bearing blog

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

The clock is ticking down to Ash Wednesday and I'm still wondering what I'm going to "do" for Lent.  I am a little bit jealous of my husband, who never worries about it, but cheerfully gives up chocolate every single year and calls it good.   As I have written in previous years, I have sworn off all non-obligatory food-related sacrifices because they mess with my head.  I think maybe I was on to something when I wrote this post before Lent another year:

Do you think maybe it's backwards to try to think "hmm, what can I give up for Lent?  Something that I like, something that's a sacrifice, hmm..."

Do you think maybe it might be better to think first "What particular virtue do I want to develop, or what bad habit or vice do I want to eliminate?  How could I fulfill my vocation better?" ... 

... and then, having answered that question, to consider what sacrifice would actually serve that goal?  I mean, maybe chocolate is really hard to give up, but maybe it's not a chocolate-free Lent that would best help you grow in holiness.  Unless you have a disordered attachment to sweets in particular, and you think chocolate is actually getting between you and God, and that's what you're hoping to work on.

Or is that just me being overly analytical?

I think I will go back to St. Francis de Sales today and consider his idea of discerning which one virtue (or a very few virtues) to focus on.  Maybe that will help me think of something.  I already have a couple of good ideas for small things I plan to do, but unfortunately none of them are things I can do daily.  On the other hand, if you put it all together, it might work out to almost daily.  

I need something to read, for one thing.  One of the most rewarding things I ever did during Lent was read the Diary of Sister (now Saint) Faustina -- the one who saw the Divine Mercy apparitions.   I came out of it with a much better understanding of what the Church means when it calls an apparition "worthy of belief," which isn't the same as coming right out and saying "This really really happened exactly the way the visionary said it did and you have to believe it really happened."  Because even if you were to assume that St. Faustina was delusional or mistaken about what happened to her (I guess it doesn't work if you assume she was a liar), you would find that her writings about her experience, the thoughts she took away from them and transcribed, are true to the Gospel and inspire love of Christ.  Probably more than anything you're likely to read here.  

I was thinking about paying $3 for a pdf of Amy Welborn's newly refurbished, Lenten-devotional form of her late husband Michael Dubrueil's work The Power of the Cross.    (She has it in forms that should work on your Kindle, Nook, iPad, or iPhone; not having any of these I was going to go for the pdf.)  Or I might pull Fulton Sheen's Life of Christ off my bookshelf -- it's just about the right length for Lent.  Or I might start re-reading Volume 1 of Jesus of Nazareth, since Volume 2 will be released next week, and I could take them as a whole.

Last year I didn't give up computer time, facebook, email, or blogging, on the theory that to do so would be the equivalent of giving up answering the phone or opening the mail.  And I probably won't do so this year either.  But one thing I did do was set time limits around my internet usage, and that turned out to be pretty valuable.  So I may do that again this year.   I also thought that I might consider which of the political blogs I follow tend to be the most destructive to my internal peace, and temporarily delete them from my reader.  

My schedule is such that I get about two opportunities a week to visit the Adoration chapel all by myself for more than an hour.  Only I rarely, or never, actually use the time for this.  I always have something else to do (and in fact I do not think of these time blocks as "opportunities to visit the chapel" but rather as "planning time" or "me time.")  I think I may try using these time blocks for Adoration instead.  It would probably be good for me to give up planning time to God.  Theoretically his plans work out better than mine anyway.

Well, that's enough of that:  it's almost time to start school.   So, comments topic of the day:  Not "what are you thinking about doing this year," but let's look for evidence of good ideas from the past.  In your most fruitful Lents, what were the sacrifices or devotions that enriched you the most?

On another linguistic note, the Vatican's translation service stinks.

This is about as close to ranting as Jimmy Akin gets, and I'm cheering. After an explanation of the latest bad summary of something the Pope didn't really say (in this case, "Pope challenges Big Bang theory," which not only didn't happen, it's just nuts if you know anything about B16), Jimmy tackles the problem on the Vatican side:

... [A] couple of thoughts for the folks responsible for getting the Pope’s homilies up on the Vatican web site (translators, web guys, whoever):

1) What’s the major international language these days? Hint: It’s not Italian.

