This is an unpaid for review of “Will There be Faith?” by Thomas H. Groome for the TLC book tour.  I was provided with a copy of the book to review.

amazon.com synopsis:

A Modern Manual for Sharing a Relevant, Vibrant, Enduring Faith

In the face of mounting obstacles, parents and educators find themselves increasingly challenged by the task of leading people toward lives of faith. Now Thomas Groome, a world-renowned authority on religious education, has created a contemporary, holistic approach to teaching Christian beliefs and values that offers real, effective solutions for today’s parents and teachers. His guide to religious education—which aims to “bring life to Faith and Faith to life”—is a hopeful road map for reenergizing the faith community and family from the bottom up.

A Modern Manual for Sharing a Relevant, Vibrant, Enduring Faith

In the face of mounting obstacles, parents and educators find themselves increasingly challenged by the task of leading people toward lives of faith. Now Thomas Groome, a world-renowned authority on religious education, has created a contemporary, holistic approach to teaching Christian beliefs and values that offers real, effective solutions for today’s parents and teachers. His guide to religious education—which aims to “bring life to Faith and Faith to life”—is a hopeful road map for reenergizing the faith community and family from the bottom up.

My thoughts:

Groome has written a rather long and rather bookish piece that goes in depth into Christian Catholic education.  I’ll be completely honest, this is not an easy book to read and with my time constraints thanks to two very small children I ended up skimming a fair portion.  I find that this book is more of a theological and academic look at things, it is not written in my preferred style of “Easy, quick and can be read in small spurts in the bathroom because that’s the only time you get a chance to sit”.

I have some small issues with certain choices of wording, particularly his insistence on gender inclusive language.  What particularly bothered me was that he refused to use male pronouns to refer to God.  Now, I agree that God is sexless, however throughout Scripture he reveals himself as “father” and Jesus refers to God as “Abba” (daddy).  I think it’s also important to note that Jesus is both God and Male, which to me  means that it is proper grammatically to refer to God with male pronouns.  I know I’m picking hairs a bit here, but it’s so distracting to read about “Godself” in an effort to avoid using “Himself” in an apparent effort to appease the feminist left.

I think this book is not really practical for most parents.  It’s too theologically dense and there’s too much in the beginning to wade through in order to get to the practical stuff.  I would have much preferred a book that was solely practical.  I think if Mr Goome had devoted the whole text to that he could have expanded better on his method and it would be able to reach a much wider audience.

This book is probably best for those who are studying, either for the priesthood or religious life, or in a program to become a catechist.  This could definitely be a great textbook in a beginning catechisis or methodology class.  It would also be best used in a group setting, the questions provided along the way are great conversation starters and could be used to jump start group discussions.

Overall, I’m sure this book will be a great asset to many people, but I feel that it’s not the best for the “average” mom like me!

“Things I have done right as a parent”

1. Please and Thank you.  These are two things we hear often around our house.

2. When Grace gets sent to the corner, she cries a bit then comes and says “Sorry Mama” for whatever infraction she committed.

3. Grace’s list of favorite foods would include asparagus, broccoli, bananas, eggs.  Despite my not so great diet during pregnancy, she loves good, whole, natural foods.  Take THAT Science!

4.  Jude’s crawling and he’s not even five months yet.  (Yes, I know I can’t really take credit for it, but I will anyway thank you very much).

5. I say “I love you” to my kids every day.

6. I educate myself on parenting topics.  I read relevant blogs, try to keep up on the science and am teaching myself the best I can so that I can be the best parent I can be.

7. Grace will throw trash in the trash can, and recyclables in the recycle bin.  This is more than I can say for certain other people in our house.

I’m SO excited about this.  I’m really hoping that it’s going to be a good (money making) option for my family.  It’s funny how you can trust and rely on God as much as you want, but sometimes you have to get off your butt and DO something.

So I’m sitting here, praying that this door is WIDE open, that my idea is a good one, and that this will help my family.

And I really need one more thing to do, right?

Unfortunately, the above xkcd comic is too true in my life.  I’ve spent some time over the last day debating with people on the realcatholictv.com facebook page.  Why the debate? We’re all Catholic, aren’t we? Well, I didn’t immeditely sing Michael Voris’ praises, so clearly I’m either a Shea lackey or just downright WRONG.  What did I say that was so evil that my faith was called into question?  Well, I simply said that I wasn’t sure that Voris’ style was appropriate for teens.  Personally, I view Voris as someone who appeals to emotion.  Get people riled up about something and they’ll listen to whatever you have to say.  I don’t have a vendetta against him, mainly because he does (mostly) speak the truth.  I don’t think his method is always prudent, though.  If you are simply preaching to the choir, that’s one thing, but in the information age his videos cause huge division.

