Parts of Speaking Publishing

 I have noticed I'm getting a lot of social media input on "so-called" trauma, estranged families, adult children who have rejected their parents, and toxic therapy.  I remember in higher education circles, about six months to a year after March 13, 2020, we started to hear about 'trauma-informed pedagogy." It was all the rage. I hope it helped someone. I thought it was a bit much.  There is trauma perceived and trauma objectively experienced.  Physical assault, personal watching of physical assault and murder, injury from accidents or war, severe illness, psychological abuse - these are trauma. Those who saw, on site, Charlie Kirk's murder, yes.  Being contradicted, hearing about abuse, hearing bigotry when the person who spoke it is unaware or out of date on certain terminology. Those who watched the Charlie Kirk murder over and over on social media feeds, that is self-inflicted trauma.  Trauma is real, but like stress, it affects people differently. And ...

 From a Christianity Today update:  The archaeological excavation of Colossae has  begun . The ancient city was a significant settlement at least 500 years before Christ, but Colossae is most famous as the home of the early church that received two New Testament epistles: Paul’s letters to the Colossians and to Philemon. The excavation, supervised by experts from Pamukkale University, may shed light on the “human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world” (Col. 2:8) that Paul worried would distract Christians from the truth that “God made you alive with Christ” (v. 13). When we visited Laodicea, we could see Colosse, the source of the "cold water" on a distant mountain slope. I wondered why it was not a site being excavated. It is not a working city now, but neither are Ephesus and Laodicea. This should be part of the Seven Churches Tour! 

 From The Free Press today, in an article on "what I learned"  Emily Damari ,  freed Israeli hostage Firstly, God. I have learned I have a very strong relationship with God, and I had many conversations with Him in captivity. This relationship continues today. I have also learned to value everything I do in my life. I open the fridge: I say thank you. I drink cold water: I say thank you. I am thankful for everything—big things and little things. Gratitude is very important. I am grateful that I have the privilege of being thankful. I was thankful before, but now it’s on a different level.

  Another not-written-by-me and I may be violating something here. I recently subscribed to the Free Press and it does not disappoint. This well-known and respected Catholic priest gets it right.  Forwarded this email?  Subscribe for more Things Worth Remembering Sunday, 12.28.2025 View in Browser Things Worth Remembering: The Divine Beauty of Imperfection Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ teaches us to see in every speckled, contradictory thing an icon of the God who did not disdain to be born among humanity. “The incarnation is a declaration that God delights in intimacy with his creation.” (Rudolf Dietrich/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images) By  Robert A. Sirico PAID Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, during the 12 Days of Christmas, Father Robert A. Sirico explains how Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” tells the season’s quietly revolutionary story...

This essay popped up on my Facebook feed. I have read this book, and what is said eloquently here is true. No name was given for the author. I hope it's not AI. It has too much empathy to be AI. Georges Bernanos wrote this in 1936, and it's one of the strangest, most unsettling novels about faith I've ever read. Not faith as triumph or certainty, but faith as a kind of sustained suffering, a daily choice to keep believing when nothing confirms that belief, when your body is failing, when your parishioners despise you, when God feels absent and you're too exhausted to keep searching. The unnamed priest writes in his diary, and you watch him disintegrate page by page. And Bernanos never flinches, never offers comfort, never suggests that suffering will be rewarded. He just shows you a man dying slowly while trying to love people who don't want his love. The priest is young, sickly, poor, assigned to a small parish in northern France where nobody wants him. He eats mos...

  Paganism may have some value. The Old Testament and New are a chronicle of a struggle between paganism (nature-based deities rather than one God over all and unbound by nature), idolatry (worshiping before statues, pictures, and figures as if the god is in the idol) and polytheism (multiple lesser gods) and a a monotheistic narrative about a Father God who sends His Son to redeem us. There are many descriptive lines in the monotheistic narrative. In my life, everything that is non-monotheistic or non-Judeo-Christian is evil. It leads to horrible treatment of others and children, for example. I am not saying the non-monotheistic is good, but that there may be good that comes from it. One, it has rich narratives in the mythologies. Two, those narratives explain human conditions. Three, we can appreciate nature if we keep the occult parts paganism (tied into nature) in check. And we can see the limitations of it and how Judeo-Christianity fulfills it. This is not new; C S L...