In which I introduce you to Jen-Tron, and give you cool stuff to read about faith and science
Sara Mahoney has a cool blog called Losing It Together, where she and her husband write about getting healthy together. We recently had an email chat about my experience with food addiction, and how changing what I ate changed my life (or, put another way: how I killed off my alter ego, Jen-Tron the Eating Machine). She posted the short interview here if you’d like to check it out. Thanks to Sara for the idea, and for asking great questions!
Speaking of which, here’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about:
You’ll notice in the interview that I once again plugged The Perfect Health Diet. As I’ve mentioned before, this was the book that made it all click for me. I’ve read approximately three billion books on the subject of nutrition, and I found this one to be the best. It’s written by two Ph.D. scientists who went on a personal quest to overcome some illnesses they were struggling with and achieve optimum health. A bit about their backgrounds:
Paul Jaminet, Ph.D. Paul was an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, became a software entrepreneur during the Internet boom, and now provides strategic advice to entrepreneurial companies while pursuing research in economics (see pauljaminet.com for more information). Paul’s experience overcoming a chronic illness has been key to our views of aging and disease. [...]
Shou-Ching Shih Jaminet, Ph.D. Shou-Ching is a molecular biologist and cancer researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, and Director of BIDMC’s Multi-Gene Transcriptional Profiling Core. [...]
What I love about the book is that it’s written more like a doctoral thesis than a glitzy diet book. Rather than trying to strong-arm you to adopt their opinions through emotional stories or scare tactics, they simply talk about the research they did and explain why they found some arguments more compelling than others.
Anyway, I’ve also become a big fan of the authors’ blog, so imagine my delight when I saw this post on Good Friday. Even more cool was the ensuing discussion, where Paul Jaminet offered an excellent defense of the idea that not only are faith and science not incompatible, but that faith leads to better science. Definitely worth a read.
If you’re interested in hearing more about that topic, you absolutely must go get a copy of Br. Guy Consolmagno’s talk, Why Does the Pope Have an Astronomer?, in which he goes into detail about this idea that adherents to the monotheistic religions do the best science. He also has an interesting (and funny) talk you can watch on Youtube called The Religious Life of Techies.
Enjoy!
7 Quick Takes Friday
It’s all you today! I’m here at the EWTN studios for LOTR and won’t have time to write my own quick takes. Here is the view from my bedroom at the guest house:
It’s especially cool after reading Mother Angelica’s biography. To see all those satellite dishes is to witness the power of what one faithful person can do when she makes the decision to fully, unreservedly turn her life over to God.
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 169)
I’m flying out for that filming of LOTR next week, and I’m worried that I haven’t been getting enough mileage out of the fact that Life on the Rock uses the same acronym as the Lord of the Rings. I’ve tried my best to work it into conversation, but I’ve found that the acronym thing just doesn’t work that well when it’s spoken. When I say, “Hey, I’m going to be part of L-O-T-R!” people don’t make the connection between the Lord of the Rings acronym, they wonder why I didn’t just say the name of the show, and it’s weird. Then I tried doing it in writing. I told a friend “I’ll be at the LOTR studio on Thursday — hope I don’t run into any hobbits!” and she was like, “Why would there be hobbits? I thought it was run by the friars of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word.”
This has become a high priority for me, as I will feel like this whole trip to Birmingham will have been an incomplete experience if I don’t get at least one good LOTR joke out of it.
AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!
We’re moving. I don’t know where to, we’re just…moving. Don’t be shocked if I and my five kids show up at your house tomorrow and ask if we can crash at your place for a while.
GRRRNNNNAAAAAGHHHHHHHPT!!!!!!!
[That last take was my attempt to convey the sound of a shriek of mortal terror-anger-despair. Not sure if I quite captured it.]
Right after I finished typing take #1, my son was stung in the face by a scorpion while he was sitting on the couch. I will not be able to write anything else today, because I need to go stare at my couch and scream. If you would like more details, you can see the blow-by-blow tweets from this afternoon, or just wait for the epic post that is sure to follow.
For your viewing pleasure, I took a video of what happened after I hosed this thing down with Raid. AFTER. See? It’s like it liked it! I daresay this thing was frolicking on my chair, just waiting for a tophat and cane to do a little rendition of Singing in the Raid. (By the way, you should probably watch it on mute. I didn’t entirely intend to put it on my blog when I decided to hit that Record button on my phone, and thus I cannot be held responsible for anything I said during the filming.)
UPDATE: No, I have no idea what that green goo is that you can see on the back of the chair at :20.
UPDATE #2: Dorian Speed‘s review of my directorial debut is in:
I watched your short film. I am still processing my trauma. Gritty realism; horror; impotence as Raid proves worse than useless. I felt I was THERE.
