Last day of PTO, and I spent it doing all of those fiddly things that I never have time for during the rest of the year: rearranging and cleaning a bit of the office, planting seeds I want to germinate outdoors, running stuff to the dump, that sort of thing. All the other to-do stuff got to-done. The only thing I didn’t get to was the garage, which can wait. Still enjoying Absolution and we are having a lot of fun with Bad Monkey. Lots of weird/gonzo Florida in the air around here in the dead of winter, which seems about right.
A low-key NYE for us: served at the vigil mass, lots of tacos, and a colossal bonfire which has become a tradition. A toast at midnight, then off to sleep. Puttering around with house cleaning today and catching up on the horrible news out of New Orleans. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis
We pledge that the Catholic Church in Kentucky and Tennessee will continue to accompany and serve migrants with every possible resource. We will continue to advocate for your just treatment and dignity as our Catholic Social Teaching instructs in every way that we are able to do so.
The Church recognizes the right of individuals to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their family members. The Church also recognizes the responsibility of nations to control their borders and create migration policies. However, the Church teaches that this right is not unlimited and must be exercised with respect for the human dignity of each person and the common good.
The Church in the United States has long advocated for comprehensive immigration reform that includes pathways to citizenship, family reunification, and protections for those fleeing persecution. It emphasizes the need for just and humane treatment of all migrants, including access to legal protections, and due process. The Church recognizes that basic human rights are based on the dignity of being created in the image and likeness of God.
from “Statement of the Bishops of the Province of Louisville on the Feast of the Holy Family,” 2024
Santa keeping things full throttle for me this year
Currently reading: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer 📚
Currently reading: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 📚
Essays on eschatology and salvation turned in. Need to do one more small project to close out another class and I’m done until late January.
Somebody figured out the connections in the Beatrix Potter story universe and the graph is just delightful. (h/t MetaFilter)
This post is a round-up of tools and tidbits that have been useful to me over the last four years of formation. If you are in discernment for the diaconate or in the midst of aspirancy, some of these things might be useful to you. Diocesan programs can obviously vary from place to place.
If your formation program includes access to a library - especially a seminary library - take the time to become familiar with the various databases available for access. Many times, things that are not available in one database are actually sitting in another one. Some of them will give you online access to complete books, though the path to getting there might not be immediately obvious. My first go-tos tended to be Atla, JSTOR, IxTheo, and the Oxford eBook collection, but access and mileage varies according to your particular institution.
We had a “get acquainted” session with the librarian at one point early on, but I don’t think I really got the hang of online research until I was in my third year. Our librarians can also get scans of physical texts if they’re in the holdings but not online and can usually turn around requests very quickly.
Familiarize yourself with any in-house style guides. The individual instructors will tell you in their syllabi what, if any, formatting expectations they have, but it’s very good to know what the institution expects as well. St. Meinrad’s in-house guide is largely based on Turabian, with some important deviations peculiar to theological texts, biblical citations, magisterial documents, and primary sources. In some cases, they defer to the style guide used by Liturgical Press (abbreviations and so forth). Refer to these guides early and often as you’re writing, particularly anything around citations. Get used to doing things according to the institution’s way, and life will be easier.
If it’s been several years since you’ve been in school (and who among us, amirite), find a blank MLA template for Word (or LibreWriter) and use it for all your short-form stuff. If you’re a weirdo, you can find MLA templates in LaTeX. I nearly wrote my closure papers in LaTeX, but I couldn’t work out some tiny quirk with footnote formatting, so I dropped back to LibreWriter
For formal papers, getting a handle on citations is a must. There will be lots of them, and I found Zotero invaluable. If you’re familiar with Mendeley, you should be able to pick up Zotero pretty quickly, and the price is right: it’s free. Both are databases for tracking research sources. You can annotate PDFs in Zotero, which connects to Word and LibreWriter for inserting citations and auto-generating bibliographies. Once you get the workflow down, using it is a breeze. I have saved almost everything I’ve read for school (as well as all the books I’ve bought) in my Zotero database.
Grammarly has been invaluable in correcting some bad habits. I have also used Claude to review papers for flow and structure. A prompt I used recently went something like this and turned out to be very useful in tightening up a few things.
This essay is for a masters-level theology course I am completing as part of my preparation for ordination to the diaconate. I would like suggestions regarding structure, flow, and any minor grammatical or spelling errors. I want to leave the text as intact as possible, so please do not suggest substantive changes beyond structural/organizational, or the grammar errors I have already mentioned. If you have other suggestions beyond what I have specified, inquire first before showing them to me so that I can opt to decline seeing them.
Quizlets are useful for generating flash-cards and practice tests. Basic, limited access is free. We also used Google Docs to collaborate on study guides for tests.
If you need to suss out a piece of music real quick, but can’t read sheet music well, Sheet Music Scanner might be worth a look. Take a picture of the music, give it a second, and it plays it back to you. This has been especially useful for the weekends when I get assigned as cantor for mass.