Year 9 Religion Our Goal and Guides

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Index for Catholic Studies

Method:

1. Memorize prayers found on pages 8-9
2. There are 6 units, so approximately one unit per month
3. Add other resources

August - September

Introduction

Lesson 1: Foreword (Happiness)

Review

Lesson 2: Foreword (Heaven)

Review

Move to Catholic Studies

Unit One: Our Guides to Our Goal
(6 weeks)
Overview of Unit: Focus on St Augustine
What Reason Is
Reasoning about God
Faith, the Master Guide: Focus on Abraham
Faith and Virtue

Set IV
Habits
Basic and Supernatural Virtues
Virtues Focus

More on Particular Virtues
Practicing Virtue

(placeholder posts below)
Habitual and Actual Faith
Professing the Faith
Great Teachers
More Great Teachers

End of First Quarter
Set V
Practicing Faith
Seeds of Faith
Sins and Dangers against Faith

Increasing Faith
Review of Revelation
Spreading the Faith
Review

Set VI
General Review of Unit One

November

Unit Two: Our Illustrated Guide Book
(4 weeks)(pages 105-148)

The Liturgical Year (Overview)
Purpose of the Liturgical Year
Sources on the Liturgical Year
Divisions of the Liturgical Year (Temporal, Sanctoral)
--Christmas
--Paschal
Sanctoral Cycle
The Liturgical Year -- the Week
Holy Days and More
The Liturgical Colors and their Use
Living a Liturgical Life
REview of the Liturgical Year

(Homeschool Connections -- The Mass Explained)

January

Unit Three: Our Source and Our Goal
(5 weeks) (pages 149-210)

1. Who and What God Is
2. The Blessed Trinity

February

Unit Four: Love, Pride and the Promise
(7 weeks)

1. The Story of Creation
2. Pride. The Fall
3. The Enemy -- Obstacles to our Quest
4. Hope is Restored
5. Summary -- Love, Pride and the Promise

March

Unit Five: Divine Aids in Our Quest
(6 weeks)

1. Divine Aids in our Quest
2. We Start Our Quest
3. Strength for our Quest

March

Unit Six: The Rules for a Successful Quest
(7 weeks)

1. The Moral Law
2. Aids and Handicaps in our Quest
3. Content of the Moral Law
4. Our Duties to God

Monday, November 8, 2010

When Public Profession is Necessary

It's not always necessary to proclaim that we are believers. Generally, it would be silly to go around carrying a sign saying, "Convert to the One True Church!" (though there might be exceptions to the rule).

"Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words." ~ this is attributed to your patron saint, St Francis of Assisi.

But Jesus said that He would be ashamed on Judgment Day of those who were ashamed of Him during their lives. He was using a parallel figurative device which was common to the Jewish people – you see it quite often in the Bible. The point is that it's not right to conceal who we are and what we believe when the situation requires us to show ourselves. To do that is to be something like a traitor.

There are certain times that it is important to publicly profess our faith:

1. When it is necessary to protect the honor and glory of God. For example, the early Christians were sometimes asked to offer sacrifices to false gods. They had no choice but to resist or they would have been dishonoring their Savior.
2. When our neighbor's spiritual good requires it. This might not be so clear-cut, but sometimes we might have to speak up to clarify a misunderstanding about the Faith or prevent another Catholic from sinning.
3. When my own spiritual good requires it. For example, when one is being tempted to doubt the truths of the faith, it's important to make an act of faith and pray to God for light or strength to resist the doubt. It's not like blinding oneself to the truth; it's quite the opposite – faith helps us to see better than skepticism does.

Go on to next section

Confirmation and Profession of Faith

Read Baltimore Catechism On Confirmation as a review of your own confirmation -- it relates to what this lesson is about.

Try this Scatter

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Review #4

Review:

Religion Set 4

What are some things you learned in this section? Discuss with Mom.

Try:

Offline:

Test

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Focus on Particular Virtues

Can you tell which virtues these Scripture verses represent on the tower diagram in the book?

Ephesians 6:10-12
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Proverbs 16:16
How much better to get wisdom than gold,to choose understanding rather than silver!

1 Corinthians 13
Love never fails. ....So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Try the Scatter, then go on to next section

Humility, the Foundation Virtue

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least nothing whatever can be done before it."...

Now I must turn to Faith in the second or higher sense: and this is the most difficult thing I have tackled yet. I want to approach it by going back to the subject of Humility. You may remember I said that the first step towards humility was to realise that one is proud. I want to add now that the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues. A week is not enough."

