Quick fasting takes

...from before the fast has even properly begun; it's still Saturday night before the first Sunday of Advent!

I am not making a promise, a vow, or even forming a vague intention... but I hope to document my living of the liturgical year more intentionally over the next year.

• Going slightly mad in the way one does when one has given up twitter for the first time in a year.  
• I just looked back at one of my old posts and it made me laugh out loud. Goodness, I'm funny and I also type REALLY poorly. I need a copy editor. 
• SHOUT OUT to the lazy pseudonym I'm using for this blog, which is different from my twitter account, and also I don't use anywhere else. Hopefully that makes it ungoogleable. 
• I like to fast. Not! to abstain, mind. Abstaining drives me crazy, I like to eat. No, I like to fast--to give up something so that I can later eat it with gusto! It's like a game, or an English country dance. Step toward, step away from the Lord's good gifts. 
• Quartz: What if meditation wasn't only good?? Every Christian: *blank stare*.
• (As usual) instead of getting theology homework done, I'm listening to a podcast. I think the only way to create community life as a parish is to have people dedicated to making a parish into a community. It's good if you can import pre-made community but guess what, that doesn't happen in 2019 America. Anyway, solid podcast as usual, even though I always feel like I've fallen through the looking glass when Catholics talk about evangelization and teaching members of the church about the faith. "Have you considered... doing this all along? No? Okay." https://soundcloud.com/user-931742388/e68-learning-catechesis-corruption. 

Augustine is ruthless in his condemnation of the false religion of the Romans; our nation is obsessed with ancient Rome, and we mirror Rome in a number of ways; more people should read the beginning of the City of God.

Technically I'm supposed to be reading book 14 and 20-22 but can you imagine skipping to the end of City of God? Sure, I do that with detective novels but it hardly seems appropriate for one of the greatest works of theology... ever.

• "What kind of life did the city have under the tutelage of all those gods!" 
• "The gods do not listen to you. They are demons, they teach depravity, they delight in acts of shame. Far from counting it an injury if such fictions are told about them, they cannot bear the injury of not having these fictions acted out at the festivals."
•  "Let us Christians, therefore, give thanks to the Lord our God — not to heaven and earth, as that author argues, but to Him who has made heaven and earth; because these superstitions, which that Balbus, like a babbler, scarcely reprehends, He, by the most deep lowliness of Christ, by the preaching of the apostles, by the faith of the martyrs dying for the truth and living with the truth, has overthrown, not only in the hearts of the religious, but even in the temples of the superstitious, by their own free service." City of God, 4, 30
• Bring back frequent condemnation of demons in the public square! (City of God 6, 8)
• Have you ever considered citing Augustine against the prosperity gospellers? "We are dealing with a matter of supreme importance when we declare that the true and holy Divinity, despite the fact that he provides us with the helps necessary for the fragile life we now live, should not be sought or worshiped for the sake of the mere passing smoke of this life but rather for the sake of the blessedness, which can only be eternal life." (City of God, 7, Preface)
• God "by whose indwelling alone is the soul made happy" (7, 27). Read chapter 27 in its entirety, though. All the way through the end. "The beginning of The City of God isn't relevant to modern life" my foot.