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Fellow parishioner Jay Balza has posted photos and video of Bishop Salvatore Cordileone's Solemn Pontifical Mass at St. Margaret Mary's Church in Oakland, CA. The Holy Mass was offered on September 20, 2009 in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Traditional Latin Mass in the Diocese of Oakland. Head over to Jay's blog, Veritatem Facientes in Caritate, for all the details.
Shiver me timbers! It be a year already since the last Talk Like a Pirate Day. You'll be wanting to forswear your land-lubbing ways today, ye Scurvy Dogs.
...and the only prescription is: more cowbell!
Clearly the President has concluded that the solution to any problem is for him to talk about it more. In honor of his upcoming appearance this Sunday on every show on television:
H/T Jonah Goldberg at NRO
In honor of yesterday's family visit to the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibit at the de Young Museum:
Everyone really enjoyed the exhibition (even Helen found things that held her interest). It clearly helped that we covered Egyptian history last year in the kids' homeschool curriculum. The exhibit has a lot of material covering the transition from polytheism to monotheistic sun-worship under Akhenaten and then back to polytheism under Tutankhamun. I was actually surprised by the number and quality of the Akhenaten artifacts. I thought the ancient Egyptians had done a more thorough job of expunging him from history after his death.
Neither Lisa nor I was able to see the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit 30 years ago, and thus we were pretty excited about yesterday's trip. I was gratified to see the kids seemed to be as well.
Who can tax the sunrise?
UPDATE: Be sure to check out Tim Hawkin's "A Homeschool Family" video, too!
The other day, Ross Douthat wrote a compelling piece contrasting the two scions of the Kennedy clan who died in the past month: Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sen. Ted Kenndedy. Here's the meat of the piece:
Liberalism's most important legislator probably merited a more extended send-off than his sister. But there's a sense in which his life's work and Eunice's deserve to be remembered together -- for what their legacies had in common, and for what ultimately separated them.What the siblings shared -- in addition to the grace, rare among Kennedys, of a ripe old age and a peaceful death -- was a passionate liberalism and an abiding Roman Catholic faith. These two commitments were intertwined: Ted Kennedy's tireless efforts on issues like health care, education and immigration were explicitly rooted in Catholic social teaching, and so was his sister's lifelong labor on behalf of the physically and mentally impaired.
What separated them was abortion.
[...]For abortion opponents, cruel ironies abounded in this sibling disagreement. Because of Eunice Shriver's work with the developmentally disabled, a group of Americans who had once been marginalized and hidden away -- or lobotomized, like her sister Rosemary -- was ushered closer to full participation in ordinary human life. But because of laws that her brother unstintingly supported, that same group was ushered out again: the abortion rate for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, for instance, is estimated to be as high as 90 percent.
At a time when the prospects for a child born with Down Syndrome have never been better, it's tragic that so many never even get the chance. The Downs kids we know are the lucky ones.