It’s also not French, or Spanish, or even Chinese. It’s English. English has 450 million native and secondary speakers. It is an official or the majority language in fifty-seven countries (nearly twice that of its closest competitor, French, which has this distinction in 31 countries).

If you want to get the Pope’s message out to the world and avoid (or at least mitigate) him being misunderstood due to difficulty checking what he actually said, devote the resources needed to get his speeches on the web site in English in a timely manner! Don’t make us wait over a week, as in this case, by which time the media story has grown cold and sewn whatever misunderstandings it contained. Also . . .

2) Make sure that your translation into English is correct.

Because it isn’t always.

There have been any number of cases when people point to a sloppy translation that has been posted on the Vatican web site and come away with a misimpression. This is particularly bad because people will say—and often have said—“Hey, this is what it says on the Vatican’s own web site!” It’s understandable that they’d think that what they find on the Vatican’s web site is accurately translated, and they have every right to think that, because it should be.

But too often it’s not, and it creates a mess for those of us who are trying to help get the Vatican’s actual message out, in spite of mistranslations appearing on its web site.

So lest anybody be too sure that just because something appears on Vatican.va, it must be an accurate translation, consider this passage from the English version of Pope Benedict’s Epiphany homily:

And so we come to the star. What kind of star was the star the Magi saw and followed? This question has been the subject of discussion among astronomers down the centuries. Kepler, for example, claimed that it was “new” or “super-new”, one of those stars that usually radiates a weak light but can suddenly and violently explode, producing an exceptionally bright blaze.

These are of course interesting things but do not guide us to what is essential for understanding that star.

Here the Pope asks a question we’ve all wondered about: What was the Star of Bethlehem? He notes as an “example” (presumably one among several) an idea Kepler had and says it is “interesting” (which means he finds it interesting, not that he’s endorsing it as the truth), and all that’s fine.

What is not fine is the way whoever translated this rendered the Pope’s description of Kepler’s idea.

“NEW”????

“SUPER-NEW”???

You don’t have to have a doctorate in astronomy (or Italian) to recognize this for what it is: a mistranslation of nova and supernova.

I mean, just look at the Italian:

Keplero, ad esempio, riteneva che si trattasse di una “nova” o una “supernova” . . .

It’s got the words “nova” and “supernova” right there! And notice it doesn’t have a bare presentation of these words without the indefinite article (un, una = “a, an”). It’s got the indefinite article right in front of both nouns! That tells you these are nouns, not adjectives. “A nova,” not “new”; “a supernova,” not “super-new.”

The translation is so bad that one wonders if the Italian was plopped into a machine translation program or something. If so, it wasn’t Google’s, because that churns out:

Kepler, for example, believed that it was a “nova” or a “supernova” . . .

TRY IT FOR YOURSELF!

So, Google’s machine translation wins hands down on this one.

While even Homer nods, it is hard to imagine how such an obviously erroneous translation could be made by someone with a functional grasp of Italian and English, much less how it could survive any kind of review.

This is a big problem and you just have to wonder what is going on in the Vatican to have such bad English translations being churned out.  Do they have non-native English speakers doing it?  Is there some kind of anti-English faction in the translation service, possibly led by French or Italian speakers who resent the dominance of English?   Search me, but it's really annoying.  I suspect it's mainly dead time in new-media adaptation (did it really matter that it took a week to get the English translation out before all this instantaneous-news stuff started?), but... annoying.

Introduction to the Devout Life 2-1 through 2-8: A how-to.

Soon after Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope, I stopped in at a local Catholic bookstore looking for some of the stuff he'd written.  I knew he was a heavy theologian, and while I style myself an armchair theologian I didn't necessarily think I was up for anything too hard, so I picked up a volume titled Introduction to Christianity.  

Many, many pages later I decided that, while Ratzinger may be a smart guy, he needs to be schooled on the definition of the word "introduction."

