Just google "ordo amoris"

 

"Just google 'ordo amoris'," suggested VP Vance on 30 January 2025, defending his remarks earlier about who we are obliged to help:

JD VANCE: There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world... 

Apparently Pope Francis did. Or rather he used his common sense and dug into the Gospels and the deposit of Catholic social teaching that draws upon them.

"Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception." — Pope Francis in a letter to the Bishops of the United States, 11 February 2025

The whole letter is here.

Writing in isolation

I had two pieces of writing due in the last week. And...I lost a day to a medical procedure that turned me into a vampire, cowering in the sunlight. So I was feeling a bit pressured. Whoosh - one piece went off last Sunday (though I still have the earworm it gave me). The next piece needed more than a bit of wrangling. So much stuff I could say, but a firm word limit. So many tangled lines in the narrative, but in a short piece you can't have too many threads. And I was tired (vampiring is tiring, I discovered, is that why they are so pale?). 

Every time I got to work, I was interrupted. Math Man wanted some advice about floating point numbers and high precision calculations. A Girl Scout was at the door with cookies (I bought Crash some Thin Mints). Egads - that meeting! A colleague with good news. A colleague with challenges. Time to get online to give that talk. Each interruption took time to recover from, to recapture where I was. I felt like I was trying to untangle a skein of yarn, forced to stuff it back in the bag every few minutes, where it gathered more tangles. I was...frustrated. Also grumpy (sorry, Math Man!). 

This photograph turned up in one feed or another. It is an Isolator, invented by Hugo Gernsback (the founding editor of Amazing Stories and the Hugo for which the Hugo Awards are named). The article introducing this gadget in 1925 (it was the cover article for Science and Invention!) notes that it blocks out 90% of distractions (relative to what it doesn't say). The user found that after about 15 minutes under the hood things got stuffy, hence the oxygen tank, which the author said was found to "liven the subject considerably." 

The article also gave a design for an isolated office, which looked far more conducive to working than that helmet. All I might add would be a bar on the door.

I did get both pieces written and dispatched, without recourse to a isolating helmet. I just firmly closed the door to my office. (Though post-procedure the  helmet might have been welcome. No light!)