He also draws our attention to Lectionary Central’s heroic scanning of St. Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job.

You’re invited to join author Kimberly Hahn for “Faithful and Fruitful,” a biblically-centered women’s retreat focusing on the joyous juggling act of motherhood to be held October 31-November 2 at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio). The weekend retreat will offer both biblical wisdom and practical advice on parenting children from toddlerhood to the teenage years.

Every stage of a parent’s life brings new challenges and joys, Hahn says, but through it all, some things never change. “Your children will always need your love, you will always need God’s grace,” she says. “The end goal of all the diapers, the carpools, and the sleepless nights remains the same: helping get your kids to heaven.”

Kimberly Hahn, popular speaker and author wrote Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism with her husband, Scott. Her newest books are Graced and Gifted: Biblical Wisdom for the Homemaker’s Heart and Chosen and Cherished: Biblical Wisdom for Your Marriage.

“Faithful and Fruitful” is the third in the Life-Nurturing Love series, a collection of Bible studies written by Kimberly Hahn based on Proverbs 31. Registration is $55 without meals and $100 with meals. Call the Franciscan University Christian Outreach Office at 1-800-437-8368 or 740-283-6314 to register.

It is the Church which came before the Scriptures; the Church that produced the Scriptures with divine assistance, and that preserved their integrity through the threats of persecution and heresy - it is the Church that gathered the Scriptures together in a book - a book that sustains all who call themselves Christian.

The passage is from his book Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith.

I was first drawn to the book because I, like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, have five daughters — and what father doesn’t see hints of his young daughters’ great virtue in Meg’s character in A Man for All Seasons?

I did not know, however, that Meg was quite a patrologist. Like her father and the Mores’ friend Erasmus, she was a great reader of Eusebius, Cyprian, Jerome, and Augustine. She even corrected mistakes in Erasmus’s scholarship on the Fathers. John Guy thinks she should have been the obvious candidate to translate the Bible into English — except that it never would have occurred to anyone to ask a woman. Meg’s daughter Mary would one day translate Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History out of the Greek.

I do recommend A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More, and not just for dads with lovely daughters, but for everyone. It’s not a devotional book, or even a “Catholic” book (I got no hint that Guy was a co-religionist of mine). It’s a book for all folks, all seasons.

One of the earliest known Insular gospel books, the Cuthbert Gospels, is bound and sewn in a specifically Coptic manner, which Michelle Brown believes indicates “an actual learning/teaching process” linking Egypt and Northumbria. The same process is hinted at in the Book of Kells, which contains an image of the Virgin suckling the Christ child clearly taken from a Coptic original: the virgo lactans was a specifically Coptic piece of iconography borrowed from the pharaonic image of Isis suckling the infant Horus. The Irish wheel cross, the symbol of Celtic Christianity, has recently been shown to have been a Coptic invention, depicted on a Coptic burial pall of the fifth century, three centuries before the design first appears in Scotland and Ireland.

A growing body of evidence suggests that contact between the Mediterranean and early Christian Britain was surprisingly frequent. Egyptian pottery —perhaps originally containing wine or olive oil—has been found during excavations at Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, the supposed birthplace of King Arthur, while the Irish Litany of Saints remembers “the seven monks of Egypt [who lived] in Disert Uilaig” on the west coast of Ireland. Travel guides in circulation in early Christian Britain gave accounts of the Egyptian monasteries.

We’ve dipped our toe into these waters before.

Thanks to Joe Heim for the link. He and his California colleague Paul Crawford have been giving me a tuition-free education via email!