1s are frogs, 10s are dogs, 100s are rhinos, etc.) and you can zoom in and out of the different sizes to place numbers on a number line. I think it can be a real help in giving an deeper grasp of place value.
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Thanks for sharing you experience. I must bookmarked this site the other day so I could take a closer look. I will!
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Personalism by Emmanuel Mounier
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton (anything by him really)
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset (anything by her as well)
He Leadeth Me by Walter Ciszek, SJ
Happy Are You Poor by Thomas Dubay
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandra Solzhenitsyn
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I second the Theology for Beginners recommendation. I use it in prepping for my RCIA classes all the time. I particularly like to use Sheed and Peter Kreft together. Sheed gives such succinct, clear explanation while Kreft gives some intuitive, fascinating analogy or explanation. I feel together I hit both a left-brain and right-brain explanation for the class!
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Your ramblings are music to my ears! It 's always a blessing to hear someone in love with Christ and His Church. I'm happy for you and your family!
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My son loves Rocket Math. It has options for practicing all four operations, but you could focus on multiplication.
Wings is an interesting app that helps you visualize multiplication facts by comparing grids. I think it is my son's favorite app!
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Letterschool is a great handwriting app that my kids love. It has several font options, including Handwriting without Tears. It takes the kids through a three step process, progressively building skills. Plus it has fun, whimsical graphics that my kids love. I have seen real improvement in my kids handwriting since using it.
Hungry Guppy is a fun math app that builds early math skills. Also, we like Montessori Board for Montessori style early math work.
Also, we like Readings Eggs app for sight words. It is like the Fruit Slice game but with sight words. It is more fun than flash cards!
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I actually am somewhat ignorant when it comes to Arthurian legends! They never held much magic for me, outside of The Lady of Shallot, though I kept trying since I usually love everything English. (Like my beloved Chesterton!) I found Grail legends particularly tedious. I just came across Parvizal when reading a book about the Grimm fairly tales called The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove. The author was examine all the influences of thenGrimm brothers, and Parvizal came up many times since it was such a strong cultural and literary influence. I was a little horrified that I was so ignorant of it as I read how influential it was!
(The book also really piqued my interest in Germanic and Norse mythology, which always have held much more magic for me but which I am fairly ignorant of outside of Wagner and echoes of them in Tolkien. Sad. Reading Beowulf kind of sparked a flame for more northerness!)
This is usually how things work out for us. I read some book that is semi-related to something I'm thinking about for our homeschool and then one book leads to another... serendipity, I guess.:001_smile:
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I just read Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight by Katherine Paterson with my often sensitive 7 year old. It was our first introduction into the Arthurian world. It went over very well. There is no graphic violence. There is some emotional angst after Parzival fails to ask the question of the suffering King that gets a little intense, but Paterson's writing seemed so, I don't know, formal that my son wasn't too disturbed. It does have a very strong religious undertone on themes on compassion, repentance, and mercy. Because Parzival is one of the oldest grail legends, I liked starting there with our step into Arthurian legends.
I'm planning to read Ian Serraillier's Sir Gawain and the Green Giant with my son soon. We really, really enjoyed Serraillier's Beowulf. It was clear enought to follow, but he kept the poetry of the work alive.
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The Sentence Family is a wonderful combination of grammar, art, and story-telling! We are just loving it at our house. My kids beg for it. We do the drawings in oil pastels, which I have to take outside to spray with a fixate, so we have this joke in our house that we only do grammar on sunny days. :tongue_smilie:
We use it slowly, introducing a character or two a week. We read the story together and then everyone draws their own picture of the character. We then incorporate the Lively Language Lessons by reading the corresponding Ruth Heller and Brain Cleary books and drawing our own examples of the different parts of speech. Then we just talk about the chracters randomly. Like tonight at dinner, any time a person spoke, we had to decide who would have send that sentence (Mr. Declarative, Mrs, Interrogative, Mr. Imperative, or Mrs. Exclamatory). Even my 4 year old knew the different types of sentence from the character sketches!
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Andrew Kern's mantra to "teach at rest." I repeat that phrase to myself daily. If I teach from a place of anxiety and worry and chaos, all that my kids pick up is the strain of work, not the beauty of the truth. If I teach from a place of rest, a place of peaceful, confident focus on where I am hoping to lead my children, our days are not just "productive," but actually ones of joyful discovery.
Some tools that have helped me teach certain subjects better:
Miquon: It made me approach math in a way I would not have done naturally.
The Sentence Family: Wonderful combination of grammar, art, and story-telling!
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7 year old: 20 minutes of Miquon in morning, 15 minutes of drill via some math app in afternoon, 20-30 minutes of LOF as part of bedtime reading
6 year old: 20 minutes of Singapore Math with Miquonesque activities in morning, just starting LOF in evening
We can't do more than 20 minutes of focused work on new material at a time without frustration or eyes glazing over.
A Personal Relationship with Jesus
in Crossing the Tiber
Posted
Yes, 72% of Catholics do believe in God, but if you dig in the data, 30% of them believe that this God is an impersonal force.