--C.S. Lewis

The book says that humility is the foundation virtue. Using the analogy of the tower, it is the opposite of the foundational motive of the builders of Babel, which was arrogance and pride. Our faith tells us that pride was the cause of the first sins. Satan and the bad angels did not want to serve. Eve and Adam wanted to be like God.

Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.. GK Chesterton

Faith requires humility because to believe something as true requires that one understand one does not know. Children have a natural humility which tells them to trust and imitate and believe what their parents and others tell them. As we get older we have to learn to practice the right kind of humility. That doesn't mean thinking that we are worthless or stupid or untalented, because that is a kind of lie to ourselves and it is ungrateful to God. God made us with great value and intelligence and gave us all our own gifts. The most important aspect of humility is to realize that God gave us everything we have.

The tower diagram in the book lists Proverbs 22:4 which says

Humility and the fear of the Lord bring wealth and honor and life.

You can easily draw your own comparisons between those promises and the outcome of the Tower of Babel.

Go on to next section

Review

Matching Game on Virtues
(you can try BugMatch instead if you want)

Review of Virtues

Look at these cards for some of the vocabulary used in this unit.

Cards on Virtues

There was a lot of terminology to do with virtue here. Some of it might have been confusing. This has been a quick introduction. You have been practicing various virtues in your life since you were old enough to remember. Still, it's important when you get older to know the terminology the Church has used since early days, for these reasons:

For understanding -- so that when you read books about your faith throughout your life, as you should do, you aren't puzzled by strange words.
For practice -- Christians should be examining their behavior regularly (really, every night or at the very least, before confession and when you have reason to suspect you are heading the wrong way in your Christian life). Knowing the outlines of the virtues helps us know ourselves better -- what we need to work on, where we are lacking.
For philosophy -- because our reason can tell us about virtue, humans since early days have discussed what virtue is and how to practice it. So some of this language you will find in Socrates and Aristotle, and in many non-Christian sources.

There are probably other reasons, but these are three I can think of.

Try the Scatter!

More on Habits

Whether you eat or drink, or do anything else, do all for the glory of God. St Paul, 1 Corinthians 10:31

Good moral habits are called virtues.   The word virtue comes from a Latin word meaning excellence or that which is appropriate to a man ("man" meaning human rather than animal or plant, not meaning "man" vs "woman").

You can see that it might be appropriate to an animal simply to spend its life searching for food, eating, and eventually having children, but for a human it would not be enough.   Humans have been given the power to choose between better and worse.

An animal might run to protect itself from danger or alternately, it might stay and fight an attacker to protect its young or its pack.    Either way, natural instinct decides what it chooses. But humans are diferent because while they might feel the same instincts to protect itself or others, the human has to choose which would be better in this situation, and then try to do it.

Such choices come up all the time in the life of any human, and habit helps us do easily what would be better to do.   It would be difficult to live for even a day if you had to think through every single thing -- how to do it, whether it would be better to do it this way or another way.

Yet it's also important to sometimes think through things and decide whether to replace an old habit with a new one.   This is another thing that animals don't do, but humans have to do to avoid staying immature forever. Maybe you used to be afraid of going to sleep in the dark, so you always had a nightlight, but one day you decided you were too old for that. You start switching off the light at night and pretty soon you have a new habit.

Some habits are more important than others.   If you have a habit of lying or sneak-attacking people, this matters more to your ultimate human life than whether you put on your left or right sock first.    Habits that are objectively bad, contrary to virtue, are more important to deal with than habits that are just useful or useless.

St Paul, in the quote above, reminds us that all actions should be measured as to whether they are for the glory of God.   Maybe it doesn't seem important how you eat or drink, but offering every action to God can give worth to even the smallest action.

St Therese said :

To pick up a pin for love can convert a soul."

To DO:

If you haven't finished reading OUr Goal and Our Guides pages 48-66. read some more.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Natural and Supernatural Virtues

Thomas Aquinas teaches that there are seven basic virtues.

The theological virtues are infused by God through Baptism, are strengthened by the Holy Eucharist, and are restored when lost or weakened by the Sacrament of Reconciliation. They are faith, hope and charity. All of these are given to us by His grace but it is our job to encourage them and practice them (there is more on this later).

The cardinal virtues help us practice and make use of what God has given us.

