Not every occupation is capable of surviving modernization. The last lighthouse keeper of Capri is about to run out of time. “But as marine navigation tools and satellite automation have become more sophisticated, the need for lighthouses and their human operators has been virtually snuffed out. In fact, with the exception of seasonal volunteers and educational guides, there are hardly any lighthouse keepers left on the planet.”

Wondering how creepy music gets creepy? It might have something to do with the devil’s interval and the Dies Irae. “This demonic combo was taboo in medieval times, though there’s no historical evidence for the popular claim that it was banned outright. Indeed, the devil’s interval was still occasionally used—though, tellingly, only in the gravest of musical circumstances.”

In what is apparently not a piece of satire, the Vatican is releasing a Pokemon Go type app… but, you know, for Jesus. “Rather than chasing after Pikachu and Squirtle, the Vatican version involves collecting saints and other Biblical figures by answering philosophical questions about them. One hypothetical query on the app’s website is ‘Who said “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”’ (Hint: it was Jesus.)”

Male politicians these days sure have a lot to say about women. Backwards women everywhere are chastised to listen up and learn, for the men are here to help. We have knowledge and have come to your assistance. For instance, who can ever forget this amazing moment where Justin Trudeau mansplains to a woman the acceptable way to use gender inclusive language and then smarmily comments on how we can all learn from each other.

To that wonderful moment that set feminism back fifty years, French President Emmanuel Macron essentially told Trudeau to hold his beer so he could roll up his sleeves and get to work. This is his masterpiece of condescension from a recent talk at the Gates Foundation: “I always say: ‘Present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight, or nine children.”

For his encore, maybe Macron can sit all the ladies down and explain to them where babies come from.

To be fair, education does have a correlation to smaller family size (or does it?), but the way Macron phrases his comment is so tone deaf that it deserves further comment. The implication is that only ignorance would cause a woman to choose to have children, and once we educate our poor, barefoot women and get them out of the kitchen, they’ll knock off all the breeding and start being more successful and rational like men out in the real world. Childless, or at least with a severely restricted family size – for that is the only rational choice – they shall be set free to put their education to good use.

I have questions, in which the above-mentioned comments may or may not be implicated:

Is it true that an educated woman would never choose to have a large family?

What value would an education, particularly a liberal arts education, have to a stay-at-home mother?

Is the education a waste if a woman doesn’t use it to earn money?

After falling into contemplative thought and pondering with all my might, it became painfully obvious to me that I am not, in fact, a female and thus have precious little perspective. Fortunately, we here at Dappled Things find ourselves surrounded by highly successful, educated women who happen to be mothers. I spend all my time ranting and raving on the internet while they’re essentially creating lasting works of creative genius. Maybe they’re a bit smarter than me? I’m going to get out of the way and let them speak:

Giving birth and nurturing children affirms that people’s value in the world isn’t reducible to their economic contribution. Pursuing higher education affirms this, too. Both choices have the potential to place women around the world in solidarity with each other. Equating large families with poverty and disempowerment does a disservice to women of all classes and economic levels everywhere.

– Katy Carl, Editor in Chief

Global Goal – Fewer children everywhere

I will use a French word so it cannot be mistranslated: largesse. Education encourages a largesse of the mind, expanding our horizons, helping us to develop an insatiable appetite for knowledge. But motherhood encourages a largesse of the heart and soul. It helps us develop an insatiable appetite for our own betterment so that we can live as good examples for our children, and an insatiable appetite to help our children become their very best selves. The largesse of motherhood is the largesse of love. Any education that taught us to put limits on our ability to grow in love was a very poor education, indeed.

– Karen Ullo, Managing Editor

The modern world values higher education to the extent that it leads to higher earnings, but thinking of wealth only in terms of dollars (or Euros) is of limited usefulness. How many mothers, when asked what their greatest treasure is, would respond “my retirement account?”

