Keeping Catholicism in Focus
Jack and Michael attended the annual FOCUS conference in Chicago last week. I'd heard of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students but didn't know much about it. From what I gather, FOCUS is hired [by university parishes?] to evangelize the university's Catholic students. I'm greatly impressed by what I see. If you don't want to lose your Catholic kid to the secularist idiots, pick a public university with a FOCUS presence or a strong Newman Center, then encourage them to get involved. They're more likely to keep their Catholic identity at such a place than they would at, say, Georgetown or Boston College.
I listened to a ton of podcasts during my flu convalescence. Well, "listen" might be a bit exaggerated. I had them running non-stop, figuring it might bode well for me if I were listening to a priest when the angel of death came for me. Relevant Radio really came through with its great app.
I also watched a lot of TV. By Friday evening, I was sick and tired of TV, but I did discover that Netflix currently has the entire modern Father Brown series among its offerings. I'll be checking out some of those episodes during the coming months.
I also made headway into the new season of Peaky Blinders, which might be my favorite TV show of all time. Great stuff. The family featured
in the show are part Romani (gypsy). I didn't know much about gypsies. My only exposure to them was in 1983, when I was working at K-Mart. The manager called an emergency meeting to inform everyone that a neighboring K-Mart called to warn them that they had just been hit by gypsies and that, if the caravan came to our store, no one could take lunch or breaks until the threat was over. A large group of gypsies, it was explained to me, would descend on K-Marts, create disturbances (customer complaints, mock fist fights, etc.), then rob the store blind while staff tried to deal with the disturbances. I'll never forget the absolute disdain on my managers' faces. It was obvious they had seen it before and/or been trained to deal with a well-known problem. So anyway, I checked out the Wikipedia entry about them. It's fairly interesting.
