Odd and Ends

Hello, my friends!

Just popping in to relink last year's Catholic Christmas shopping aid, from Catholic sellers! I hope all the links still work, ha ha:

Catholic gifts from Catholic vendors!

ALSO:

If you would like signed copies of either of my books in time for Christmas gift-giving, please get that order to me this week, so I can send them out in plenty of time! My email is on the side of the blog, or you can email me at primalloss@gmail.com

If you want them signed and personalized, DON'T buy them from Amazon! Email me. And even if you don't want them signed but want a "CyberMonday" discount, email me. :) Otherwise, buy them at Amazon for full price. ;)

Aaaaaand.....


EXCITING NEWS: I'm busy working on a book with Trent Horn (best Catholic apologist in the universe, and he works for Catholic Answers), which will show you exactly how to talk to your children (both little and big!) about each of the tough moral issues we are facing in the culture today. If you could pray for our endeavor, I would appreciate it so much!



Meanwhile, here is the single best article I have read to date about what is happening in our culture, especially with regard to the scourge of "identity politics" (which many young and faithful Catholics have fallen into, aka, the "social justice warriors") and its connection to the breakdown of the family (which is at the crux of so much of the disaster we see all around us):

Where the Revolution Has Lead: 

An Interview with Mary Eberstadt 

Here's an excerpt:

Q. To millennials, and I speak as one, intentional self-definition feels like the natural mode of being. It's what we do on social media without even realizing it. Has that not always been so? Aren't existential crises a long-running theme in the past century of modernity? Have they changed, or heightened?

A. What’s changed is not human nature – everyone asks the same questions about identity. But the familial circumstances in which many contemporary souls now find ourselves are radically changed, and make that quintessentially human question harder to answer.

For most of history, that question, “Who am I?” was answered first in the context of the family: I am a daughter, I am a cousin, a grandmother, a niece, and so on. Identity of a most obvious and unquestionable kind was provided by how any given individual was situated within the family into which he was born. If you didn’t know anything else, you at least knew that.

As of the Pill, though, and its promise of consequence-free sex, family relations have changed fundamentally – and with them, familial identity. Modern contraceptives increased the temptation to people-shop, because so many more people were now sexually available. Bonds like marriage, which once had been seen by most people as immutable, were (and are) extraordinarily strained by this massive sexual consumerism.

As a result, many people now regard “family” as a voluntary association, rather than a primordial set of bonds. That’s why we have such high rates of divorce and single motherhood – higher than ever before in history: because as of the sexual revolution, many people have behaved as if the family is negotiable, rather than given.

In the essay, I give examples of just some of the resulting confusion out there. Are you a stepsister? That depends. What if your mother and your “stepsister’s” father were married once -- and aren’t anymore? Are you still related to that person? What if they were never married in the first place, and you were just living with your mother’s boyfriend’s daughter? Would you have considered her a “stepsister” at all?

Similarly: is that my grandfather? Well, if he’s your mother’s father, probably yes. But what if he’s someone who married your grandmother after she divorced your original grandfather – what then? And so on.

Add to all of these novel existential quandaries the related fact that the family has shrunk, and you can readily see what distinguishes us from our ancestors: we have fewer attachments to family than they did, and the ones that we do have are, for many of us, in constant flux.

How is a communal animal – man – supposed to derive identity from his first community, the family, at such a time? That’s where the barely suppressed hysteria behind today’s identity politics is really coming from, I think: confusion and loneliness and familial deprivation.

Read it all here. 

Miss you guys!!!! xoxoxoxo