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 168)
I have a Malcolm update for you, and it’s awesome: This family has committed to adopt him! The money you have donated will help them in this process, so THANK YOU for your generosity. You can see a breakdown here of the overwhelming financial burden they still face, so please keep them in your prayers, and, if you feel moved, drop them a few buck through their PayPal button on their sidebar. Again: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
When I wrote about fasting from artificial light in the Register a while back, I got a ton of interesting responses. One of my favorites was from a dad who told me about this family tradition that they’ve been doing for 30 years:
We turn off the light when we leave for Holy Thursday Mass and don’t turn them on again until we return from the Saturday Easter Vigil at around midnight on Saturday.
We got the idea when our parish turned off the lights and had us exit in silence on Holy Thursday. And we entered at the Easter Vigil in darkness which continued until the Gloria. And, of course, Good Friday services were held during the daytime so lighting was not a main focus. So we got the idea to practically “live” this period when Jesus the “light of the world” was taken away from us.
I think we might try this this year. Anyone else going to give it a shot?
So, uhh, yeah. Holy Week next week. Wow. As I’ve mentioned, this hasn’t been the most powerful Lent I’ve ever experienced. I set the bar embarrassingly low in terms of the sacrifices I would make and the practices I would undertake…and still managed not to hit it. But! The good news is that it’s never too late to let God transform you. Besides, there’s still Holy Week! I’m hoping to set everything else aside and just focus on the Lord next Thursday and Friday. If you could say a prayer for that intention (i.e. that “focusing on the Lord” doesn’t turn into “focusing on the Lord…after I check email, and, hey, look at all this funny stuff on Twitter!”) I’d appreciate it.
Lately I’ve been oddly intrigued by a medieval devotion called The Fifteen Oes, a.k.a. the Fifteen Prayers of St. Bridget. The story I heard (which I am not sure is correct) is that St. Bridget was praying about our Lord’s passion, and she was told in a vision that he received 5,475 injuries to his body. The idea behind the 15 Oes is that if you pray them daily for a year, you’ll have honored every one of the wounds of Christ (15 x 365 = 5,475).
Again, I don’t know if that story is accurate. However, I love the prayers, in that each time you go through them you meditate on 15 different aspects of Christ’s sufferings. I’ve read comments from around the internet from folks who said that they found it to be powerful to commit to praying the 15 Oes every day for a certain length of time, even if it wasn’t for a whole year. I think I may include this in my Holy Week devotions.
A while back I went through a long phase of reading nonfiction adventure stories (a la Over the Edge of the World and Skeletons in the Zahara), and that got me interesting in the subject of castaways. You would not believe all the crazy castaway stories that are out there! Here’s a fascinating article about wayward ships drifting from Japan to the U.S. back in the 19th Century, and here is a Wikipedia roundup of famous castaway stories. This one is one of my favorites:
In June 1722, [Philip] Ashton was captured by pirates while fishing near the coast of Nova Scotia…He managed to escape in March 1723 when the pirates landed at Roatán Island in the Bay Islands of Honduras, hiding in the jungle until the pirates decided to depart without him. He survived for 16 months, in spite of many insects, tropical heat and alligators. In the beginning he seems to have eaten only fruit, because he only had his hands to collect food; he could not kill any animal. He had no equipment at all until he met another castaway, an Englishman. A few days later the Englishman “went out but he never returned.” The Englishman left behind a knife, gunpowder, tobacco and more. Ashton could now kill tortoises and crayfish and make fires to have hot meals. Ashton was finally rescued by the Diamond, a ship from Salem, Massachusetts.
Whoa, whoa, WHOA. Wait. While he was a castaway in what was then remote jungles at the edge of the civilized world…he happened to run into another Englishman?! How crazy is that? How did the other Englishman get there? How did they begin that conversation when they first ran into each other? I’m going to need someone to please write a compelling historical nonfiction epic about this. Thanks.
Tomorrow (Saturday, March 31) I’m speaking in Houston at a women’s retreat for St. Cecilia parish. I’m going to be talking about how how fear prevents us from living our lives to the fullest — a subject with which I have plenty of personal experience. Can’t wait!
Simcha recently posted her favorite songs for Lent. I’m not educated enough to have multiple suggestions; after about two I’d start digging into power ballads from the 1980s. But I will say that no Lent is complete without listening to Dum Transisset Sabbatum, sung by the Tallis Scholars, at least once.
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Apologies to Beth Anne, Jen, Priest’s Wife, Genny, Ann-Marie, Barbara, Katie, Kaylene, Ana, and Blair, who were the first 10 to link up but whose links got deleted due to a technical glitch. Sorry about that!