Not so with St. Francis de Sales, who begins Part 2 ("Prayer and the Sacraments") of Introduction to the Devout Life with very basic instructions on how to practice mental prayer and meditation.  From 2-2:

As you may not know how to practice mental prayer, Philothea, for unfortunately it is a lost art in our age, I will give you a simple method which will help you until, by reading some of the useful books on the subject, and above all by the practice itself, you are more fully instructed.  The first thing is to place yourself in the presence of God and ask his help, so I will begin by showing you four ways of placing yourself in his presence.

And he goes on to explain what he means when he says "Place yourself in the presence of God." The four ways are, briefly, to realize vividly the omnipresence of God; to realize that God is present in a special way in one's soul; to think of our Lord "in his sacred humanity" gazing upon us from heaven; and to "use our imagination to represent our Lord as very near to us in the same way as we often think of our friends..."  

 

To place yourself in the presence of God before prayer, choose one of these four ways, never more than one, and then dwell upon it briefly and simply.

Pretty basic stuff.  And yet, surely it's a necessary fundamental, isn't it?

St. Francis goes on in chapter 3 to offer tips for "asking God's help," and even explains in chapter 4 that in meditating on a mystery one should imagine the "scene," so to speak.   

... In some meditations it is useful to represent to the imagination the scene of the mystery you are considering as if it were actually taking place before you; for example, if you wish to meditate on the Crucifixion imagine yourself on Mount Calvary and that you see and hear all that took place on the day of the Passion; or if you like, for it comes to the same thing, imagine that the Crucifixion is taking place in the very place where you are, just as the Evangelists describe it.

The same applies to meditations on death or hell and to all similar mysteries concerned with things that we a can see and hear and touch...

However, I do not wish to make prayer seem too difficult or wearying but rather as simple as possible.  To imagine the scene is to keep our mind on the mystery we are considering so that it may not wander to and fro, just as we confine a bird in its cage or a hawk to our wrist.

Isn't this rather obvious?  St. Francis thinks not, as he has experience with people who don't recommend this fairly basic method of prayer:

Some will tell you that it is better to represent these mysteries to yourself in an entirely intellectual and spiritual way, through faith, or else consider that the events take place within your own soul, but this is rather too subtle to begin with; so,... until God raises you higher, remain in the valley which I have pointed out to you.

Two notes:  

(1) I'm finding that these chapters in the second part contain advice which is helpful for putting into practice the instructions in the first part.  (2-5:  "Having confined your spirit... within the mystery that you are considering, either by using your imagination, if it is something perceptible to the senses, or by the mind itself if it is something invisible, begin to consider, in the way explained in the meditations which I have already given you [in the first part].")

That's not to say that you can't immediately start using some of St. Francis's insights as you read along and discover them for the first time, but I expect that the book's advice will need to be digested as a whole work rather than as a day-by-day "textbook" or syllabus of the devout life.  In other words, I think I'm going to have to read the book once, taking notes, and then consider how best to put it into practice.  

(2) I've looked at a couple different translations, and let me tell you, the translator matters.  It's one thing to get whatever's available from the library or free online, but if you're going to spend money, don't just go buy any old copy of Introduction to the Devout Life without picking it up and reading a couple of different sample and seeing how the language strikes you.  I wasn't looking for a scholarly edition, but for something that had the conversational, natural tone that I'd seen in recent translations of other work by St. Francis de Sales.   I've checked out a copy of the "Everyman's Library" edition translated by Fr. Michael Day that I like very much.    I read French, so maybe I'll pick up the original just for fun and practice at some point, but that wouldn't be very good for blogging (and in my experience not very good for spiritual instruction, either).

 

UPDATE.  Jennifer Fulwiler of Conversion Diary considers St. Francis's "Four Ways to Place Yourself in the Presence of God."

Blogging Daughter Zion: Part II.

An intriguing turn of phrase:

...the covenant relation of Yahweh to Israel is a covenant of marital love, which---as in Hosea's magnificent vision---moves and stirs Yahweh himself to his heart.  He has loved the young maiden Israel with a love that has proved to be indestructible, eternal.  He can be angry with the wife of his youth on account of her adultery.  He can punish her, but all this is simultaneously directed against himself and pains him, the lover, whose "bowels churn."  He cannot repudiate her without rendering judgment against himself.  It is on this, on his personal, innermost bewilderment as lover, that the covenant's eternal and irrevocable character is based.

