Author: Maria Johnson

wake up from your snoring!

Me...and Daisy, Sarah's hat. What are we pondering?

Hey! I have a guest post at Sarah Reinhard’s blog, SnoringScholar.com, at, um snoringscholar.com. She’s so gracious with her fun sandbox so I’m playing over there today.

Here’s a little bit of what I say:

We’ve all heard it – The Internet is an insidious source of distraction and evil in contemporary society. It’s true!

I blame a certain little addiction to cute farm animals and shiny pink tractors as one of those distractions. Thanks to family and friends mocking me at every obnoxious status update, I had an intervention and am pleased to report I’ve been Farmville-free for 18 months.

Of course, I’m making light of it – or am I? Social media, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Google + or [insert your favorite distraction here], can be a powerful time suck. It can be a black hole that takes us away from our families and friends, makes us less productive, and does nothing, nothing to make us better people.

Is it a crazy anti-internet rant? A public confession and self-flagellation left over from Farmville days? Maybe. NO! One should never rant without a solution. See what a lot of people are doing to inject the internet with some positive medicine. Read the rest of my post here.

I keep forgetting I do this podcast thing

Bahaha.

Check out Catholic Weekend. It’s a few friends that get together and talk about stuff. Some of it is personal, some of it is current events, but all of it is Catholic — and by that I mean, we’re Catholic so no matter what we’re talking about, it’s coming from that world view.

This weekend’s show was fun! Father Roderick, Captain Jeff and I talk about some neat things. Give us a listen here.

 

in which I review The Mighty Macs

If you’ve been doing the rounds on Facebook and Twitter, you’ve probably seen a lot of activity on the new movie, The Mighty Macs, which opens this weekend.

It’s a fun movie if you’re looking for a few laughs and a little inspiration. Happy endings tend to do that for me.

What I didn’t expect was that it would open the flood gates of memories for me. You see, I was a young girl playing basketball in those early 70’s. It was just too much fun reliving those days…I still have a great big ole smile on my face when I think about it.

I saw a preview of The Mighty Macs a couple of weeks ago, and reviewed it over at Patheos! Go check it out…I interviewed the amazing Theresa Grentz and Katie Hayak…see what they have to say about playing on the championship Immaculata team, in real life and reel life…

I love basketball and I love nuns.

It’s a left over from my Catholic youth, playing ball at Christ the King Elementary School and St. Pius X High School in Atlanta, so imagine my joy to attend a special preview for The Mighty Macs, which opens this weekend.

A movie about women’s basketball! With nuns? It got my attention.

And it captured my heart, because it’s wonderful.

Check out the rest of the review here, The Mighty Macs: More than a Game.

On my bookshelf at the office…

…where I am reminded daily to treat my students with dignity and respect, and show a little love every once in a while.

That’s St. Marguerite D’Youville. She keeps me honest in the classroom, kinda like the Grey Nuns did to me so long ago 🙂

a rain spattered windshield made me think of this

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;         5
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:         10
                  Praise him.

fall frolicks

Fall happens to be my favorite season  (when I’m not claiming spring is my favorite season). I love the promise of cooler weather, but really, I love the contrasts that coexist so beautifully at this time of year.

Fall gets a bad rap for heralding in winter and all the symbolism of death often associated with that. Phooey, I say. Winter has its charms, too. But this is about Fall, okay?

There’s something about the sun’s warmth on my skin when the air is cool that makes me feel like the whole world is a freshly made bed and I’m surrounded by cool linen and a warm down comforter.

Well, that was a bit much in the imagery department. It’s more like this: is there anything more delicious than a big fleecy college hoodie and shorts? Yeah, that’s more my comfy style.

But back to the sun. I am acutely aware of the sun in the fall. I think it has something to do with the gray, rainy weather that is typical of this part of the country in the fall. It’s rarely ever cold enough for an early snow (or any snow, for that matter) but the rain comes, and it brings a heavy pall with it.

Everything gets dingy and washed out, and the sky doesn’t so much turn gray as it loses any kind of definition. It’s just a big whiteout.

When the sun comes out I take notice. Like today. It was so bright it almost hurt.

The sun was kind of low in the sky and it made everything seem like it was filmed in Technicolor. The blue, cloudless sky was so blue. The green leaves were so green. And the sun?

It was magnificent.

 

 

daisies! and more daisies!

This week’s Catholic Weekend delved into the silliness of not having a recent post here to plug, and my only defense was…um. I had no defense. But Steve hasn’t updated either, so I challenged him to see who would post first.

I WIN!

So, I went out to lunch with John, saw a little football, ate some tasty burgers, and took a drive out to the granite-covered fields at the horse park. There was a mountain bike event going on, but I managed to grab a few shots of the Stone Mountain daisies that grow along granite outcroppings.

They really are the friendliest flowers 🙂

We’ve got a bunch of granite in our backyard, too, and I walked all the way to the back of the property with the dog, and lo and behold! I have my own daisies in my yard!

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What does beige and the Church have in common?


Well, for one, an atrocious trend in bland architecture and design in the latter part of the 20th century. Barring, of course, Gaudi’s gaudy Templo de la Sagrada Familia, which I saw in the mid-80’s and not only left me unmoved, it left me confused. There’s a time for less is more, ya know? Gaudi took it to the extreme. More is more, and then, let’s add some more.

So, I can live with disagreeing with the great architectural and Church minds of today that it is a masterpiece. It’s something. That’s for sure.

But I digress. This little ditty here is to whet your whistle for a little ol’ review of Fr. Robert Barron’s book, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith over at the Catholic Portal atPatheos.com. It’s gorgeous. The book, I mean. The review is pretty OK, too.

I’m a pretty avid reader and zip through books quickly. Not so with Father Robert Barron’s work of art, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith.I lingered over the pictures and reread many passages — not because they were difficult to digest, but because they are beautifully descriptive and rich with detail.

Barron’s style instructs without being pedantic. There is an underlying joy in what he shares, and it is contagious.

Read the whole review here, Catholicism: Out of Beige and into Beauty .