Category: Reblogs

Seeing Thanksgiving with God’s Eyes

To be able to give that much love to such people seems impossible, but if God orders us to do it, then is it really impossible in the first place? I honestly still have difficulty agreeing with that question, but I do want to have enough faith to be able to agree with that with everything I’ve got. Praise and thanks be to God Almighty very much again for the challenges and guidance.

Convert's Quest

Isn’t it interesting how life throws opportunities/situations our way and they remain with us? We all have those unshakable, whether good or bad, experiences that seem to follow us or reprise themselves on certain occasions. Since yesterday was Thanksgiving, I am reminded of a profound gospel moment pretty early in my Christian journey.

While nearly finished with my first semester as a freshman in 2009, the opportunity to engage in a Thanksgiving service project came my way. My professor presented her annual tradition to the class of feeding homeless men that are registered sex offenders. She discussed how these men live in a small community and are often ridiculed denied privileges, and ostracized because of their prior crime.

After she finished, her words hit me like a ton of bricks. What would it feel like to have a full-time reminder of my past transgression always before me? No matter how…

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A Letter to my Son

Not only timely but also wonderful. Perhaps wonderful to the point of timelessness, even. I feel like, once again, I’ve found something I have been looking for and should be looking for my whole life. Praise and thanks be to God Almighty very much again for this wonderful friend and father He’s working through, and may He keep on helping us all.

Convert's Quest

Dear Son,

Your mother has frequently asked me to write about fatherhood. For so long, I wanted to glamorize the new role and this new sense of spiritual responsibility that I am blessed to have.

Yes, being a father is a euphoric feeling. Here I am entrusted with the spiritual and physical well-being of another by God.

I could not have asked for a greater miracle than you!

My father abandoned me at fifteen. He nor your grandmother ever conveyed to me the necessity of “the talk”, a conversation about how to encounter racism.

With this letter, I want to illustrate the reality of racism and empower you to speak up for yourself and others.

So here it is.

It is 2020, and I turned thirty back in April.

Here you are, just a mere sprout on the spectrum of life.

Here you are living your best carefree life. So…

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If You’re Not Well Grounded, Beware BTS

RM did tell peeps “Speak Yourself,” so…

The Drama Llama

Now this might seem like an odd post from me, considering that I have talked about BTS on this blog and in positive terms, and I’ve even been to a concert. I very much enjoy their music and parts of their message and still do! But note parts of their message. Not all of it. This is because I’m Catholic, and certain ideas expressed in some of their recent comebacks and the literary works these comebacks reference are antithetical to my beliefs.

190115_BTS_at_the_2019_Seoul_Music_Awards By TenAsia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76464187

Specifically, Herman Hesse’s Demian and Carl Jung’s ideas.

I had only ever encountered a few Herman Hesse quotes (which I quite liked) before BTS came out with Wings and “Blood, Sweat & Tears” (herefrom BST). Once the teasers came out, everyone kept going on about Herman Hesse’s Demian, and so I decided to read it. I found it on Project Gutenberg or…

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Are Women Basically Mothers at Heart?

And now I find myself realizing that I’ve been taking being a man for granted more than I thought. Still, I thank God very much, for I have found more hope in this chance to learn more yet again!

joy of nine9

Women today are confused about who they are called to be. If we feel called to be full-time mothers, society seems to dismiss us as vintage models, out of step with the modern feminist agenda. I know I often felt embarrassed because I did not have a real job as I mothered nine kids.

Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) had a lot to say about the nature of women. She was a Jewish German philosopher who converted to Catholicism, became a Discalced Carmelite nun, and died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Initially, she struggled intellectually with the whole idea that women were different than men. In the end, instead of denying her gender, she looked to her body as the image of her soul. Katharina Westerhorstmann discusses Stein’s view of women in On the Nature and Vocation of Women: Edith Stein’s Concept against the Background of a Radically…

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Penman No. 340: Wowwow, Mingming, Peepeep

My heart is warmed very much. Thank you very much for this piece, Sir!

Pinoy Penman 3.0

IMG_9007.jpegPenman for Monday, February 11, 2019

FOR REASONS still not too clear to me, since I had a great relationship with my late Dad, I never really wanted a son, and heaved a huge sigh of relief when Beng popped out a baby girl named Demi 44 years ago. Demi turned out to be everything we could wish for—bright, caring, and generous, an exemplar at her job in a major hotel in California, where she lives with her husband Jerry, another proud addition to our small family.

I may not have minded a grandson, but The One Who Knows Better decided that we were all going to be happier by ourselves, so Beng and I and Demi and Jerry have enjoyed our foursome, traveling together whenever possible and achieving what we could in this life without worrying too much about the future.

We couldn’t have imagined that in our later…

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Penman No. 337: A Perfect Ending

Gonna miss ya, Sir. Thanks very much again for all the great lessons, then!

Pinoy Penman 3.0

IMG_9010.jpegPenman for Monday, January 21, 2019

I RETIRED last week after 35 years of service at the University of the Philippines, and I celebrated the special day with UP friends at a dinner graciously hosted by UP President Danilo Concepcion at his official residence, the newly renovated Executive House.

Standing in a wooded corner of Diliman close to C. P. Garcia, the Executive House was built by President Vicente Sinco in the late 1950s, and in its early years no president really lived there, but it became the venue for lively faculty colloquia, involving such intellectual stalwarts of the time as O.D. Corpuz, Ricardo Pascual, Cesar Adib Majul, Leopoldo Yabes, and Concepcion Dadufalza. When President Salvador P. Lopez decided to move with his wife into the place in 1969, they were reportedly met, in typical UP fashion, by a posse of protesters insisting on certain demands.

These historical precedents were…

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12 Days of Christmas Anime, Day 4: Gintama

Merry Christmas, fellow filthy animals. Now, here’s something to help us clean up some more.

Beneath the Tangles

Seasons greetings to our dear readers!  Gintama ranges four seasons and 367 episodes at the present time and includes quite a few Christmas episodes.  I have already written about the Christmas story told in episode 200.  The present post concerns an earlier Christmas episode from season one.  Gintama might be described as a science-fiction, samurai parody, but it covers a wide range of genres and styles within its four seasons.  With episode 37 (Titled “People who Say that Santa Doesn’t Exist, Actually Want to Believe in him”), you might dub the first half Old Comedy, i.e. the sort of gut-busting low humor one sees in Aristophanes’ plays.  The first half contains nothing especially edifying, but it gives the viewer a good time.

On the other hand, the second part relies less on silliness than on character flaws.  Much of the comedy drives off the contrast between the way different…

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Penman No. 330: From Parrots to Maroons

The hype is crazy, and this also has quite some stuff to learn about my uni, so yeah~

Pinoy Penman 3.0

up-maroons-86-championship.jpgPenman for Monday, December 3, 2018

I HAD a whole other column lined up for this Monday, but that’s going to have to wait after last Wednesday’s titanic ballgame—you all know what I’m referring to, that heart-stopping semifinal do-or-die clash between the Adamson Soaring Falcons and the UP Fighting Maroons for a spot in the UAAP finals. Without a ticket to the live game at the Araneta Coliseum, I watched the nailbiter on a giant screen at the UP Theater with 2,000 other maroon-shirted fans, and screamed my head off as shrilly as the girls around me when UP sealed the 89-87 win with a shot in the closing seconds.

I can’t say that I’m a huge basketball fan—I hardly know what’s going on in the NBA or PBA—but I’m a big fan of school spirit, and have cheered for UP since my mother (BSE, 1956) indoctrinated me by playing…

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