– Katherine Aparicio, Associate Editor

Speaking as a father who very much loves my six children, I can say that giving the fruit of my education to my children is the most valuable use to which I have put it. If anything, most of my reading is wasted in a world of practical application where it’s buried under pressing economic concerns and lack of space for personal contemplative progress. Education, particularly a liberal arts education, prepares us for a life well-lived. It’s an act of love, an act of faith in a world that is worth knowing more intimately. Our interaction within it, our exploration of it, our wonder before the mystery of it, opens up a whole new, undefinable, transcendent space. It naturally follows that I would not only want to gain an education to be a good father, but that my education has propelled me to actually become a father, because education itself is an expression of love. It’s as if the world is a precious jewel and I get to hold it up to the light and point out to my children all the ways the refraction leads us back to the single, inexpressible source of beauty.

Maybe education, at least the right sort of education, will actually increase the desire for children?

Go back the original article I linked to and look at all the pictures of happy, successful women with their precious families. Maybe, just maybe, these women are smart and thoughtful? Maybe they’ve made their life choices from the font of wisdom they’ve acquired through their education? As one of the women comments, “consider yourself schooled.”

As a parish priest, I often hear stories about homeschooling families who have been put through the ringer when it comes to preparing for the sacraments. Their priests indicate that they must pay for and join the required, officially sanctioned religious classes offered by the parish because they suspect the parents haven’t properly prepared the children. A priest would never demand that a parochial school child do the same. This lack of trust displays a fundamental misunderstanding of Catholic homeschoolers and denies that they are actually engaged in Catholic, religious education. Questioning the ability of parents to provide a religious education not only goes against the Church’s teaching on the primacy of parents as educators, but also displays a lack of knowledge about how well-educated homeschoolers truly are, particularly in the faith. The proof is in the statistics, a huge number of homeschoolers go on to religious vocations. 

In spite of the tremendous, proven success of homeschooling, The National Catholic Register reports that one of the working groups of bishops at the Youth Synod has concerns. The note from the group mentions that, “homeschooling can have an ideological basis,” and goes on to ask, “Are parents qualified to homeschool them?”

The problem, it seems, may not be ignorance of the community in question but the fact that homeschoolers show a reluctance to deconstruct the tradition, seem to know some Latin, and may, in fact, be willing to use it during real-life actual prayers. They love Catholicism, thus they are ideologues. Ironically, those ideologues love their bishops and priests and are great sources of strength in their parishes. This reminds me of the time I was accused of brainwashing the parish schoolchildren during the normal process of teaching the faith because I was wearing a cassock. If simply being Catholic and doing normal Catholic things is considered extreme and ideological, well, we’re just going to have to disagree.

It’s the question that really bothers me, though – Are parents qualified to teach their children?

First of all, just how successful do they have to be until that question forever disappears?

Second, we should really have some sort of shared understanding of what education is meant to achieve. Is it to become a particularly well-paid cog in a globalist-capitalist economy? Are schools simply training grounds for the next generation of compliant wage-earners? If so, sure, let’s go ahead and pack the classrooms with ipads and standardized tests and get an expert in educational theory to load those precious little minds up with the tools they need to grab a coveted spot in a nice cubicle near the water cooler for fifty years of middle-management bliss. No offense to anybody intended, we all do what we have to do to earn a living, but is this how we want to define success in life? Is it the best possible reason to why we read books and learn and explore?

Education is not and cannot be primarily concerned with merely functional activity, it is about developing a capacity for happiness. It is about learning to recognize the beautiful and the good and then to form young souls to be receptive to that beauty, to achieve inner harmony and virtue. Education is poetry. Education seeks sainthood.

My children are homeschooled. They read novels all day long. The boys play with Legos. The girls do extravagant macrame crafting projects. They bake cupcakes and make pancakes. My daughter recently created an entire unicorn costume with nothing more than scrap fabric and a sewing machine. My son plays the piano in fits and spurts all day long and when he can’t sit still and focus he gets a quick break to dig a hole in the backyard. Perhaps more important is what they don’t do. They don’t get bullied. They don’t stare vacantly into space while waiting for the rest of the class to catch up on the lesson. They don’t feel marginalized and stupid when they’re the ones who have fallen behind. They don’t wake up in the dark and wait for a bus in freezing cold and then fall asleep at night exhausted while trying to complete unnecessary homework.

