Association Of Catholic Bloggers

All pictures in this post are from the book Little Acts of Grace by Rosemarie Gortler and Donna Piscitelli. Illustrations are drawn by Mimi Sternhagen. I highly recommend this book for Catholic parents who want to teach their children about many aspects of the faith and their meaning. Let's face it, it's not always easy to attend Mass with children.  Sometimes you leave feeling more like you were engaged in battle than having spent an hour in the highest form of prayer in which we Catholics can participate.  In a way, you are engaged in the battle for your child's soul.  When we go to Mass, we are asked to leave the world behind for awhile and focus on the spiritual.  Even children can begin to sense these eternal truths long before they can fully understand them. As parents and the first educators of our children, we are called to teach them the Catholic faith.  How do we go about this with unreasonable toddlers, unruly preschoolers, and ...

Those who enjoyed Nancy Bilyeau's debut historical novel The Crown will find its sequel The Chalice   even more heart-wrenching and suspenseful. Once again we follow the adventures of former Dominican novice Joanna Stafford as she is torn from her peaceful country life and thrust into the maelstrom of Tudor-era intrigue. Having survived the dissolution of the monasteries, Joanna is trying to start a tapestry business in order to earn her living, when suddenly her wealthy and prominent Courtenay cousins arrive in town. They take her to stay with them in their mysterious old house in London where Joanna soon discovers that people and situations are not always what they seem. To her great discomfiture, it is revealed to Joanna that she is the key figure in a prophecy, a prophecy which pursues her wherever she goes. In the meantime, she struggles to keep her Catholic faith in a hostile environment, as well as deal with temptations of the flesh. It is not always clear to me what Jo...

This post is part of an occasional series called Finding God in Children's Liter ature , in which I look at children's books in light of the Bible and Sacred Tradition. All correlations between these books and the Christian faith are my own insights, unless otherwise noted. You may quote me or link to these posts, but please do not re-blog them or use these ideas as though they were your own. Thank you. Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss is the story of a proud and power-hungry reptile. He starts out as king of a pond of turtles. Unsatisfied with that, he commands his subjects to stand on one another's' shells in a stack, while he climbs to the top. The stack of turtles keeps growing, despite the protests of the turtle on the bottom, named Mack. Yertle believes he is king of all he can see, so the higher his throne of turtles goes, the more powerful he becomes. Eventually, he over steps and the stack of turtles collapses. At last, Yertle is only King of t...