But to reach our destination we must also have prudence to choose the best means of getting there, justice to fulfill our obligations to God and man on the way, fortitude to overcome the difficulties we encounter, and temperance not to be sidetracked on the way by passing pleasures and satisfactions.

To remember:

By faith we know God, by Hope we trust His goodness and promises, and by Charity we love Him. Light and Life

Go on to Next Section

Monday, September 27, 2010

Four Natural Virtues

Read, then go on to next section

The four cardinal virtues -- justice, wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude), and moderation (self-control, temperance) -- come not just from Plato or Greek philosophy. You will find them in Scripture. They are knowable by human nature, which God designed, not Plato. Plato first formulated them, but he did for virtue only what Newton did for motion: he discovered and tabulated its own inherent foundational laws. These four are called "cardinal" virtues from the Latin word for "hinge". All other virtues hinge on these four. That includes lesser Virtues, which are corollaries of these, and also greater virtues (the three "theological virtues"), which are the flower of these.

These four cardinal virtues are not the only virtues, or even the highest ones. As Einstein surpassed Newton, Jesus most certainly surpassed Plato. But just as Einstein did not contradict Newton but included him, presupposed him, and built on him, so Jesus’ supernatural virtues do not contradict Plato’s natural virtues but presuppose them. Plato gives us virtue’s grammar; Jesus gives us virtue’s poetry.

...These four cardinal virtues are not the only virtues, but they are the cardes, the "hinges", on which all the other virtues turn. They are the necessary foundation and precondition for all others. If a person is not courageous, for instance, he will not overcome the difficulties inherent in the practice of any virtue. If he is not wise, he will not understand what he is doing, and his virtue will sink to the level of blind animal instinct.

There are many more virtues than these -- there is always more -- for "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." But never less. -- Peter Kreeft:

Review

Look through these flashcards on the Virtues, then try the Scatter

Friday, September 24, 2010

Credo ut intelligam... I believe in order to understand

St Anselm of Canterbury wrote,

"Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. Nam et hoc credo, quia, nisi credidero, non intelligam. "

("Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this, too, I believe, that, unless I first believe, I shall not understand.")
He held that faith precedes reason, but that reason can expand upon faith.

If you think back on the earlier lessons about St Thomas Aquinas, you see that this is true even outside of religion. A small child believes that what he sees and touches is real. He believes that what his parents tell him is true. As he gets older, he may question things his parents and teachers have told him. This is part of growing up and if it is done well, the young person comes to know truth by reason rather than by simple belief. He finds out answers for himself. This is always, according to the Catholic Church, a good thing when done properly.

Pope John Paul II, writing about the relationship between faith and reason, said:

What is distinctive in the biblical text is the conviction that there is a profound and indissoluble unity between the knowledge of reason and the knowledge of faith. The world and all that happens within it, including history and the fate of peoples, are realities to be observed, analysed and assessed with all the resources of reason, but without faith ever being foreign to the process. Faith intervenes not to abolish reason's autonomy nor to reduce its scope for action, but solely to bring the human being to understand that in these events it is the God of Israel who acts. Thus the world and the events of history cannot be understood in depth without professing faith in the God who is at work in them.

Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence. Here the words of the Book of Proverbs are pertinent: “The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps” This is to say that with the light of reason human beings can know which path to take, but they can follow that path to its end, quickly and unhindered, only if with a rightly tuned spirit they search for it within the horizon of faith. Therefore, reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way.

There is thus no reason for competition of any kind between reason and faith: each contains the other, and each has its own scope for action.

Go on to next section

Faith

The book makes the distinction between natural faith and supernatural faith.

Natural faith is belief in what is said by a human being, without actual personal knowledge that it is true. Examples: the distance of the Sun from the Earth; that the American Revolution took place historically; that our friends really are our friends; that the doctor knows what he is doing when he prescribes some treatment. Of course, we don't just believe people randomly -- our belief is usually supported by our reasoning that the source is credible, that the information is generally thought to be true, and other such things.

You can see that this kind of faith is necessary to us in order to function and learn. If we distrusted everything we did not absolutely KNOW we would not be able to live. Even the floor we stand on would be suspect because we didn't KNOW the builders knew what they were doing, or even if our minds were deceiving us by telling us there was actually a floor.

Supernatural faith is greater than this natural faith, though. It is defined as:

A theological virtue, a free gift of God, consisting in an infused supernatural habit or capacity for believng, by which man is disposed to accept as true everything God has revealed solely because of the authority and truthfulness of God who reveals it.

