A Carpe Diem Snapshot:
This morning we are preparing the house for the final gathering of the Tolkien Book Club, discussing The Return of the King. In this photo, taken yesterday, Valentina is looking up at a book gifted to me by my Dad when I was a child. Perhaps he had some kind of foresight that my own daughter would become a Tolkien fan and that this book would be useful in our homeschool. Another book that I am finding very useful in the quest to better understand the depth of Tolkien's thought is Stratford Caldecott's A Secret Fire. I shared a bit about Caldecott's Tolkien scholarship in a blog post recently and hope to write more on this very soon in an article entitled "Tolkien in Rome."
Liturgical: Saturday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time
“Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
Bishop Barron's Gospel reflections.
Sanctoral: Saint Joan of the Cross, France +1736
Ireland celebrates the Memorial of Our Lady of Knock, celebrating the apparition of Our Lady, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, a Lamb and cross on an altar on the wall of the parish church in the village of Knock in County Mayo on August 21, 1879.
St. Beatrice of Silva (1424-1492), also known as Beatriz da Silva y de Menezes and as Beatriz de Menezes da Silva, was a noblewoman of Portugal, who became the foundress of the monastic Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady in Spain.
Human: 260 BC – the temple of Janus was dedicated. Its construction was started by Duilius. Some remnants survive near the Marcellus Theater.
1945- Korea is divided into North and South Korea along the 38th parallel.
1947- The Radcliffe Line is revealed, setting the border between Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan
1844- Birthday of Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia who was held captive for a decade until his escape, fought off an Italian invasion, and modernized the infrastructure of his country.
The Writer's Almanac today.
Natural: Cat Nights begin on August 17. This term harks back to the days when people believed in witches. A rather obscure old Irish legend said that a witch could turn herself into a cat eight times, but on the ninth time (August 17), she couldn’t regain her human form. This bit of folklore also gives us the saying, “A cat has nine lives.” Because August is a yowly time for cats, this may have prompted the speculation about witches on the prowl in the first place. Also, nights continue to get longer. Cats, crepuscular creatures, are nocturnal hunters. Their superior night vision means that the nights belong to them.
Collision of 2 neutron stars about 130 million years ago created ripples in space-time that traveled to Earth and set off detectors in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory– 2017
Italian: Come trascorrere un giorno a Roma/How to spend one day in Rome
English: Words that Tolkien invented that are now part of the English language
Quote: “Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
--J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Return of the King
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