Emphasis mine.   God cannot do something without rendering judgment against himself?  This is, then, what covenant means:  a promise so unbreakable, it acts to restrain Omnipotence Himself.  That single sentence in its context was for me a whole day's worth of pondering.

To place it more in context, after Ratzinger has used the book of Hosea as above to establish the significance of covenant, he goes on to show the part Mary plays as Israel's representative:

...the relationship between God and Israel includes not only God but Israel as woman... for this reason the covenant, which forms the very basis of the existence of Israel as a nation and the existence of each individual as an Israelite, is expressed interpersonally in the fidelity of the marriage covenant and no other way....But above all, this also means that to God, the One, is joined, not a goddess, but, as in his historical revelation, the chosen creature, Israel, the daughter Zion, the woman...

In the women of Israel, the mothers [e.g., Sarah, Rachel, Hannah] and saviors [e.g., Esther, Judith, Deborah], in their fruitful infertility is expressed most purely and most profoundly what creation is and what election is, what "Israel" is as God's people....

Emphasis mine again.  "Fruitful infertility" is an expression of creation (something from nothing) and election (saving the un-saveable).  Again, there is something to chew on for a long time.

Of course, this line of development...acquires its definitive meaning for the first time in the New Testament:  in the woman who is herself described as the true holy remnant, as the authentic daughter Zion...

He is setting up Mary as a type, as a representative or personification of Israel-as-woman, indeed of all creation as woman (or Woman), the one whose life is the perfect response. 

Incidentally, on the next page Ratzinger begins to discuss the feminine figure of Wisdom in the Old Testament, and offers this striking descriptive definition of Wisdom (Sophia) that is no doubt intended to be thematically linked to the previous: 

"Wisdom" appears ... as God's first creature in whom both the pure, primordial form of his creative will and the pure answer, which he discovers, find their expression; indeed one can say that precisely this concept of the answer is formative for the Old Testament idea of wisdom.  Creation answers, and the answer is as close to God as a playmate, as a lover.

All this is in the space of a couple of pages.

Blogging Daughter Zion. Part I.

I recently picked up the 1983 Ratzinger book Daughter Zion (Die Tochter Zion appeared in 1977), hoping it would be a quick read at only 82 pages.  I read about a quarter of it this morning over my eggs Havana and coffee, and can report that (for Ratzinger!) it's really very accessible. 

It helps that I'm familiar with the basics of Marian theology.  I haven't read nearly enough of his stuff, but my impression so far is that his great gift is in explaining very difficult concepts with clarity and precision.  Not that you don't need to think hard about what you're reading -- the concepts are, as I said, difficult -- but his language is so transparent that you don't have to waste any brainpower wondering what he meant by this or that.  (Maybe a little bit of brainpower is expended untangling sentences with many modifiers.  I suspect this of being an artifact of German.)

Anyway, Daughter Zion is subtitled Meditations on the Church's Marian Belief, but I wouldn't call it "meditations" at all.  That word calls to mind, at worst, "365 Daily Meditations" type books, and at best calls to mind lectio divina, the prayerful consideration of perhaps a very short passage in order to internalize its full depth.  This book is a theological explication that was originally a series of lectures.  However, I suppose that there are not very many Catholics -- or anybody else for that matter -- who will gladly pay $7.oo to be "lectured" by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger a.k.a. Benedict XVI.   Yes, I know you would.  So would I!   I'm assuming that Ignatius Press employs at least one reasonably foresighted person in Marketing.  The Pope Lectures You On Mary won't fly very far.

So what is Daughter Zion?

"This will not be a Mariology constructed piece by piece out of its New Testament components," says Ratzinger (p. 33).  Instead, in Daughter Zion he describes the "distinctive structures of the Marian dogmas" which, he says, "cannot be deduced from individal texts of the New Testament; instead they express the broad perspective embracing the unity of both Testaments."

