Hitting the road

I'm going to be on blog hiatus for a few days as I visit my family for my sister's graduation and hunt for grad school housing. In the meantime, enjoy this picture of some fun cars. There was a whole crowd of them around Soulard Market a few Saturdays ago. The drivers were all really friendly and waved at me. How could you not be in a good mood on such a gorgeous spring day?

Godspeed, Sr. Ros!

I usually don't post pictures of myself, but I love this one of Texas Volunteer and me with Sr. Rosalind Moss. This weekend was our first time meeting her in a while. Sadly, it was also the last since the occasion was her goodbye party. She's leaving St. Louis, too, albeit for only a year of novitiate study and training.

Expansion of the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Israel's Hope is on hold while Sr. Ros is in her novitiate. Work renovating her convent and organizing educational materials will go on, thanks to her new administrative assistant and an army of volunteers. Hopefully next summer St. Louis will again see Sr. Ros and some new sisters out and about in full habit, evangelizing the neighborhood. (And hopefully there will soon be more information on the order's website.)

We're really going to miss Sr. Ros. Even thought we've only met her a few times, she always treats us like we are the most important and wonderful people in the world. We put in a few Saturday hours helping around her convent, but went away feeling like we had received ten times what we have given. I don't know what I would have done without her comforting advice the Saturday I messed up on the GRE and was dealing with stress in the VSC community.

Where else could one find a nun with great Jewish humor? (She is a convert, after all.) After hearing my rantings, Sr. Ros turned to Texas Vol and asked "Does she believe in God? Because the way she's talking it sure sounds like she doesn't."
Then she turned back to me. "This is what you do. Go home, write a hundred times on the chalkboard 'Jesus I trust in you. Jesus I trust in you. Even if I don't feel it, Jesus I trust in you.'"

And so I will.

Botanical Gardens

This weekend a couple of us finally took advantage of our Botanical Gardens season passes. I'm so glad we did! Even after several hours of walking we still hadn't seen all the different gardens and flowers. Daylilies were done blooming, but roses were out in full force.


I really liked this statue of Juno in a formal garden. (The goddess queen, not the snarky pregnant teenager). The Victorian observatory tower is in the distance.

The English Woodland garden was more informal and organic-looking. We really appreciated the shade!

Bizarre Item of the Day

Last week when I posted pictures of Papa Benny with adorable kids, I did a Google image search for "Pope Benedict baby." This is what I found.



This is El Colacho, Spanish a baby-jumping festival that has been happening in Castillo de Murcia since 1620.The guy leaping over the infants represents the devil. Supposedly this Knieval-esque stunt helps cleanse the babies of original sin and guarantee them safety in life.

Pope Benedict has advised Spanish priests to stay away from this dubious and obviously dangerous festival. Good call.

Abortion, Slavery and Obama

Continuing my week-long reflection on pro-life issues, I'd like to make some historical analogies. Considering abortion in American often sends my brain running for context from the past.

Abortion is the slavery of our times. Consider the similarities: a moral evil opposed by much of the population, but still supported as a right by many and protected by law. The lives and fate of one section of humanity (African-Americans, fetuses) fall under the authority of others.
Debates over this issue sharply divide the political sphere. Some people live close to the issue and feel passionately about it. For those who don't encounter it everyday, it's not as big a deal.

For instance, a Southern planter might have defended slavery as part of his right to property and prosperity, but a Northern factory worker would have been more concerned with his own family than whatever happens in other states. Similarly, I think abortion is not a part of daily life for most Americans. Women don't normally go around telling all their friends that they terminated a pregnancy last weekend. Sometimes the staggeringly large abortion statistics seem as far away as genocide in Darfur. Sometimes the really intense pro-lifers with bloody fetus posters seem too extreme, but that's when I remember that the abolitionist movement housed some pretty intense members as well. (See: John Brown and his military raids.)

All this talk about Obama at ND and the importance of dialogue, not demonizing, also turns me to slavery. When I took a course on "Museums and Slavery," I again learned the importance of words. Call them "enslavers", not "masters," or "owners." Don't use the passive voice about plantation chores - "the cotton was picked" by whom?? Enslaved people, who deserve as much attention as their wealthy enslavers. Our racially mixed-class had some fantastic discussions. Even though we had different backgrounds, we kept a respectful tone and learned a lot about each other. I still don't mind Confederate flag bumper stickers on pickup trucks, but I'm more sensitive now to how people can find them offensive.

