Forming our future
By Joni House
Deciding on the best educational environment for a child is one of the most important choices a parent has to make. In our quick-paced, technology-centered culture, finding the right technological tool for one’s child can seem like the most challenging part of the process. In truth, this is only half of the challenge.
It is not until one begins to use available technology that one discovers its value as a resource in education and appreciates that having the right tool is only the first step in the success of student learning. For teachers to be truly successful at using technology in education they must have more than just the availability of technology, they must also be educated in how to use it effectively.

Imagine you have just purchased a beautiful new car. It is sleek, shiny, and includes all of the latest upgrades. You are thrilled at the possibilities available to you now that you own it. You open the door, place yourself inside, and close the door in preparation for your very first drive to the most amazing place you can imagine. Can you feel the excitement?

Now imagine that excitement dissipating as you realize that you have no idea how to start it or which pedal to push to make it go. This is the frustration teachers struggle with when faced with using modern technology in the classroom. It is a gift, but without the knowledge of how to “drive” it, the value is lost.

One of the determining factors for parents when choosing a school for their child is knowing and understanding the technology resources that a school can provide. The catch for true integration is that the technology must not only be present, but utilized to its fullest capability. For technology to be successfully integrated in school, it must be used in the classroom, but also done in such a manner that facilitates hands-on learning for students. What does this mean? Let’s take a look at the use of interactive white boards.

If not properly trained on the capabilities of an interactive white board, teachers can fall into the trap of using them as a glorified overhead projector. Although still an important use, there are countless additional interactive possibilities in interactive white board software that can assist teachers in facilitating hands-on learning for students.
Students should be out of their seats, at the board with the mouse device in hand, applying what they are learning to the lesson. They should be at the plate swinging, not sitting on the bench watching the play. Kinesthetic learning is technology’s biggest asset, but it is not as simple as handing the technology to the teacher and patting him/her on the back with a silent “good luck.”

The proper use of technology in the classroom necessitates continual professional development. Teachers must be provided ample opportunities to master the use of technology in building classroom curriculum and facilitating modern day hands-on learning.

Having the resources and utilizing them to enhance the teaching/learning process is crucial. An educational environment can have all the latest resources, but if those resources are not utilized, how is the material being taught enhanced?
In order for resources such as interactive white boards, tablets, digital cameras, document cameras, wikis, blogs, student response systems, Skype, laptops and notebooks to impact student learning, educators must be provided professional development opportunities which demonstrate how teachers can integrate technologies into classrooms.

Educators must then be given the opportunity to utilize the newly learned strategies that integrate technology into the curriculum. If technology is truly integrated into the curriculum the school community will have to learn from their challenges, celebrate their successes, and share their resources.
In many instances educators learn best from their and colleagues’ trials and errors. We are all learning, and what a great lesson to teach our students – learning never stops.
(Joni House has been the principal of Columbus Annunication School for three years.)

COMPLETE THE CIRCLE
By George Evans
I can’t seem to avoid Pope Francis when I sit down to write this column. That may not be bad. In fact it may be very good because he continues to have so much to say that we all need to hear.  This time his Easter sermon to 150,000 gathered in St. Peter’s Square emphasized that evangelization, the topic it seems everyone is currently talking or writing books about, “is about leaving ourselves behind and encountering others, being close to those crushed by life’s trouble, sharing with the needy, standing at the side of the sick, elderly and the outcast.”

He is not telling us to sell the catechism or to teach the creed as such.  He’s telling us to take the risen Lord with us to those who need him and will meet him in us. That’s scary, but who else is going to do it.  We are his hands and feet. Peter and all the heroes of the early church are dead.
Saints Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius, Dominic and are dead and while their religious orders are doing their part, they can’t do it alone either. He’s telling us to do what we are told at the end of each Mass, “Go and glorify the Lord by your life.” Embrace the world and its people in mercy and love and the catechism and creed will follow and will be embraced in turn.

Pope Francis prayed in his Easter message that the risen Lord would “help us to overcome the scourge of hunger, aggravated by conflict and by the immense wastefulness for which we are often responsible” and that Christians “would be given the strength to protect the vulnerable, especially children, women and the elderly, who are at times exploited and abandoned.”
He’s telling us to get out of our churches and get our hands dirty – to visit the sick and suffering, to feed the hungry and go into their homes, to teach about Jesus by letting those vulnerable see him in us.

Francis is telling us to nourish and strengthen ourselves with prayer, adoration, Eucharist and other sacraments but then to do something with it for others as Jesus did,  not to just keep it for our own sole benefit.  The tough things like affecting legislation that is desperately needed at both the state and federal level, working with  one or more of the myriad groups attempting to make Jackson and every other city in Mississippi a better and more just and caring place to live.

