Association Of Catholic Bloggers

This is our firstborn son. Today about 3:30 he was hit by a red SUV. He was walking his bike across a crosswalk. A good friend of his had just crossed with his bike. The SUV driver didn't see him. The driver's van rammed into our son. The van's decorative grille hit him in the shoulder and knee. He slammed to the ground over his bike. He stood up almost immediately and walked to a parking lot.  Read more here...

Those of us who grew up in the United States and attended public schools probably remember reading Harper Lee's novel about racial justice and human dignity "To Kill a Mockingbird" sometime during our middle or high school years. I read it in middle school; most of my classmates were white and a few were African Americans. Now, as a high school English teacher, I am reading this story with students whose faces reflect every continent on the globe. This experience shows me how reading beautiful books can help us recognize universal truths that transcend time and place and culture. Read more here:

It's been quite a week. Nothing is wrong. It's just been a week filled with work and more work, then parenting and housekeeping and hardly anytime to sleep or to think. And so by the time today rolled in, I was bone tired. My high school juniors, who take a yearlong course in British Literature, have moved on from the Anglo-Saxon Era into the Middle Ages. We're reading Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. So, given the week and the subject matter, don't you think it makes sense during the last class on the last day of a long week to dance? Read more here...

Delighted to discover someone passing by had taped my friend's son while he was visiting Picadilly Circus with his American family. Gabriel is the youngest of four boys.  -Allison Salerno

By Allison Salerno Last night, when I walked into a house with our teen in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York City, I saw something I've never witnessed: a living room with 30, no maybe 40 happy teenagers, playing guitars and singing. This was a 17th birthday party for a young man in GS (Gioventù Studentesca), the youth group of CL (Communion and Liberation. ) The happy birthday boy was at the electric piano, with his father by his side on the guitar. Where does all this beauty come from? To me, it is a sign of the Holy Spirit moving among us.

By Allison Salerno  The creature emerging from our nearly 12-year-old younger son is something we already are raising: a teenager. Living as a peri-menopausal woman with two instead of one moody boy in a family, however, is different than coping with one. Already this morning they were bickering before breakfast over who had to walk the dog. Later, a hungry 14-year-old walked by and grabbed waffles off the breakfast plate of the 11-year-old, who is hungry All. The. Time. ("Mom, you've been telling me for years I am about to have a growth spurt"). And it wasn't even 9 a.m. As any parent knows, every child is different. The teen years of our first, a reflective, artistic soul, are going to be much different, I imagine, than that of our family's lone extrovert, who always has had a posse of pals and "met" the principal on his first day of middle school. (The details are dim but something about storming the cafeteria doors when the students