Just as Laura walks around and prays for the children in other nearby graves, she trusts that other people will see her children and keep caring for them.
This is why praying for the living and the dead is a work of mercy. It's good for the souls of those we are praying for, it's good for our own souls, but it's also this quiet, unknown act of charity to loved ones and neighbors who will pass by and know you were helping out their family while they were away.
what cathedral workers must have been like, the ones who lay on scaffolds, a deadly distance above the ground, to complete carvings that were much too high to ever be seen by the worshippers below. Their work, and Br. Joseph’s, is done for God, and for this one girl.
Reminds me of Antoni Gaudí talking about God as his client. People always quote him joking about la Sagrada Família taking forever, "My client is not in a hurry." But I liked what he said about the Mercat Santa Caterina, for which he designed an unbelievably complex, decorative roof. "Nobody will see it!" critics said. "Do you think God is nobody?!" he responded.
Fr. Albrich confesses that it seems paradoxical that, after coming to the monastery to “look for the things that are eternal” he finds himself in a community that is physically and institutionally fragile
pray for vocations!!!!!
to visit one of the vast spillover graveyards in a place we never went together.
this is one of those quiet griefs so many people in cities share but never talk about. there's no room in the close-by cemeteries we do know, so we have to visit our loved ones in strange faraway places that feel like warehouses rather than part of our communities. just one of the many reasons we need cities with more space, more green, more room for life and death, so that we don't banish our beloved dead to oblivion.
“Even a year or two after, we got Christmas cards from them,” said Laura.
what a way to remember the birth of the Christ child!
she visited the nearest Catholic cemetery simply to have a place to mourn
nice to know that other people do this. it is good to mourn with "strangers," whatever we are mourning. we are all God's, all in communion.
If technology, born from useful play, becomes an environment in which work can be carried on in the guise of play, then either we will never really work, or we will never really play, after this
This observation—that the blurring of lines between work and play is not inherently, self-evidently good for people—is really important imo. Especially in pedagogy, it's tempting to celebrate incorporating play unequivocally without considering some of the potentially harmful outcomes if we take it to a Kantian imperative extreme.
By giving humanists the feeling that they are exploring large corpora much more quickly and efficiently at scale, topic models may make humanists much more willing to entertain big-picture questions about huge textual libraries. Historians and literature scholars might be able to start to tackle questions spanning centuries and tens of thousands of texts through more traditional means, using topic models only to make the initial process of venturing new ideas feel less unbounded. Confidence gained in this manner may be quite useful.
This surge in interest in topic modeling coincides with a turn in my field of Spanish literature (and I'm sure other fields as well) away from the author-focused model and toward more thematic concerns. It's rare to see an article, much less a monograph, nowadays in my field that focuses in on a singular author, canonical or not. Rather, a glance at any table of contents will show a lot more emphasis on big themes (e.g. "material culture," "the body," "restitution") in narrow timespaces ("...in early modern New Spain," "...among Afro-Iberian maritime workers," etc). This sort of thematic research is ripe for topic-modeling—usually accompanied by close reading, though—in a way that a previous era's more individual-focused questions were not. It's curious to me that DH, and topic modeling specifically, is not more popular in my field, given these broader scopes.