Giving some of our time to those in prison or just out of prison, to those struggling with mental illness or the financial disaster which so often accompanies it. Reach out and touch a family member who has been excluded or a co-worker who’s difficult or a foreign worker who doesn’t speak good English.

Pope Francis has given us all kinds of examples of what to do in his actions and in his preaching and writings. He has stripped away much of the unnecessary pomp and circumstance of the papacy that made it more difficult to see the humility and care of Jesus by living a lifestyle much more in keeping with the carpenter from Nazareth and the incarnate son of the Father and risen Lord. He has worked tirelessly to reform the Vatican and has announced two synods on the family for the fall of 2014 and 2015.  He has embraced the poor and vulnerable in almost every public outing.

He needs our help as we need his. We cannot be content with trying to shape up our own lives and stopping there. This world needs Jesus desperately and can only get Him from us.

Jesus has saved us and we have celebrated the Paschal Mystery yet again and are not only saved but strengthened by it. It is now time to do something with it and to take the risen Lord with us to the world in all its nitty-gritty reality.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Nature, desire, and soul – we rarely integrate these well. Yet they are so inextricably linked that how we relate to one deeply colors the others; and indeed, spirituality itself might be defined as what we each do in terms of integrating these three in our lives.
More recently notable spiritual authors such as Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Bill Plotkin and Belden Lane have argued persuasively that physical nature profoundly affects the soul, just as how we manage our private desires deeply influences how we treat nature. Spirituality is naïve when it is divorced from nature and desire. In a book just released, “The Road Knows How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul,” Canadian writer Trevor Herriot joins these voices in calling for a better integration between nature, desire, and soul.

The flow of the book follows its title. Herriot does a walking pilgrimage across part of Saskatchewan’s prairies, a land roamed for centuries by the buffalo, and lets nature and desire speak to his soul as he does this prairie Camino. The result is a remarkable chronicle, a deeply moral book.

As a naturalist, Herriot is involved in various conservation projects from saving grassland birds to preserving the historic grass upon which the buffalo once roamed. Thus it’s no surprise that one of his central themes is the connection he intuits between nature and spirit. “I worry about what happens when we separate spirituality from bodily life and culture, both of which are profoundly connected to soil, climate, and the other givens of place,” he writes.

And we should worry too: “These days, we watch truckloads of grain pass by and sense that something in us and in the earth is harmed when food is grown and consumed with little intimacy, care and respect. The local and slow food movements are showing us that the way we grow, distribute, prepare and eat food is important for the health of our body-to-earth exchanges.

The next step may be to realize that the energy that brings pollen to ovary and grows the grain, once it enters our bodies, also needs to be husbanded. The way we respond to our desire to merge, connect, and be fruitful – stirrings felt so deeply, but often so shallowly expressed – determines the quality of our body-to-body exchanges.”
From there it’s a short step to his reflections on sex and desire. Herriot submits that “there is a sadness that comes of misappropriating sexual energy, a kind of functional despair that hums away in the background for most men if they stop long enough to listen to it.” In brief, for him, how we treat our bodies, our spouses and the other gender greatly helps determine how we treat nature.

And the reverse is just as true; how we treat nature will help determine how we treat our own bodies, our spouses, our lovers and the other gender: “In a world bathed in industrial and impersonal sex, where real connection and tenderness are rare, will we sense also that something in us and in the earth is being harmed from the same absence of intimacy, care, and respect? Will we learn that any given expression of our erotic energies either connects us to or divides us from the world around us and our souls?

We are discovering that we must steward the energies captured by nature in the hydrocarbons or in living plants and animals, and thereby improve the ways we receive the fruits of the earth, but we struggle to see the primary responsibility we bear for the small but cumulatively significant explosions of energy we access and transmit as we respond to our own longings to connect, merge and be fruitful.
Learning how to steward the way we bear fruit ourselves as spiritual/sexual beings with a full set of animal desires and angelic ambitions may be more important to the human journey than we fully understand.” This is not a language that’s easily digested by either the right or the left.

Like Allan Bloom’s book a generation ago, “The Closing of the American Mind,” Herriot’s book is poised to have equally strong critics on both sides of the religious and ideological spectrum. Religious conservatives will be upset about some of his views on sexuality, but I fear that many secular liberals will be just as upset by those views as their right-wing counterparts. The same holds true for some of Herriot’s views on soul, church, historical Christianity, patriarchy, feminism, gender, homosexuality and global warming.

Conservative Christians will find themselves stretched in ways that they would prefer to not think about and strident secularists will find themselves constantly incredulous that someone like Herriot, whom they consider an ally, will speak of soul, spirituality, lust and chastity in ways that they have long-considered naïve; but holding very complex truths often creates precisely this kind of tension.

James Hillman used to quip: “A symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.” “The Road Knows How” tells us where many, many of our symptoms belong.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)