When I am reading anything, I tend to mutter to myself.  For instance, wham! when I come across a phrase or sentence that hits me, so to speak.   Reading Ratzinger causes me to attract attention in restaurants if I'm not careful.  Anyway, I thought it would be fun to share some of the whams. 

Here's the first one, from page 13.

Marian piety and theology is fundamentally based upon the Old Testament's deeply anchored theology of woman, a theology indispensable to its entire structure.  Contrary to a widespread prejudice, the figure of woman occupies an irreplaceable place in the overall texture of Old Testament faith and piety.  Consequently, a one-sided reading of the Old Testament can open no door for an understanding of the Marian element in the Church of the New Testament.  Usually only one side is taken into consideration:  the prophets conducted a relentless battle for the uniqueness of God against the temptation to polytheism, and as matters then stood this was a battle against the goddess of heaven, a battle against the fertility religion, which imagined God to be man and woman.  In practice this was a resolute battle against the cultic representation of the divine woman in temple prostitution, a battle against a cult which celebrated fertility by imitating it in ritual fornication.

(This part I knew already:  the religion in the background, against which the Old Testament prophets were fighting to keep Israel's faith distinct.)

From this point of view, idolatry is usually referred to in the literature of the Old Testament as "fornication."  The rejection of these representations apparently led to the result that Israel's cult is primarily an affair of men, since the women certainly stay in the outer court of the temple.

That I didn't consider.  Interesting!  Ratzinger goes on to explain that one error that has arisen from this is the conclusion that "women had no role at all in the faith of the Old Testament... that there is and can be no theology of woman because the Old Testament's chief concern is to exclude woman from theo-logy, from the language of God.  This would then mean that Mariology de facto could only be seen as the infiltration of a non-biblical model."

If you or someone you know tends to think of Mariology as non-biblical, could it be because of this error?

Primary sources (with comments).

If you get most of your mainstream-media news from NPR -- and I wholeheartedly admit that I do, it's what I usually have on in the car -- you may be thinking that Pope Benedict XVI came to the United States mainly to discuss the sexual abuse of minors by priests.   

It's not that this isn't an important thing to discuss.  It's just that I've listened to several NPR distillations of his addresses by now, and so far that's just the only topic that's merited extensive commentary.   (I noticed, by the way, that he has been careful to limit the discussion to that abuse committed by apparent pedophiles; we can, I think, assume he is not talking in this trip about men who exploited young people who'd reached puberty.   This distinction narrows the scope of his public discussion on the subject considerably--by about 85% of the victim count--and it's a distinction I've not heard made yet in the MSM.)

Anyway, if you are interested in commentaries on his addresses that give a flavor of the pontiff's main themes as presented by, you know, the pontiff, rather than the media-digested versions, you might go to Father Z's blog What Does The Prayer Really Say?  He has been putting up the texts of Benedict's speeches and adding highlights and comments. 

• Fuller account of what the Pope said on the airplane (from a NYT story, with comments)
• Transcript of the press conference (from John Allen)
• Discourse from the White House
• The homily from Mass at Washington Nationals Stadium (and here's more commentary from Fr. Z on the liturgical choices and now commentary by Fr. Z. on the commentary from NLM.  Knowing what Benedict has written about liturgy, I have to say I was cringing for a lot of that Mass.)

I'm hoping he puts up more... UPDATE:

• Address to the United Nations.

Faith ---> hope ---> charity.

A friend of mine wrote to me on my post about Spe Salvi, where I'd written

B16 begins with a discourse about the nature of Christian hope and how it intersects with faith.   He talks about the "certainty of hope," which sounded paradoxical to me at first (isn't hope something that concerns the thing you might experience, not the thing you will experience?), but I think I get it now...

My friend wrote me (if he gives me permission I'll quote him) that the tension between the certainty implied by perfect faith and the uncertainty implied by hope has made it difficult to understand.  When I replied, I quoted the passage below and added almost as an afterthough a note of my own:

Quote:

"A further point must be mentioned here, because it is important
for the practice of Christian hope. Early Jewish thought includes the
idea that one can help the deceased in their intermediate state through
prayer...The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that
reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for
one another continues beyond the limits of death-this has been a
fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it
remains a source of comfort today. Who would not feel the need to convey
to their departed loved ones a sign of kindness, a gesture of gratitude
or even a request for pardon?

