A Random Assortment

~ A fascinating picture of the modern family. What's the answer to being stressed out? Don't go to college, apparently. Also, be a man. This made me laugh:

In most cases, that means women still do the majority of the child care and housework — particularly managing the mental checklists of children’s schedules and needs — even when both parents work full time, according to the Pew survey and other research. Just don’t tell fathers that. They are much more likely than mothers to say they share responsibilities equally.

~ I like this [Catholic, but more widely appropriate] party-throwing guide. Although we live in a tiny apartment and can't really throw parties at the moment. Also, we're only slowly easing back into entertaining; we cooked our first dinners for non-family members last month. But still, it's great, and I look forward to hosting people again someday. (Via Like Mother, Like Daughter.)

~ I love this:

Why am I talking about this? Because, O my brothers and O my sisters, we all have the same mother, and we all could do a darn sight better job of seeing and treating her as a whole, with needs and concerns and an entire existence that doesn't have anything to do with taking care of us specifically.
I speak, of course, of Mother Church. We need to stop treating the Church like a servant who fades into irrelevance the moment she's not directly serving us. Does she cook and clean for us and do our laundry? Oh, yes, she does. She feeds us with grace, with the Word of God, and with Eucharist, and she invites us to throw our smelly old sins down the chute and -- okay, here the analogy breaks down. I guess she washes, dries, and folds our consciences for us, and leaves them in a tidy stack on our bed? She bustles around, caring for our needs, even anticipating our needs, telling us what we need and making sure we have plenty of opportunities to take advantage of what she has to offer us, from birth to maturity to death.
She knows us intimately, cares for us personally, never stops thinking about us, never stops loving us, never stops desiring everything good for us. But the Church is about more than us -- and she's about more than giving us stuff, too. Mother Church isn't just a sacrament dispenser, who fades into existence for an hour here and there, whenever we need something; and we should be careful not to treat her that way.

I spent a while discussing the Synod on the Family with Francisco and one of the things I keep coming back to is that there just isn't (from either side!) a real spirit of docility and willingness to learn from the Church. It's like culture wars have taken over the Church. I get that we need to be critical and careful about what we're learning, but in my opinion there are loads that both the liberals and conservatives (and me!) have yet to learn from the Church. And gratitude seems to point us in the right direction.

~ This is old but somehow came to my attention again. On childbearing:

Hospitality describes the mother as welcoming a needy guest, self-denial honors the pains and costs of that nurture, and stewardship observes the boundaries of her agency in respecting Providence.

~ After Serial, it seems like we're entering a new genre of story: replaying crimes and trials and wondering if the right people are in jail. Here's another: Blood Ties.

~ Excellent: Diversity in the Christian University:

But even more troubling is the movement’s implicit categorizing of people under the utterly accidental traits of race and gender. Are all women “nurturing” and “empathetic,” for instance? Surely not. Most women would resent being painted with such a broad brush. But this kind of benign—even complimentary—discrimination lies at the heart of the desire to promote certain groups on the basis of their race or gender.

~ Maybe a bit romantic, but it does include T.S. Eliot, so, "In Memory of Sheldon Wolin."