We are given this gift in our Baptism and it is strengthened in Confirmation and through practicing our faith, particularly by receiving the Sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.

This supernatural gift allows us to go much farther towards the truth than anyone could go without it. Since God is invisible to our senses, we would find it impossible to come to know what He is like without this gift of seeing what is beyond our minds.

Go on to Next Section

Review

Say
Prayer of St Anselm of Canterbury:

"I acknowledge, Lord, and I give thanks that you have created your image in me, so that I may remember you, think of you, love you. But this image is so obliterated and worn away by wickedness, it is so obscured by the smoke of sins, that it cannot do what it was created to do, unless you renew and reform it. I am not attempting, O Lord, to penetrate your loftiness, for I cannot begin to match my understanding with it, but I desire in some measure to understand your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this too I believe, that "unless I believe, I shall not understand." (Isaiah 7:9)

Try a Scatter:
It's about the First Commandment.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The First Cause

Do you remember reading this last year, from Fr Ronald Knox, The Creed in Slow Motion? It talks about the same thing the Pope is talking about. Though God by definition can't be "proved" by experiments, anyone who looks at the universe and thinks like a scientist will eventually find themselves thinking about Him. It is quite unavoidable.

It's an inveterate habit of man to ask "Why?" Most of us have been told off about it in the nursery, and discouraged from doing it. I remember once travelling in the train with a small boy who pointed to the clock in Banbury station and asked, "What does that clock say?" And the mother said, "It's a quarter to two". And the small boy said, "Why is it a quarter to two?" A child like that grows up Into a scientist, and spends its whole life asking why. All our science comes from the human habit of asking for the reason of everything, our ineradicable belief that every event must have a cause.

And when we've pushed that habit as far as it will go, all we have done is to weave long chains of causes, each one depending on the next. Why did you twist your ankle? Because the low gate into the garden was shut when you didn't expect it to be. Why was it shut? To keep the little pigs out. Why were the little pigs running loose? Because there wasn't enough feed for them if they were put in a sty. Why wasn't there enough feed for them? Because ships get torpedoed in the Atlantic. Why do ships get torpedoed in the Atlantic? Because we are at war with Germany. Why are we at war with Germany? And so on. The series of causes stretches back and back, and you never get to the end of it.

But, you see, it can' t really be infinite. Because an infinite series of causes all depending on one another wouldn't be a sufficient explanation of anything. Somewhere, at the end of that chain, there must be a First Cause which is not caused by anything which went before it. And that First Cause is God. His face looks down at us, as we try to run away from him, looks down this long avenue of causality, and reminds us that he made us; we did not make ourselves.

"All right," says the scientist, "we won't talk about causes and effects, if it has these uncomfortable consequences. We will content ourselves with observing the pattern of things as we find it in our experience; the wonderful order there is in nature, and so on." But, you see, that doesn't make them any better off. Order can only be the expression of a mind; and who was it that put that order into nature, which we discover with our scientific instruments? If you take a razor-blade, and a blade of grass, and put them under a powerful microscope, you'll find that the edge of a razor-blade isn't really straight at all; it's all hopelessly jagged and uneven, so that you can't imagine why your father doesn't cut himself shaving every morning instead of just some mornings. But the blade of grass is still absolutely even all along, not a dent in it. Now, who did that? Not you or I.

The more we try to map out the pattern of nature, the more are we driven to the conclusion that it exhibits the working of a Mind greater than any human mind. And this creative Mind we have to call God. We have looked along a fresh avenue of experience, and still we see his face looking down at us through the trees.

End of This Lesson

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Review: Focus on St Augustine of Hippo

ST. AUGUSTINE WITH HIS MOTHER

I don't really have a review for you yet. Since this book quotes St Augustine several times, I thought maybe you could learn a little about the life and thought of this great Saint.

Read a short account of St Augustine's Life.

When you have read it, try this quiz. I got 76% the first time -- see if you can do better than that. I missed the one about what he was the patron saint of -- you can find that information here.

Try an interesting quiz asking you to complete the quotations from St Augustine's writings. I found that I could do well on it just by using my understanding of what he was saying. Also, because Augustine was a rhetorician and wrote balanced sentences, a lot of times you can find the right phrase to complete the quote just by seeing the comparisons and contrasts in the passage. Anyway, give it a try! (I missed one).