Category: NCRegister

NCRegister Blog: Cosmetics and the Objectification of Women

She came back from the job interview with a job offer in hand. As I talked to her about the student work position on our college campus, she mentioned that her new boss told her that she would be expected to wear makeup at her job. While I knew that women often wore makeup to work, I had never been required to wear it to work. I felt a little upset for my friend who sat through being told by a man that she — a young, pretty woman — had to wear makeup while men who worked in the same workplace had no such requirement.

Up to this point it had seemed normal to me that one would choose to wear makeup in a professional or formal setting, but when it was imposed on my friend I started to feel that there was a problem with it. With so many women coming out with their stories and accusations of men treating them with impropriety, we need to dig deeper into the causes of this problem. The expectation that women use cosmetics is just one of many contributing factors our society’s tendency to reduce women to objects to be used rather than human persons to be loved.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog:10 Classic Children’s Authors and Illustrators and their Works

From The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang.

With Christmas coming, many parents tremble at the idea of adding more toys to the overflowing playrooms and bedrooms. A good book to give a child can solve the problem of too much clutter and benefit the child in many ways. It gives them hours of something worthwhile to do, adds to family community when read together, and teaches them to love beautiful things.

As a bibliophile, I have two criteria for what makes a book a “good” book for children. The first is that it must be good literature. This means that it has either stood the test of time and is still seen as a valuable book, or I have read it and found it to have great beauty and depth. The second criterion is that, if it is illustrated, the illustrations be beautiful. I do not like unrealistic, overly cartoony images, but simple line drawings with watercolor, painting, colored pencil, or woodcut prints do nicely.

My reason for being so picky is that the things that my children see and read at a young age will form and shape their minds for their whole lives…

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: Art, Body Image, and Gratitude

Madonna in the Meadow by Raphael

When we decided to study the history of art with our children as part of their homeschooling I did not realize that the course of this study would show me just how deeply I had been influenced by the secular media to disvalue my physical appearance. There is a stark contrast between what modern media presents as a beautiful, attractive woman and what neoclassical, baroque, romantic, realist, etc. art portrays as beautiful. Through looking at these paintings I have learned to value the beauty of women and to truly be thankful for the way that God made me.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog:What It Means to Entrust Children Who Die Without Baptism to God’s Mercy

The burial of our Léonie (named for Servant of God Léonie Martin).

 A statistic that I have been hearing a lot is that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. In my case it has been 3 in 7. So, as you can imagine, I have spent a good amount of time trying to come to grips with the fact that we all come into existence with Original Sin, and that Baptism is necessary for salvation, and that I was simply unable to baptize three of my children because they died inside me.

The Church says nothing certain about what happens to these children after they die, only that “as regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them.” (CCC 1261)

What exactly does it mean to entrust these children to the mercy of God?

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog:Being Open to Life Means Being Open to Loss

I walk through my house and every corner reminds me of the memories I will not have of my child. I change my toddler’s diaper and wonder where we will keep a changing table that we do not need once he is potty trained. I look to next June, and the harsh reality of the baby that will not be born then hits me.

The thoughts flit through my mind. I should be thankful for the ones that I have—the ones living and breathing in my home everyday. But my longing for this one who is gone does not take away from my love for them. They also mourn for the baby we will never meet.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: Giving Generously In Motherhood Will Not Leave You Empty

A mother makes a sacrifice of many things when she chooses to give her body and life to her children, and the reality is that the evil one wants to make us mothers regret this sacrifice every single day. He wants us to regret that we have to give ourselves in care of our children, to think we are wasting our time and gifts, instead of seeing that motherhood is a beautiful opportunity to give ourselves to another human being in a way that can save our souls. He wants us to think that when we give of ourselves to our children that we will have nothing left for anyone else—that we will be left empty. One of the balms to heal us mothers of this regret and fear is to ask God to help us grow in the virtue of generosity and to show us how he wants us to serve him in our lives…

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: The Benefits of Living in a Small House with a Family

It has taken me a long time to get to the point of being comfortable with intentionally living in a smaller house with our potentially large family. There is that point after having a baby, when I start thinking about if/when the next one might come along, and if/when he or she does come along, what we are going to do about bedrooms. I spend hours planning and rearrange mentally where we are going to put which person. Then I start to wonder, how much space does each of my children really need? At what point would it make sense to get a bigger house? Can we just get by with the space we have?

Often in the midst of my anxiety about house size, I have had to be reminded that these material things are passing and what really matters is that we grow in holiness. My own experience of growing up in a smaller house in a family of six, realizing how others have lived in the past, talking to friends who grew up in bigger families, and considering creative, economical uses of home space has all contributed to my husband and my decision to choose purposefully to live in our smaller house with our four children and potentially with any future ones.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: Let’s Move Forward to Embrace Tradition and Beauty

As one raised going to the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite who now attends the Extraordinary Form every Sunday, I wanted to respond to Pope Francis’s recent statement about the liturgical reform that happened after Vatican II. He seemed to be addressing Traditionalist Catholics who would like to reverse the changes that occurred to the liturgies of the Roman Rite after Vatican II in a speech in Italy this week to participants in their National Liturgical Week. He said,

“After this magisterium, after this long journey, we can affirm with certainty and magisterial authority that the liturgical reform is irreversible.” (from the Catholic News Service)

But those who have come to love the EF (Traditional Latin Mass) after being raised going to the Ordinary Form of the Latin Rite (Novus Ordo) know that we cannot—we have come too far. The reforms of the council have become part of the very life and heartbeat of the Church. Liturgy is vibrant, living worship of God—it has always been changing and always will until the end of the ages…

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister Blog: Hell is for People Who Are Too Distracted to See the Face of God

It was happening night after night; my husband or I would decide after the children were in bed to “do a quick email check.” The other would join in and before we knew it half an hour had passed and all we had done was give into the temptation to idle curiosity and lose ourselves in distraction.

We have fought this vice our whole lives—distraction, the bane of a recollected life. It pulls one from one thing to the next, never allowing a task to be completed well, never giving one time just to think. The philosopher Dietrich Von Hildebrand in his book Transformation in Christ described distraction as the “exact antithesis to recollection” and “a state of being dragged along from one object to another, never touching any of them by superficially” (Ch. 6). The time sap of social media and the gossip-ridden sites of the internet are just another symptom of this fallen human state, one that we came into when we first gave into the vice of curiosity.

What is Von Hildebrand’s solution to being distracted? Learn how to become recollected.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…

NCRegister: “Inloveness,” Virtue, and NFP

The professor and I co-wrote this one:

We began to fall in love in the early spring during college.

The chemistry was quite obvious. During the summer before we got engaged, we read A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken, in which he tells the story of the deep “inloveness” between himself and his wife, Davy.

We, too, like Davy and Sheldon, wanted to preserve and deepen our inloveness. In our marriage, our use of natural family planning, with all of its struggles and suffering, plus the joy of our children, has been a key instrument in deepening our inloveness; it has aided our growth in virtue…

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register…