"...So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that
person, something external, not even after death. In the
interconnectedness of Being, my gratitude to the other--my prayer for
him--can play a small part in his purification. ... It is never too late
to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain....Our hope is
always essentially also hope for others; only thus is it truly hope for
me too."

(this part is me writing now)
This helped answer, for me, "What need is there for hope, if one has
faith?" Well, there are probably other aspects of it, but certainly we
need to hope for others, whose faith only *they* know. Don't you think?

I've been musing about this for a while, centering hope in its rightful place between hope and charity.  Yes, hope is at least partly directed towards other people, hope in God for others.  Why wouldn't it be, since charity is pretty much completely directed towards other people?  Not really the self, and the love we have for God (at least in English) doesn't seem to be properly described as "charity," caritas. 

Faith and hope and charity are an odd little trinity, with a sort of progression, aren't they?  And aren't the three relationships among God, neighbor, and self an odd little trinity of relationships too?  (I love the number three, the way it inverts upon itself like the Star of David, there being a trinity of relationships among a trinity of persons).  If faith is about the relationship between self and God, and  Charity about that between self and other,  is hope somehow between:  some strange way the soul perceives God and the other, or God in the other?  Perfect faith implies certainty; charity needs no certainty at all, we can be completely lost inside and still have the power to practice it; is hope somehow between:  some strange place we can be certain and uncertain at the same time?   

Perhaps hope resides in uncertainty because there are things that we can not know.  We can't know the interior of another's soul.  However strong our faith, it's a misplaced faith if it pretends to be certainty about anything other than God Himself.  Not even the most comforting beliefs can really be "faith"  if they're unrevealed.  Is your loved one in Heaven?  Will you get there someday?  With few, few exceptions you cannot know, not even with perfect faith.   

And there are terrible things that might be, but aren't certain, too.  Hope is an acknowledgment of that  uncertainness.  Even perfect faith will never give us the certainty that a particular soul is lost, no matter how much we fear it might be true or even wish it were true in our darker moments. 

If hope is an uncertainty, it's a blessed uncertainty.

Spe Salvi.

I went out for breakfast this morning before anyone else awoke -- my favorite Saturday activity, now that MJ's old enough to be left behind for a few hours -- and took with me the new encyclical, finishing it over a pile of fried yuca, steak and eggs at the local Cuban diner. 

I haven't read anyone else's comments on it yet, and here's mine. 

First, it's not long -- I read half before bed and half over breakfast.  Nor is it challenging for anyone who's used to reading theology; much less challenging than Cardinal Ratzinger's academic work. 

B16 begins with a discourse about the nature of Christian hope and how it intersects with faith.   He talks about the "certainty of hope," which sounded paradoxical to me at first (isn't hope something that concerns the thing you might experience, not the thing you will experience?), but I think I get it now: through faith we have a certainty of something that will satisfy our every desire, but its nature so completely unknowable to us now that it has to reside in the realm of the desired-thing, the not-yet-realized thing, and so it is something we have hope for and not satisfaction in.  So the faith and the hope are one.   (Forgive me for my clumsy paraphrasing.  There's a reason -- okay, several -- that I don't write the encyclicals.  Go read it yourself.)

The real meat of the encyclical is paragraphs 32-48, in which Benedict describes three "settings" for learning and practicing the virtue of hope.   As I read the first, on prayer, and the second, on suffering, I was nodding and going "Oh yes," and "That's a nice way of putting it," and other mild expressions of agreement.  The third section, though, blew me away.  If you only have time to read part of the encyclical, paragraphs 41-48 are the place to go:  "Judgment as a setting for learning and practising hope."

Another paradox:  the Last Judgment as a means of inspiring hope?  As Mark said when I told him the topic, "That's, um, odd."  Most of the time, the image of the Last Judgment has been used to inspire fear.  Benedict prefers to say that it inspires "responsibility."  Intriguing! 