Of course, our discussions were helped by the fact that we all agreed slavery was wrong. What about dialogue with enslavers? A constant dilemma for American historians is the fact that most of our country's founders indeed held other persons as property. Dealing with this again requires some respect. Instead of writing them all off as irrelevant bigoted white men, we honor their achievements while critiquing their personal practices. We also find comfort in the "good" ones who didn't treat enslaved workers cruelly. (See: George Washington freeing his slaves in his will)

This paradox is most evident in my pal Thomas Jefferson. Here we have a very intelligent, accomplished man who crafted beautiful words about our country, but also enslaved many of his fellow Americans. Monticello has embraced this paradox since Sally Hemings became a household name. Visitors to Jefferson's estate today are urged to ponder how one could write about liberty yet deny it to others.

In some ways Obama reminds me of Jefferson - they are both intelligent, well spoken champions of religious pluralism. How can our current President speak eloquently about protecting the weak and defenseless and yet condone the murder of our most vulnerable Americans? Maybe because, like Jefferson, he grew up in a culture where a moral evil was widely accepted.

Bizarre item of the day

Every so often Nicest Boss in the World asks me to sort through notification emails of recently announced federal grants. Today's didn't have anything related to what NFNF does, but it did offer some interesting science opportunities.

$90,000 for "a cooperative agreement with the University of Wyoming to conduct Wyoming pocket gopher surveys and to refine the current potential distribution map for the species."

up to $380,000 for "collection of data to describe long-term trends in densities of the Mojave population of the desert tortoise where it occurs in Nevada and California."

These sound ridiculous to me, but then I remember one of my bio major friends in college. Her senior thesis was the result of 2 years in a lab studying the fertility of fruit flies. Now she's in graduate school, where her future career depends on crayfish. So somewhere out there, gopher and tortoise experts are high-fiving each other and dreaming of new equipment to take out in the field.

Vigil for Justice

Last night was a sad one for Missouri - Governor Jay Nixon approved the first state execution since 2005, ending the life of Dennis Skillicorn. Skillicorn earned the death sentence for being an accessory in a murder he did not know his friend was about to commit. What is truly tragic about this decision is that Dennis was worth more to Missouri alive than dead. Since his conviction, he turned from his "first life" of drugs and crime to a "second life" of faith and community activism. In the Potosi prison, Skillicorn organized a hospice care system for terminally-ill prisioners, created educational and visiting programs for children of inmates, and authored a book admonishing juveniles to make good choices in life. Skillicorn was a shining example of how the prison system can make rehabilitation possible, but that same system has killed off its model product.

All of us VSC girls have become concerned about the unfairness of the death penalty thanks to Pittsburgh Volunteer's work in the SVDP Criminal Justice Ministry. So, we headed to the prayer vigil happening on the steps of SLU's College Church last night.


My high school self would have thought this a hippie activity, but hey, when else can you be a hippie except when you are young and living in an convent commune. Those attending included the Jesuit Volunteers, some Daughters of Charity, and some people who indeed looked like aging hippies. But there were also people whose own lives have been impacted by the criminal justice system going awry. For instance, this man being interviewed by a reporter was recently exonerated of a false murder charge.

Current criticism of the death penalty is another example of how defending human life requires you to address social problems. Are innocent people sentenced to death? It does happen. People on death row are not necessarily the worst criminals, they just couldn't afford a lawyer good enough to finagle an easier sentence. Why isn't life in a high-security prison enough to protect the public? Do executions solve the problem of murder?

I don't think so. Skillicorn's death doesn't remove the pain of those people his friend killed, or bring back the innocent victims. I'll never forget seeing chilling news coverage of Timothy McVeigh's execution for the Oklahoma City bombing. The victim's families were still sad and still hurting. A few other people were out for vengeance, but just once death wasn't satisfying enough. "Next we need to get Terry Nichols!" one guy told the cameras. He seemed thrilled by the idea of deciding who dies.