Through homeschooling, our children have been given their childhood back. The simple fact of allowing them to be human beings gives them space to learn far more than they would in any other context. When education is in harmony with the soul, learning and education becomes a passion, not a chore, and our children learn with very little effort. Most important, while they skip around the house memorizing multiplication tables, they are happy.

This may seem overly romantic, to claim that this is how education can work and for an average child no expert educators are necessary, but there is great wisdom in the Church’s perennial teaching that parents are the primary educators of their children. This is because children are master imitators, and who better to imitate than their very own parents? Education is based primarily on watching and mimicking parents. They pray with us. Cook with us. Read with us. Play music with us. They learn to socialize with a diverse range of people by listening in during dinner parties. They learn to love virtue by first being loved by us.

I’m not making this stuff up. It’s all there in John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, Plato’s Republic, and any number of explications of classical education. Plato talks at length about how children are naturally influenced and shaped by those around them. It makes sense that I, as their father, would want those influences to be me and their mother. No one loves them more than us, so no one should influence them more than us. No one can prepare their souls to be more receptive to all that which is beautiful, noble, and true than us.

The world can be an ugly place. It can be harsh and prosaic, dominated by power and politics, and overwhelmed by a functional view of existence. Education isn’t meant to suit us to win in such an environment, education is meant to open us up to possibilities beyond such limited thinking. It’s time to honor those parents who are able and willing to do so, by whatever educational means they choose. Particularly in our parochial schools, how can we invite more involvement from parents?

Parents are uniquely well equipped to teach their children. They are the experts. The question really should be: How can we support homeschooling, and how can we learn lessons from them for our parochial schools to imitate?

Ask any group of reasonably well-read Catholics to name a living Catholic horror writer, and, since the death of William Peter Blatty early last year, the only one they can usually come up with is Dean Koontz. (I should know. I’ve made the experiment on multiple occasions.) But during the past decade or so, as we have seen a small but intentional movement toward the cultivation of Catholic fiction, a few brave authors have begun to delve into the darker side of the spiritual realm and still emerge with their faith unscathed, or even strengthened. If you’re looking for good stories to send shivers up your spine that will not leave you in the depths of atheistic despair, the authors below are worth checking out.

Tim Powers is an acknowledged master of fantasy with dozens of novels and short story collections. His work has inspired spin-off video games and even the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film. He’s also a practicing Catholic. At a talk he gave last year, which I attended, Powers said, “Any reader who goes looking for specifically Catholic fiction would be a bit at a loss with my books.” He went on to say, “What fantasy fiction does is to literalize metaphors… To un-literalize all of our stuff defeats the purpose of the genre… but of course, any story can serve both purposes.” In other words, you may have to do some metaphorical thinking to find the Catholic themes. Powers writes primarily “secret histories,” that is, history reimagined as if the real events had in fact been shaped by supernatural forces. Just skimming the list of his novels, you’ll see words like voodoo, zombies, psychic vampire, magic, werewolf… in other words, a little something for every creepy taste.

Eleanor Bourg Nicholson is one of our former editors here at Dappled Things. Her novel, A Bloody Habit, was released by Ignatius Press this summer. My full review is forthcoming in our next issue, but suffice it to say, it’s Victorian skepticism and Dominican vampire slayers at their best. As Nicholson said in a recent interview with Catholic World Report, “If evil isn’t evil, and sin isn’t sin, and vampires aren’t vampires, the thrill of the Gothic is reduced to lame angst. I find angst very boring indeed.” There is nothing boring about A Bloody Habit, and I’ve heard rumors that she’s working on a sequel with werewolves!

Andrew Seddon is an author who comes highly recommended to me, but whose work I have not yet had a chance to explore. However, the brief glance I took at the samples available on Amazon convinced me that I need to move him up on my To Read list. Seddon is the only author featured here who has not written a vampire novel. (What can I say? Vampires drink blood to achieve immortality. It’s a trope that resonates with Catholic imaginations.) Instead, Seddon prefers good, old-fashioned ghost stories. He has three collections of spooky short stories, Tales from the Brackenwood Ghost Club, What Darkness Remains, and In Death Survive. He also writes science fiction, historical fiction, and devotionals.

