ROBERT E DUNN - Blog

school

7/23/2021

Since kindergarten, my favorite place has been school.
My ideal Catholic school, the one I fancy creating, I lay before you for your grade.
Of course, it would require a very rich person build it.
Staff: five tutors and a principal
No grade levels (1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on)
Lower School (Building A)
Room 1, giant classroom, 25 boys with male tutor
Room 2, giant classroom, 25 girls with female tutor
Requirements: child can read one-syllable and two-syllable words and sentences with basic punctuation (period, question mark, and exclamation point); child is able to count and do addition and subtraction
Curriculum: trivium and quadrivium, including Introduction to Latin, Catechism
Upper School (Building B)
Coed 25 boys and 25 girls
Room 3, all subjects except math and science, one tutor
Room 4, math, one tutor
Room 5, science, one tutor
Requirements: movement from Lower School to Upper School normally at age 13 or 14. Student evaluated by the tutors to determine whether he or she is ready. Gifted children advanced faster according to demonstrated ability.
Curriculum: English, Latin, US and world history, civics, rhetoric/speech, logic, Catechism, STEM math and science (to include one-month courses on science subjects not taught in other schools, such as botany, TBD by students and tutor)
Credential not required; a solid education and observable ability to teach required.
Any tutor capable of teaching music and art appreciation would be encouraged.
Sport is not a subject; students are encouraged to participate in club sports.
Learning to play a musical instrument or sing is for outside school.
Sex education to be done by parents at home and highly encouraged.
Testing is frequent and is to be used to determine a student’s progress. Grading based on the amount of progress demonstrated, not tests.
Verbal discipline leading to expulsion for those who cannot cooperate.
Tutors and students clean the school.
Uniforms required of everyone all the time.
Tuition enough to pay the staff, nothing more.
If I took the time, I could draw the school.

nothing serious

7/23/2021

The more I get to know people, the more I realize why Noah only let animals in.

To people who check behind their shower curtains for murderers...if you do find one, what's your plan?

I went line dancing last night. Well, it was a roadside sobriety test...same thing...

Research has shown that laughing for two minutes is just as healthy as a twenty-minute jog. Now I sit in the park, laugh at all the joggers, and tell their life stories to the bench presser sitting next to me.

counting

7/22/2021

Math trick I presented to my student today:

How many questions are there on a test if the numbered questions are 113 to 174? You must add one to account for the first question – subtraction will not give you the right answer. Here is the proof. Reduce the numbers to 1 to 5. If you subtract 5 – 1, you get 4, but there are 5 questions. You did not count number 1.

Consider an actual SAT question: On the last day of a one-week sale, customers numbered 149 through 201 were waited on. How many customers were waited on that day? Possible answers: 51, 52, 53, 152, 153. The correct answer here is 53, which is the result of (201-149) + 1 = 53. You must count customer 149.

syncopation

7/22/2021

This is a good example of syncopation. The organist accents the upbeats as the word, "saint," is sung three times, and this displacement of regular accents gets the attention of listeners desiring a return to predictability. The first to process down the middle of the nave are the young seminarians. Most of the congregation are young men and women steeling their future priests for battle.

churchill

7/20/2021

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the EQUAL sharing of misery."

benson

7/20/2021

Reproduced below are two quotes from Wikipedia. Robert H. Benson was one of three sons of the Archbishop of Canterbury and an Anglican priest who was received into the Church in 1903. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904. Last month, one of my students and I read his ghost story, "The Watcher." I slightly edited the Wikipedia quotes to fix grammar problems.

Before 1911, Benson speculated about the year 2007. "… the Anglican Church and other Protestant denominations have crumbled and disappeared under a rising tide of secularism and atheism, leaving an embattled Catholic Church as the sole champion of Christian truth. Nations are armed with weapons that can destroy a whole city from the air within minutes."

In The Dawn of All, published in 1911, he imagined, "a 1971 in which the Catholic Church has emerged victorious in England and worldwide after Germany and Austria have won the "Emperor War" of 1914. This book is also notable in its fairly accurate prediction of a global network of passenger air travel."

Prescient prognosticator?

fssp

7/20/2021

Proof that our FSSP parish is alive - we have 96 altar boys, ages 7 through 17. Parishioners include an FBI agent and several police officers and soldiers.

Che ka choo!

7/19/2021

traditionalist

7/18/2021

I'm not a traditionalist Catholic! I am a Catholic. No other descriptors are necessary. Those who do not accept tradition are dissenters, period. You don't want to be one.