What most worries me though is the attitude of his faithful fans.  They are extremely similar to those fans of Fr Corapi, and remind me of the defenders of Fr Maciel.  They are willing to defend their “Catholic Superstar” to the end, even when it means critiquing and disobeying the bishops and the Church organization.  Voris and Real Catholic TV only exemplify this.  They make no effort to get approved by the Archdiocese of Detroit, who have made statements regarding their unapproval of them.   With the recent press release by the World Youth Day organization also saying they never approved their catechsis sessions to be held in Madrid, Voris and RCTV insist that they never “asked to be approved”.  Why is this important?

Because the way the church is set up and organizied makes it easy for regular, every day, REAL Catholics to know what is and isn’t true.  If you write a book on Catholic doctrine, you can get an imprimatur to verify that you didn’t say anything against the teachings of the Church.  If you want to hold an event sponsored by a diocese, you get their approval of their topic.

What happens when Catholic celebrities pit themselves against the structure of the church is that the “sheep” get confused.  Voris and Corapi both have said many many true things.  But as we are seeing in the Corapi scandals saying true things does not make you a saint, nor does it mean that vast droves of lay Catholics should be listening to you.  Rather, we should be listening to our bishops and intelligently comparing what they say to the 2000 year tradition of the Church.

One last point before I close this absurdly long post.  RCTV has deleted several of my comments on their facebook page.  They also banned a friend who called them out on their refusal to work with the archdiocese (and deleted a whole conversation off their page).  It’s also interesting that they don’t allow people to comment on their fan page, you can only comment on posts.  Why are they trying to hinder the conversation?  Why aren’t they listening and responding to the things people are saying?   I may sound like a conspiracy theorist, but really, what are they hiding?  If they are so sure they are in the right here, why not explain why?

I overextended myself a little far this summer though.  Jude’s been needier than Grace was so I’ve been having to make sure that I am always available to him.  He won’t take a bottle either, which makes it much much harder to get a few hours away.  Thankfully, though, some projects are winding down, I’ve decommitted myself from one obligation and I am feeling good heading into the end of summer and the beginning of fall.

What’s on my plate now?

• Really Rosie is our summer youth theater program this year.  I’m producer and we’re “in between” show weekends right now.  It’s a little different because we have dress rehearsals this week for our cast, we did three different casts!  It’s a great opportunity for more actors to have lead roles.  With any theater project there’s been some “drama” and I’ll be thankful when it’s over for the summer!
• DHCT in general is doing ok!  I’m now just a “regular” board member, which I think is good for this season in my life.  I’m hoping to just offer some peripheral support for the shows this year.  I like serving as a board member, but I don’t want to do too much, because I don’t want to have to quit.
• One of the things that I’m dropping from my plate is BRICK (the youth group at my parish).  I’ve been a leader there for four years and while it’s been great to help out, I’m feeling the need to “move on”.  The Holy Spirit really spoke to me through some different situations/people this summer and I’m moving on to bigger commitments at ROCK (youth group at another parish).  The people who were really leading the charge at ROCK want to move back a bit and have asked me to fill the role as “leader”.  I’m really excited about this upcoming year and I might share some things as we get them figured out and finalized!  This is the third year that ROCK will be meeting and I think we’re starting to find our identity and be able to really minister to the teens well.
• Work has been good.  I’m working on revamping our hall website (adding some better features and just freshening it up) and also creating a website for the Lounge.

It’s “Birthday Week” in my family right now.  Yesterday was John’s 12th, tomorrow is my 25th and on the 25th we celebrate my Grandma Joan’s birthday.  A lot of my friends have birthdays within a week of right now and we’ve all been chatting about them.

This is something we’ve talked about before, but how “happy” of a birthday do you have?  Or, can you even expect a happy birthday?  Some of my friends truly dread the coming of their birthdays.  People disappoint, circumstances lead to crummy days, overall they are just not happy.  Typically, I’ve always looked forward to my birthday.  I’m a gifts kind of girl, it’s arguably my top “love language” (acts of service is a close second, but I often think of acts of service as gifts).  I love to get gifts, who doesn’t?  But I also love giving gifts.  I love going to the store and picking out something beautiful for my mom or my sister.  I love going and searching through clearance racks at Meijer looking for a goofy but appropriate gift for one of my brothers.  I love writing a sappy note in a card, just to see if I can make the birthday person cry.