Lastly, there’s me, which I mention because if you go looking for work in this tiny niche of Catholic-themed horror stories, my name will probably come up. My own contribution to the genre is my 2015 novel Jennifer the Damned, published by Wiseblood Books. It’s about an orphan vampire raised by nuns. Like Nicholson, I’m not a fan of modern quasi-vampires. Jennifer kills people. Things get messy. Metaphors are literalized.

If you know of Catholics or other Christians who are writing quality chilling tales, please share them with us in the comments! (I’m looking at you, Orthodox brothers and sisters. Vampires came from your neck of the woods.) The realm of the Gothic is fertile soil for the Christian imagination, but for a reader, it can be daunting to try to find the wheat hidden among the detritus of chaff. I hope this helps.

Happy haunting!

In the early, 1860s, Louisa May Alcott was working on her latest masterpiece. That’s right, Pauline’s Passion and Punishment, a sordid little tale of revenge and romance. Here’s the glorious first paragraph:

To and fro, like a wild creature in its cage, paced that handsome woman, with bent head, locked hands, and restless steps. Some mental storm, swift and sudden as a tempest of the tropics, had swept over her and left its marks behind. As if in anger at the beauty now proved powerless, all ornaments had been flung away, yet still it shone undimmed, and filled her with a passionate regret. A jewel glittered at her feet, leaving the lace rent to shreds on the indignant bosom that had worn it; the wreaths of hair that had crowned her with a woman’s most womanly adornment fell disordered upon shoulders that gleamed the fairer for the scarlet of the pomegranate flowers clinging to the bright meshes that had imprisoned them an hour ago; and over the face, once so affluent in youthful bloom, a stern pallor had fallen like a blight, for pride was slowly conquering passion, and despair had murdered hope.

Here are some helpful reviews from Goodreads:

“I love several of Louisa May Alcott’s other works. Pauline’s Passion, unfortunately, is not one of them.”

“Definitely not my favorite Alcott book. I couldn’t stand to give her a two star rating, though.”

“I found I did not like Pauline at all, and she certainly deserves punishment.”

We’re a long way from Little Women.

Little Women, in fact, hadn’t been written yet. Mostly because Louisa May Alcott didn’t want to write it. She knew that most of her work to date was “rubbish,” but still, when her publisher proposed that she give up writing pulp and devote her skills to the March family, she considered it a moral tale lacking in artistry. I believe the exact quote is, “moral pap for the young.”

Once started, though, she fell in love with the novel – or, at least, it appears that she fell in love with Jo, who is hesitant to marry and appears to share Alcott’s taste for pulp fiction – and worked on the story day and night, completing it in a mere ten weeks. This was typical behavior for Alcott, who probably suffered from mental illness. She would refer to her episodes as a descent of the “horrors,” and they often had her swinging into manic periods of intense creativity before plunging into suicidal thoughts.

A lot of other people liked Little Women, too, because it sold quickly and made Alcott rich and famous. It has been made several times into films, including this 1980 anime version, and the latest remake is now playing over at PBS, This one stars Lea Thompson and I’ve read that it takes liberties with the text, but sometimes it’s quite interesting to watch what choices the writers and actors make in that regard.

I suppose what’s so fascinating about Little Women is that it has a veneer of a simple, moral tale, but the illusion only holds at the surface. I remember reading it when I was about nine years old and it seemed easy enough to comprehend even for a child at that age, but underneath the polished writing and sentimentality swirls a vortex of feminism, madness, and uncertainty. As she’s speaking with Laurie, Amy pulls back the curtain for a moment: “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you’d imagine.”

Little Women endures not because it is a straightforward coming-of-age tale, those are a dime-a-dozen, but it endures because it’s deceptively complex in a way that defies us at first read to take it all in. This, I suspect is why remakes continue to be made and the story is so adaptable. As Alcott writes, it is full of “good strong words that mean something.”