Today, our priest commented on Latin Mass restrictions. I will paraphrase. We are being purged, but the grapevine will produce better fruit when it is purged and suffers. Thus, God is allowing us to be purged to produce better fruit. In the 1300’s, speaking directly to St. Brigid of Sweden, Our Lord said, “If you have Me, you have no one to fear.”

We fear no one.

tower of babel

7/18/2021

“Quō vādis?” Peter asks.

“Where are you going?”

“Rōmam eō iterum crucifīgī,” Jesus replies.

“I am going to Rome to be crucified again.”

On the Appian Way, Peter gains the courage to continue and returns to the city, where he is martyred by being crucified upside-down. By the way, 'u' is an upside-down 'n'.

What language did Jesus speak? Latin was the administrative language of the Roman Empire, Greek was the language of commerce, Hebrew was the language of the Pharisees, and Aramaic was spoken in Nazareth and Capernaum.

Well, He is God, so He speaks in English, or, more accurately, I understand Him in English. It's a good thing I had Mr. Alvernaz SJ and Mr. Henning SJ for Latin I and II.

remote rule

7/17/2021

Proximate Rule of Faith (Magisterium) VS Remote Rule of Faith (Tradition)

Faith for Catholics is not only a simple trust in the gospel but also a belief in specific ideas. It means accepting certain truths about who God is, the nature of humanity, Christ and His life, and even the Church. When Catholics talk about the rule of faith, they are describing the way in which Christian truth is understood, expressed, and lived.

Catholics understand God's truth to be perfect, both in its pure essence (the remote rule of faith) as well as in the way Christians must understand that truth (the proximate rule of faith).

Father Ripperger, exorcist currently serving in the Denver Archdiocese, says we must follow the Remote Rule when the Proximate Rule fails, which is what is happening to us now.

piety

7/17/2021

Sometimes, Catholic piety makes me want to upchuck, or am I seeing stupidity, not piety? Last Sunday, I sat next to a Chinese man at Mass. He hardly looked up at the altar. His humility put me to shame.

dongfang

7/17/2021

Just finished reading, "Dongfang and the Festival of Lanterns," for one of my students. The story appears in Moonbeams, Dumplings & Dragon Boats, a treasury of Chinese Holiday Tales, Activities & Recipes from The Children's Museum, Boston, written by Nina Simonds and Leslie Swartz and illustrated by Meilo So, published by Gulliver Books Harcourt Inc. (2002).

Latin

7/17/2021

As you might have guessed by all my postings, I like Latin. It has many "qu" words: quoque, quemque, quemquam, quisquam, quid, quod, quotquot, quotiescumque, and so on, making me euphoric. Oh, that last word derives from the Greek euphoros. However, Latin has the distinction of never changing, and you know I like that.

Last Common ancestor

7/17/2021

A symbolic betrayal of human evolution, wrongly implying that evolution is linear and progressive. [Credit: Wikipedia]

Without acknowledging the fact that many adherents to evolution ignore the soul, this mostly fine digital resource does state, "Theories of evolution provide a provisional explanation for the facts."

Wikipedia traces the beginnings of the science:

"The search for a fossil that connected man and ape was unproductive until the Dutch paleontologist Eugene Dubois went to Indonesia. Between 1886 and 1895 Dubois discovered remains that he later described as 'an intermediate species between humans and monkeys'. He named the hominin Pithecanthropus erectus (erect ape-man), which has now been reclassified as Homo erectus.

"Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago, evolving from Homo erectus and migrating out of Arica, gradually replacing local populations of archaic humans.

"The term missing link has fallen out of favor with biologists because it implies the evolutionary process is a linear phenomenon and that forms originate consecutively in a chain. Instead, last common ancestor is preferred since this does not have the connotation of linear evolution, as evolution is a branching process."

Biden's speeches are scripted by others. Quid, inquam, ego non capio. What I say, I do not understand. Homo means man. Sapiens means wise. He belongs to another branching process.

Friendship

7/16/2021

A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the scenery when it suddenly occurred to him that he was already dead. He remembered dying and that the dog walking beside him had been dead for years. He wondered where the road was leading them.

After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble.

At the top of a long hill, there was a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight and a magnificent gate inside the arch that looked like mother-of-pearl. The street that led to this wondrous gate was pure gold.

He and the dog walked on the street toward the gate, and as he got closer, he saw a man at a desk to one side.

When he was close enough, he called out, "Excuse me, where are we?"

"This is Heaven, sir," the man answered.

"Wow! Would you happen to have some water?" the man asked.

"Of course, sir. Come right in, and I'll have some ice water brought right up." The man gestured, and the gate began to open.

"Can my friend come in, too?" the traveler asked, gesturing toward his dog.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we do not accept pets."

