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Face Of The Day

To anyone that is concerned as you can see I’m doing fantastic! Blessed to see another day! Always smiling

Columbine: 15 Years Later

Dave Cullen, author of the best-selling book Columbine, addresses the lessons that much of the mainstream media haven’t yet learned from the tragedy:

Casey Chan puts the anniversary in a broader context:

History buffs might not know this already but it seems as if this week—April 14th to April 20th—might be the worst week in American history. Things like President Lincoln being assassinated, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Columbine shooting, the Virginia Tech school shooting, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Boston Marathon bombing, etc. all happened during this week in history. Of course, if you look back far enough into history, you’re going to find something terrible for every day because, well, terrible things happen all the time. But you have to admit, this week just isn’t a good week for American history.

From an Esquire profile of Frank DeAngelis, the Columbine principal retiring this year after 35 years at the school:

Mr. D’s job of reconciling the past with the present and the future is a difficult one. Because, as the students will readily attest, people are uncommonly weird about Columbine. Tour buses stop to let their riders snap pictures during the school day. Visitors take selfies in front of the school’s sign. Travelers who’ve gotten lost looking for the memorial end up wandering around the parking lot. The memorial was built in 2007, in nearby Clement Park. It was set away from the school to deter tourists from bothering students, but that didn’t work. They keep coming. To them, the school itself is the monument.

The View From Your Window

Littleton, Colorado, 4.57 pm

Theology For Hedonists

David Sedley delves into the philosophy of Epicurus:

Hedonists are ethical thinkers who hold that things are good precisely in so far as they are pleasant, and bad precisely in so far as they are painful. Epicurus was, more specifically, an “egoistic” hedonist, in that he took it to be obvious that the good for each individual, from the moment of birth, is that person’s own pleasure, not other people’s: in other words, your life is a good one if, and only if, you yourself enjoy it. Although an enjoyable life must, according to Epicurus, be centred on moral virtue, what makes it worth living is in the last analysis your enjoyment of it, and not the morality for its own sake.

Moreover there are, besides moral propriety, other factors equally indispensable to enjoying your life.

In particular, because the fear of the gods and the fear of death do more than anything else to blight lives, overcoming these is the essential starting point of Epicurean living. And almost equally important is the moderation of your desires, gastronomic and otherwise, restricting them to the most basic and readily satisfied ones. Extravagant pleasures – even that of meat-eating – threaten to make us their slaves, yet their satisfaction brings no more pleasure than living on the simplest fare. Epicurus was no epicure!

Sedley goes on to explain why the thinker valued a tranquillity “simply incompatible with the world-governing role that popular religion attributes to the gods”:

According to Epicurus, our innate conception of god is simply that of an immortal and blessedly tranquil being. Reduced to moral terms, this means that the ideal that from the moment of birth we all intuitively seek is a life of tranquillity totally unmarred by the fear of death. Unfortunately in most of us this basic aspiration has been distorted by superimposing the values of a corrupt society, so that our ideal role models come to be characterised by vindictiveness, greed, belligerence, lust, tyrannical rule and so on. This plausibly accounts for the popular worship of deities (Ares, Aphrodite, etc.) whose profiles distort true moral values.

A Poem For Sunday

From “Easter” by George Herbert (1593-1633):

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise

Without delayes,

Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise

With him mayst rise:

That, as his death calcined thee to dust,

His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part

With all thy art.

The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,

Who bore the same.

His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key

Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song

Pleasant and long:

Or, since all musick is but three parts vied

And multiplied,

O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,

And make up our defects with his sweet art.

(Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas, 1602, via Wikimedia Commons)

Cool Ad Watch

Alex at Weird Universe captions:

An ad by a Seattle burger restaurant, inspired by the fact that Easter Sunday is on April 20 (4/20), which is a special day for cannabis enthusiasts. Of course, some people are already saying that the ad offends them. But in the ad’s defense, there is a long-standing argument that Jesus and his disciples probably were cannabis users. Though I doubt that argument is endorsed by the Vatican.

