Newsletter Vol 1 Issue 1 | April 2021
Hello dear friends and family! Happy Easter and welcome to my newsletter. 😀
Hope those of you in the US are enjoying the spring weather. We’ve been blessed with sunshine lately so all the bulbs are sprung and waving hello.
Last month we celebrated our eldest’s 30th, can you believe that? Yup, Aisa’s 30 and expecting Baby #3 in November! She published a book on wine+theology last year, which you can find here. This was taken last fall (Maggie is now 1 yr 7 mos and Joseph is 2 yrs 10 mos):
On Aisa’s birthday I served this classic broccoli salad which son-in-law Steven loved. It’s yummy with or without bacon. I use soy-free Vegenaise so Migi can eat it, serve optional vegan cheddar for the dairy-free peeps, make the sunflower seeds optional for my mom, and use coconut sugar instead of regular cane for Alfredo/Bong.
But of course, since I just shared a healthy recipe, we’ll need to balance that out with the opposite: this ramen hack is seriously addictive. If you don’t have allergies, try it out!
We’re driving to Colorado in May to spend a couple of days in Denver and bring Paco (24) home for the summer. He is finishing up his first year of MBA at the St. John Leadership Institute, and he’s got his hands full with several projects, the latest being the Queen City Coronators’ magazine which you can preview here.
Migi (22) is busy with work at Honeywell and finishing up school, plus his ongoing Church Wanderer project, which you can follow on Instagram or Facebook.
Yena (19) is a freshman at University of Cincinnati. She’ll be working in the HR department at Jurgensen for the summer. Nino (12) is busy with homeschooling and Trail Life.
Lately I’ve been having fun over at Goodreads. The Catholic Book Club folks recently read C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces so I reread it alongside them, and it hit me differently this time compared to 2015 when I first read it. I blogged about it here. If you are on Goodreads, or even if you’re not, please consider joining us for the Catholic Thought Book Club‘s next read, Archbishop Chaput’s Things Worth Dying For which we begin next week (here’s a sample of his Excellency’s thoughts). As I was putting this newsletter together I found that Father Z had just blogged about it: If the Fishwrap and Maximum Beans are bothered by it then it should be good, right? 😀
For Lent, I finally dug into Venerable Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ. I’ve gathered some of my favorite quotes in this gallery.
After all that heavy reading I permitted myself the luxury of enjoying something lighter: Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. Here’s my review.
This song has been stuck in my head for the longest time, ever since Yena introduced it to me earlier this year. It’s a break-up song, but so catchy; some of you might like it. The video is clean, and the lyrics are 99% clean, except for the word ‘bastard’ if you look at the English translation (the singer referring to himself), but that word also appears in the Bible so I guess it’s not that offensive.
Lastly, you guys know I’m no social justice warrior, but three articles I’ve been pondering:
– this one from The Atlantic: my first reaction was — is there anything at all that does NOT make feminists angry?, but read on.
– this article at America Magazine, which although they publish a lot of progressive (read “bordering on heretical”) Catholic commentary, still manage to give me pause at times.
– and this one from Catholic convert Leah Libresco Sargeant… I love that Leah really strives for balance, and given her personality and her love for data, she doesn’t devolve into pointing fingers but actually explores possible solutions. The comments especially from Erika Bachiochi from the Ethics and Public Policy Center are eye-opening. (Erika has been writing about reproductive assymetry for a while; here’s a conversation between her and Serena Sigilitto at Public Discourse.)
Perhaps I’ll have more to say about this next time, but do share your thoughts with me.
Please keep in your prayers our friends and family in the Philippines, where I hear the current administration has bungled the COVID response horribly. The surge in cases is scary and depressing. Their hospitals are full.
Please also pray for my dear cousin Eduardo Azucena, who is awaiting a kidney donor. Someone has volunteered but they still have to do rigorous testing etc to ensure that he’s a good match. If you happen to have any leads especially if they live in or near California, please let me know.
We include you and your intentions in our daily family Rosaries. Please don’t hesitate to ask if you’ve got specific intentions we can pray for. I don’t mean for this to be a one-way thing; would love to hear back from you. Tell me what’s going on in your part of the world. I crave real conversation that’s so lacking in our soundbite society today. If you prefer a phone call over e-mail or text, just say so and I’ll be more than happy to oblige.
Much love and prayers,
Stef in Cincinnati
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