The man thought a moment and then turned back toward the road and continued on his way.

After another long walk, and at the top of another long hill, he came to a dirt road leading through a single farm gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was no fence.

As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against a tree and reading a book.

"Excuse me!" he called to the man. "Do you have any water?"

"Yeah, sure, there's a pump over there, come on in."

"How about my friend here?" the traveler asked, gesturing to the dog.

"There should be a bowl by the pump," said the man.

They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was a hand pump with a bowl beside it.

The traveler filled the water bowl and took a long drink himself.

When their thirst was quenched, he and the dog walked back toward the man who was standing by the tree.

"What do you call this place?" the traveler asked.

"This is Heaven," he answered.

"Well, that's confusing," the traveler said. "The man down the road said that was Heaven, too."

"Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and mother-of-pearl gate? That's Hell."

"Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?"

"No, we're just happy that they take the folks who would leave their best friend behind."

useful idiot

7/14/2021

Quote from Urban Dictionary, a lexicon whose vulgarity makes me laugh. I do not recommend UD for children.

If you have never heard the term “useful idiot”, it was the attitude held by Vladimir Lenin towards communist sympathizers in the West (America). While Lenin and the Soviets held them in utter contempt, they also viewed them as tools for dispensing communist propaganda to other countries, thus infecting foreign cultures with their totalitarian tripe. After their mission was complete, they were no longer “useful.” It's a term the [sic] refers to brainwashed American Marxists who blindly support any ideology that gets themselves out of real work and causes others to pay their way.

woke vs five minutes of beauty

7/13/2021

children

7/12/2021

dress

7/12/2021

The FSSP has a great motto on how to dress for church: "Dress to conceal, not to reveal." Remind you of Adam & Eve when they were tossed out of the Garden of Eden and discovered they were naked?

sticktoitiveness

7/12/2021

Some people might ask, "In the face of revelations about the Deep State and the Deep Church, why do you still love America, and why are you still Catholic?"

First, I believe in the principles on which America was founded.

There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American.

During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room and said, "Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intend to do, bomb them?"

A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly:

"Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can each treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day; they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water daily; and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?"

Second, if I did leave the Church, what would happen is this. On the day I die and meet Christ face-to-face, the question would be, "Did I give you permission to leave?" The answer is obvious.

puns

7/9/2021

Ammo

7/9/2021

Three Mary's

7/8/2021

At the foot of the cross stood the three Mary's. Mary of Clopas is explicitly mentioned only in John 19:25, where she is among the women present at the crucifixion of Jesus: Now there stood by the cross of Jesus His mother, and His mother’s sister, Mary of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. The crucifixion occurred on April 3, A.D. 33. Jesus was 33.

Every night I listen to the Passion. If I were pope, I would order the Passion to precede Mass. Canto singers would process in first, followed by the altar boys, followed by the three Mary's, John, and Joseph. On the left side of the main altar the three Mary's and John would be seated, and on the right side Joseph would be seated. Lastly, an altar boy with a lamb would enter and walk by Joseph, then in front of the altar, then by the three Mary's and John. The altar boy and the lamb would take a place in between the singers and sit down on the carpeted floor with a basket for the lamb. The singers would finish the Passion, the boy and his lamb would exit, and Mass would begin. Joseph would exit because we know he died before the crucifixion.

Below are the canto singers I listen to every night when I go to bed. If God granted me one wish, it would be to have a voice like that of Pontius Pilate. The singer who sings that role has a slightly higher voice than the narrator. Listen long enough to hear them all: narrator, Pontius Pilate, Jesus [bass voice], and crowd. My favorite Latin phrase is, "Quod scripsi, scripsi." In English, "What I have written, I have written." Pilate says that in response to the Jews' objection to the sign he had ordered to be nailed on the cross above Jesus's head: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews). It was written in three languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. We see it abbreviated to INRI. I've also included a Caravaggio painting of Mary of Clopas with hands raised.

For the Passion libretto in Latin and English, copy and paste the following into your search engine...
https://www.scribd.com/document/258090504/Arvo-Pa-rt-Passio-Texts-and-Translations

elites

7/6/2021

Can I just say this? --- Screw the elites in this country. The fastest growing population in the USA are the "don't's". They are the people, led by the elites in government, big business, and entertainment, who don't know, don't want to know, or don't believe there is a God. They do not have a biblical worldview. The statistics are revealed by Dr. George Barna, founder of the Barna Research Group, now called The Barna Group, in a 7/6/21 interview with Church Militant, a group of Catholic journalists from whom I get most of my news. That Jesuit rag, America, said AOC is the future of the Catholic Church. She is a Marxist with a salary of $174,000 per year.