Money quote from the guy responsible for the ad:

“No one group is sacred,” [Lunchbox Laboratory owner and "practicing Catholic" John Schmidt] said. “Do you ever watch South Park where they parody everybody and every religion and pretty much anything?”

Mental Health Break

420 MIX from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

She Has Her Mother’s Eyes And Her Father’s Trauma

Researchers in Switzerland are closer to understanding why extreme stress appears to have second-generation effects:

The researchers studied the number and kind of microRNAs expressed by adult mice exposed to traumatic conditions in early life and compared them with non-traumatized mice. They discovered that traumatic stress alters the amount of several microRNAs in the blood, brain and sperm – while some microRNAs were produced in excess, others were lower than in the corresponding tissues or cells of control animals. These alterations resulted in misregulation of cellular processes normally controlled by these microRNAs.

After traumatic experiences, the mice behaved markedly differently: they partly lost their natural aversion to open spaces and bright light and had depressive-like behaviors. These behavioral symptoms were also transferred to the next generation via sperm, even though the offspring were not exposed to any traumatic stress themselves.

Virginia Hughes adds:

The study is notable for showing that sperm responds to the environment, says Stephen Krawetz, a geneticist at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan, who studies microRNAs in human sperm. (He was not involved in the latest study.) “Dad is having a much larger role in the whole process, rather than just delivering his genome and being done with it,” he says.

Faces Of The Day

Viktoria Sorochinski describes her project Anna & Eve, which profiles a mother and daughter:

I first met Anna and Eve in Montreal where I used to live…. They drew my attention because of the unusual dynamic of their relationship. They seemed to interact like two sisters rather than like a mother and a daughter. The little Eve had this incredible power and maturity which one can very rarely encounter in a 4-year old child. The mother, on the other hand, seemed to be much more childish and naive for her age. They were both in the process of growing up and discovering this world. They were both learning from each other.

See more of Sorochinski’s work here.

Dwelling Together In Love

Michael Brendan Dougherty reflects on the way Christians celebrate Easter, finding that the patterns of Holy Week reveal “a larger, more comprehensible story about God’s covenant with man.” How he describes the movement from Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday:

We gather at the edge of sanctuary, which is the symbol of the heavenly Holy of Holies, and re-enact the part of the vicious mob in Jerusalem who called for the death of God for the sake of God’s name. We become the Roman torturers who mocked the King of the universe with a crown of thorns. We play the roles of the screaming and vain religious men, who work themselves into a fury. Our pastor intones the hysteria of the chief priest who condemned God Himself as a blasphemer. We once more present to God (and to ourselves) the bitter betrayals, laziness, and weakness of the Apostles after whom our priests are modeled — and who too often imitate their bad example.

And after all this, our own Via Dolorosa, we are finally prepared to hear the words, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do.”

This re-enactment — in which reality is suffused with divine meaning — does not end with the liturgy at our Church and is not reserved for the devout or even the believing. Once this vocabulary for understanding the universe seeps into the imagination, the world takes on the same patterns.

After God builds a three-story home at Creation he deputizes Adam as a kind of junior architect, another gardener who will “till and keep it,” verbs used later to describe the duties of priests in the Temple. We are to imitate God, to build our houses and make covenants with one another. To create children and make them our sons and daughters, to gather the orphans into our own homes, to dwell together in love, to sacrifice for each other, to fight for each other as God has for us. And we’re to have fun, too; to sweat over the ovens and feast together.

On this Good Friday morning I will go to the butcher and buy racks of lamb at an extortionate price. On Sunday, we will return from Mass to my father-in-law’s home, which, like the sanctuary, is a place of love. And I’ll prepare the offering. The ribs will remind me of Christ’s side, the side of the Temple, and the smoke will come like a wild offering from the oven. The devout and prodigals of our family will gather together for the holiday and to mark a few birthdays. We will put aside any previous hurts. There will be inside jokes, more good food, more games to play, more communion than any of us could have on our own. And around my father’s table, well-fed, well-loved, and well-understood, we will have made an image of the heavenly banquet, of a New Jerusalem, of a paradise filled with laughter, forgiveness, the smell of spices, with play and rest. Heaven is a homecoming.