This year though, things are different.  I was looking forward to my birthday.  I was talking about making plans.  And then life kept happening, and the baby has had a tough week or two, and the two year old doesn’t sleep, and the power has gone out at the theater twice during tech week and there’s just SO much stress.   And so plans never got made.  I feel fat.  I don’t have a new cute outfit to go out in.  I don’t really know what I want to do.  I dread the day after, because besides the potential for feeling let down about the big day, it’s also the anniversary of Celeste’s death.  Jude will hit the same age she was when she died (to the day) on my birthday… I realized that this morning.

There’s still time for making plans, of course.  Chris won a gift card to a local restaurant, so we know where we’ll be going for dinner.    Someone will be able to babysit, I’m sure.  And Chris bought me a fabulous bike for my gift, which he already surprised me with.

I’m holding out hope for a Happy Birthday.  And really, it’s about what you do with it.

Are you there Internet?  It’s me, Rachel.  I’ll be trying to talk to you more.  I don’t know if you really want to listen to me ramble, but I’ll ramble anyway.

And now I hear a certain two year old pulling on her doorknob.  It’s supposed to be nap time.  AKA: Mom sits on the internet for as much as she can time.

I’ve been feeling an awful lot of stress lately.  Just a general feeling of “Wait, WHAT am I supposed to be doing exactly?!”  I’ve got so much going on, so many responsibilities.  I managed to actually drop one the other day.  It’s so hard to say “No”.

Speaking of saying no, I need to get rid of all the candy in this house.  I’m sick of hearing “Canny pease Mom” all. freaking. day.  If it’s gone, it’s gone.

I think I want to redesign my header on here.  Not sure what I’m really going to do with it.  Maybe switch themes.  It needs to be refreshed.

My birthday is in a week.  I’ll be 25.  Is it time for my quarter life crisis?  What does that look like?  Mid life crises tend to involve spending ridiculous amounts of money on frivolous things to make you seem young.  Should I be trying to save money so that I can have a frivolous mid-life?  This might warrant further reflection.

I’m out.  I’ve got about 5 bazillion chapters of the Bible to read in my quest to read it all in 90 days.  Yes, I’m nuts, adding something like that on to my plate.  oh well!

And I’m just like my daddy like that.

(And like how he’s great with directions. That’s me too. Just ask my mom.)

(That’s one of my favorite wedding pictures.  I love it! Click on it to view it larger.)

There’s an episode of Glee, in the first season, when everyone gets all in a funk because the rival Glee Club has been pranking them and being generally more awesome (any group who sings bohemian rhapsody is WAY cooler in general).   So the teacher makes them all sing some soulful funk music, because clearly music is the answer.  And then they all live happily ever after (or… something like that).

Well, I’m in a bit of a funk.  And I must say music DOES help.  It’s cliche, but at least I’m not dancing and breaking into apropos songs at the drop of a hat (or the drop of a glass of milk).

I’ve dealt with seasons of depression for a long long time now.  But I think right now, post partum is much harder.  I feel alone, yet I’m constantly with my baby (and the toddler too).  I have a second person practically attached to me all day, and I feel alone?  How is that for an oxymoron?

So for today, to bust through this funk I’m going to blast the Wicked soundtrack and get what cleaning I can done.  And when the baby wakes up from his nap I’ll dance around with him (and probably sing too).  You might not want to come and see it, I’m not exactly as talented as those Glee kids.
(PS, who else is annoyed that Chris Colfer didn’t get to say ANYTHING on SNL this past weekend?!)

Photo credit aimeebakes

It’s chilly this morning.  weather.com says 48 degrees, but that it feels like 41 thanks to the cold rain and wind.

However, I won’t complain too much, because this gives me a chance to wear my new trench coat.  It’s raspberry and stylish and a “signature piece”.  I’m giving myself a makeover, shedding things from my wardrobe that don’t fit, don’t look good and that I don’t love.  I’m contemplating attempting Project 333.  It’d be a good exercise in minimilism.  Of course, for it to be successful, I need some different shoes.  But if I really wanted to, I think I could do it and do it well and not really “need” anything more than that.

I miss blogging.  I miss writing about things.  I like to write, it’s just that with a 2 year old and a 2 month old, things are busy.  I’ve been interrupted several times by Grace asking for things like jelly beans (yes at 11 am, she’s eating jelly beans and not eating her oatmeal).  Jude’s sleeping away though, oh wait.  As I typed that, he started crying.

Ah, the life of a mom.  I’ll be back though!