Medieval-Enlightenment Humanities

My second-year students have worked really hard this semester. Below, a tribute to them: the list of works whose excerpts they valiantly soldiered through at the behest of their crazy instructor. (I didn't fully realize how crazy this was until I actually sat down to type out the list. Yikes.)

St. Benedict, Rule of St. Benedict

Einhard, Life of Charlemagne

Letters from King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII

Magna Carta

St. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Canons of Lateran IV

The Rule of the Franciscan Order

The Primitive Constitutions of the Order of Friars Preacher

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Giovanni Boccacio, Decameron

Canons of the Council of Constance

Dante, Inferno (no excerpting here--we walked alongside Virgil & his pupil to the depths of despair)

Diary of Christopher Columbus

Nican Mopohua

Bartolomeo de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance

Machiavelli, The Prince

Martin Luther, 95 Theses and Babylonian Captivity

John Calvin, Genevan Catechism and Institutes

Schleitheim Confession

39 Articles of the Church of England

William Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More

Canons of the Council of Trent

St. Francis de Sales, The Catholic Controversy

St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises

St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
Francis Bacon, aphorisms from the Novum Organum

Descartes, Discourse on Method (and a short jaunt into Meditations on First Philosophy for my favorite Descartes passage)

John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government and Letter Concerning Toleration

Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense

Greco-Roman Roots of Civilization

I'm very proud of my freshmen class. Most of them come to JPII with no exposure to studying the great works of Western civilization, and most dove right into the material and really worked hard to understand what was going on in each work and how they connected to each other.

This semester covered excerpts from the following works:

• Much of Homer's Iliad
• All of Sophocles, Antigone
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Plato, Apology
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics and Politics
• Polybius, Histories
• Cicero, On Duties
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• Gospel of Matthew
• Acts of the Apostles
• Letters to the Romans and Galatians
• St. Justin Martyr, First Apology
• St. Clement of Alexandria, On Philosophy
• Passion of the Holy Martyrs Felicity and Perpetua
• David Bentley Hart, "Human Dignity was a Rarity Before Christianity"
• St. Augustine, City of God
• Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order

even in perplexity

"For still the vision awaits its time,
presses on to fulfillment--it will not lie.
If it seem slow, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not delay." (Habakkuk 2:3)

"A telos is an end that illuminates the entire path. You might say the difference between telos and process is fundamentally pedagogical. With a telos, the entire path is redeemed and validated as a movement that presupposes, values, and remembers what came before. We know how to walk ahead because of the lessons the past has taught us. A telos can teach us how our past still has meaning because that past must be absorbed into our journey towards the telos." (Michael Altenburger)

"God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission--I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next...if, indeed, I fail, He can raise another, as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling. Therefore I will trust Him...If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us." (St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, Meditations on Christian Doctrine, "Hope")

medieval philosophy + big band

what do Boethius, Dante, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando and Robin Williams have in common?

I'm glad you asked.

a Benque horarium

so, you might ask, how does a missionary teacher in Belize spend her days?

to be honest, it's really not that different from college life--I study and learn, go to class, sleep, eat, and try to block in adequate time to pray each day. Happily, the schedule here is very oriented towards the prayer life of the parish and missionary community, so that last one has been at least slightly more successful than it was at college.

on any given day, with slight variations, this is how I live:

6 am: wake up, shower, walk to church
6:30-7:10ish: holy half-hour with Benediction, plus I try to say Morning Prayer
7:10-8: eat breakfast in the rectory with fellow missionaries who are early risers (it's a small crew)
8-11:30: teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays or do class prep/grading on MWF
11:30-12:15: lunch, back at the rectory
12:15-5:30: more teaching/prep/grading + hanging out with students
5:30-6: supper at the rectory
6-6:30: chanted Evening Prayer with the priests and sisters
6:30-7: walking rosary (if my toe isn't dying--this hasn't happened for several weeks) or pray/read--I'm currently going
7-7:50: Mass (in Spanish except for Wednesdays)
7:50-10:00ish: finish up grading and hang out with the other ladies at my house, quick shower before Night Prayer and bed

Wednesdays are a long day--at 5:30, we have small group with the women students at the junior college, and after Mass is Super Missionary Night Prayer (SMNP)--games, snacks, a testimony from one of the missionaries, and night prayer together.

Friday and Saturday nights the missionaries often hang out at one of our houses or in the (blessed air-conditioned) living room of Deacon Cal and his wife Ginny, who have been married for 56 years and served the community in Benque for 50 of those. We play games (Catan is a big favorite), trade embarrassing stories, or watch movies from the well-curated collection of the estimable Drew Kanne, one of our seminarians.

Sundays are free days--Mass, a leisurely lunch, and an afternoon for napping, letter-writing, reading, or wasting time on Facebook.

There's not a ton of leisure time and life is pretty busy, but it's good--and structured enough that I actually get things done!

spiritual direction

"And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment."

He has done all things well.

life in Benque

I've been in Belize for about five weeks now, and finally the dust is starting to settle.

I live in a lovely house with three other women missionaries who teach at the high school next door. It's an 8-10 minute walk to the parish in one direction and a 15-20 minute walk to John Paul II (the school) in the other, though I often ride to school in a van with the other teachers.

laundry (ft. the high school across the street)

The weather has been almost uniformly pretty hot and humid--upper 90s during the day and dropping down into the 80s at night. We're supposed to drink 3-4 liters (around a gallon) of water per day just to replace the sweat! And because it is so hot, showering multiple times per day is a cultural norm here. Neither the school, the house, nor the parish have AC, but we do have electricity and so keep fans running constantly.

our kitchen

There's a kitchen in our house, but we mostly eat in the refectory at the parish with the priests and other missionaries (there are 26 or 27 missionaries living in four houses). The food is extremely good: homemade refried beans or stewed red beans, homemade tortillas and rolls, rice, and chicken or beef cooked a variety of different and delicious ways. We also have fresh juice at almost every meal: watermelon, cantaloupe, lime, or tamarind (tastes a lot like apple).

I got an infection in my foot last week (which has almost healed by now, thanks be to God!) so I've been trying to keep off it. One of my favorite times of day when I have been able to walk, though, is a walking rosary around Benque in the evenings before Mass. The air has cooled off by then and the sun is setting. One of the altar servers who usually comes has taken to carrying the cross before us, and it's really beautiful to look up and see the cross superimposed on the sunset. I tend to get pretty distracted praying the rosary, but walking actually helps me keep my mind from wandering, and walking past different houses and shops suggests immediate needs and people to pray for. 

a simply enormous avocado
which cost the equivalent of $1.50

Belize was a British colony until the early 1980s, and is the only Central American country to have English as an official language. I've encountered a few people whom I have to talk to in Spanish, but in general I'm not forced to do so, so I can't say I've gotten much better at speaking the language. Most Masses as well as morning prayer and many of my students' conversations are in Spanish though, so I've gotten much quicker at hearing and understanding when others are speaking. I'm really loving teaching--the material we're studying is very interesting to me personally, so it's a lot of fun to prepare for class and to think about how I can most effectively and enjoyably teach the material to my students. Many of the students are excited to be there, and it's incredibly fulfilling when they make a connection that isn't obvious in the material but that I was hoping they would pick up on based on the trajectory of our discussion.

It's been a great first month and I'm thankful for how good this life is. Blessed be God.