In those few paragraphs (only 4,159 words in length) he lays out an astonishingly concise exposition on the meaning of "images of God;" on the Christian view of history; on the tension between freely granted grace and justice for evildoers; on purgatory; on praying for the beloved dead; and  on the nature of good and evil in the human person.  If you include paragraphs 49-50 in that astonishingly concise exposition, you also get an incisive reflection on the role of Mary in all this.   So paragraphs 41 through 50 are terrific preparation for explaining some of the trickier bits of Catholic theology.   I really couldn't believe how much he packed in.  And it's all really fresh and new, at least to me. 

Anyway, you shouldn't be listening to me... read it yourself.  Form your own take on it -- and then, as I'm doing now,  see what others are saying:  Amy Welborn,  Disputations, John Allen.  Surely more is forthcoming...

"Bargaining" comes later.

THE FIVE STAGES OF READING POPE BENEDICT'S BOOKS

1. Optimism.    You pick out a book with a pleasantly elementary-sounding title.   Introduction to Christianity.  Just what you're looking for in some light summer reading.  Cheerfully you pay your $13.95, pick up a latte in the cafe, and head out into the sunshine to crack it open.  You do not even bring a pencil with you.
2. Depression.  You realize that this is a usage of the word "introduction" (and possibly of the words "to" and "Christianity" as well) of which you were previously unaware.     You go to fetch a dictionary.  And a pencil.   And another latte.
3. Epiphany.  Wait a minute!  His writing, it's --- it's so CLEAR!  You --- you --- understand.   This is some of the most brilliant stuff you've ever read!  You never thought about it that way!  Whole new avenues of thought are opening up before you!  The theological insights could change your life!  You are making notes in the margins!  You are dog-earing pages!   You will never look at your faith the same way again.  You close the book and go home to bed.
4. The morning after.   You start to tell a friend about the amazing book you are reading, and at that moment realize that you cannot remember anything you read yesterday, except the word Vaterunser.   
5. Denial.  Hmmm.  Got a long plane flight ahead of you.  This one called  In the Beginning...  sounds straightforward enough.

Next week:  the five stages of graduate-level statistical thermodynamics.

Taking off his Pope Hat.

Pope Benedict is about to publish a scholarly book on Jesus:

"Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration" is scheduled for a March release in Italian by the Rizzoli publishing house and in German by Herder Verlag.

Announcing the publication Nov. 21, Rizzoli and the Vatican gave reporters copies of the book's preface and a portion of its introduction.

In the preface, signed "Joseph Ratzinger -- Benedict XVI," the pope wrote that for decades he had noticed a growing scholarly distinction between the "historical Jesus" and the "Christ of faith," a distinction that many Christians now accept as accurate.

But, he wrote, if the human Jesus was totally different from the Jesus depicted in the Gospels and proclaimed by the church, what does it mean to have faith in him?

Jimmy Akin notices something important:

But the book is not an act of the papal magisterium, despite its author's election to the papal see:

In a Nov. 21 statement, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said, "The pope says clearly, with his usual simplicity and humility, that this is not a 'magisterial act,' but a fruit of his personal research and, as such, can be freely discussed and critiqued.

"It is not a long encyclical on Jesus, but a personal presentation of the figure of Jesus by the theologian Joseph Ratzinger," who was elected pope after beginning the work, Father Lombardi said.

This says volumes about the personal humility of the man who is now pope. To have the spiritual authority to mandate that every sentence in the book be believed by Catholics and to refuse to use it--to refuse to put forward one's own ideas authoritatively--and to instead openly say that people are free to discuss those ideas and critique them--knowing even that they will meet hostility in many scholarly circles--is the mark of an extraordinarily humble man.

How cool is that?  I'm looking forward to seeing it in English.  Correctly or not, I am imagining it as a more scholarly, less for-popular-reading, Life of Christ a la Bishop Sheen.  (Which, if you haven't read, you might select while you are waiting for Benedict's, I mean Ratzinger's, book to come out.)