Today is the Memorial of Saint Boniface, Bishop and Martyr (died 754). Today is World Environment Day.
Saint Boniface, Bishop and Martyr (died 754) was born about 673-680 at Crediton, Devonshire, christened with the name of Winfrid, and was educated at the Benedictine monastery at Exeter, England, where he became a Benedictine monk. Starting in 719 he became a missionary to Germany, assisted by Saint Albinus, Saint Abel, and Saint Agatha. They destroyed idols and pagan temples, and then built churches on the sites. In 723 Boniface encountered a tribe worshiping a Norse deity in the form of a huge oak tree. Boniface walked up to the tree, removed his shirt, took up an axe, and without a word he hacked down the six foot wide wooden god. Boniface stood on the trunk, and asked, “How stands your mighty god? My God is stronger than he.” The crowd’s reaction was mixed, but some conversions were begun. Boniface was made Bishop, and then Archbishop of Mainz. He reformed the churches in his see and built religious houses in Germany, along with founding or restoring the dioceses of Bavaria, Thuringia, and Franconia. He also made three trips to Rome to confer with the Pope. He had the support of Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, in his evangelizing efforts in Germany. He then evangelized in Holland, but was set upon by a troop of pagans, and he and fifty-two of his new flock, including Saint Adaler and Saint Eoban, were martyred at Dokkum, Friesland (modern Netherlands). He is the Patron Saint of the city of Fulda, Germany, of the country of Germany, and co-Patron Saint of England with Saint Augustine of Canterbury and Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. Today is World Environment Day. This day is the United Nation’s principal vehicle for encouraging worldwide awareness and action for the protection of our environment. It has been a flagship campaign for raising awareness on emerging environmental issues from marine pollution, human overpopulation, and global warming, to sustainable consumption and wildlife crime. World Environment Day [WED] was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972 on the first day of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, resulting from discussions on the integration of human interactions and the environment. Two years later, in 1974, the first WED was held with the theme “Only One Earth”. WED has grown to become a global platform for public outreach, with participation from over one hundred and forty-three countries annually. Each year, WED has a new theme that major corporations, NGOs, communities, governments and celebrities worldwide adopt to advocate environmental causes; this year, the host is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the theme for this year is ‘‘Land restoration, desertification, and drought resilience”. (In 2013 the Hindi poet Abhay Kumar penned the World Environment Day Anthem; the words in English, halfway down the Wikipedia page for World Environment Day, make the Anthem sound like something that should be sung by little Japanese kids in a Godzilla movie.)
Last night I finished reading One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters.
Richard fed the cats, and I woke up at 8:00 am. I started the laundry and the Weekly Computer Maintenance and Virus Scan, and posted to Facebook that today was World Environment Day. I did my Book Devotional Reading, and did my Book Review for this Weblog and for my Goodreads account for One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters. I ate my breakfast toast and read the Acadiana Advocate out on the porch, and did my Internet Devotional Reading just as the rain started coming down very heavy. I called the bank, as our account was locked; they called me back, and I got things fixed. My monies from my retirement accounts were deposited. I then discovered a leak in my closet (now I know how the inside of my church purse got so wet early last month); Richard called our contractor, who will have his laborers come out to see the problem at some point. I finished reading The Double by José Saramago, Translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and did my Book Review for the book for this weblog and for my Goodreads and Facebook accounts. I started reading Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker; we watched Jeopardy!, then I went out to the porch and continued reading Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker. We ate the last of the bacon wrapped chicken, whole new potatoes, and brussels sprouts, and watched Murdoch Mysteries S17E16 “Preacher Jimmy Wilde”. And I am tired, and I think I will finish this Daily Update, do some reading, and go to bed early.
Tomorrow is the Optional Memorial of Saint Norbert of Xanten, Bishop (died 1134), and the Remembrance of Servant of God Auguste “Nonco” Pelafigue (died 1977). Tomorrow is also Same Perfect Day and Month Day, and tomorrow is the anniversary of the D-Day Landings in 1944 on the Normandy coast by the Allies during World War II. The New Moon will arrive at 7:37 am. And I really have no plans for tomorrow.
Our Parting Quote for this Wednesday evening comes to us from Jerome S. Bruner, American psychologist (died 2016). Born in 1915 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, his parents were Polish Jewish immigrants. He was born blind (due to cataracts), but an experimental operation at age two restored his vision; he never forgot what it was like to perceive shapes and colors for the first time. His father died when Bruner was twelve, and his mother moved the family to Florida, where he attended a series of high schools. He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology, in 1937 from Duke, and went on to earn a master’s degree in psychology in 1939 and then a doctorate in psychology in 1941 from Harvard. In 1939 Bruner published his first psychological article on the effect of thymus extract on the sexual behavior of the female rat. During World War II, Bruner served on the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force committee under General Dwight D. Eisenhower, researching social psychological phenomena. Bruner was a researcher at Harvard in the 1940s when he became impatient with behaviorism, then a widely held theory, which viewed learning in terms of stimulus and response: the chime of a bell before mealtime and salivation, in Ivan Pavlov’s famous dog experiments. Bruner believed that behaviorism, rooted in animal experiments, ignored many dimensions of human mental experience. In one 1947 experiment, he found that children from low-income households perceived a coin to be larger than it actually was; their desires apparently shaping not only their thinking but also the physical dimensions of what they saw. In subsequent work, he argued that the mind is not a passive learner, and not a stimulus-response machine, but an active learner, bringing a full complement of motives, instincts and intentions to shape comprehension, as well as perception. His writings, in particular the book A Study of Thinking (1956), written with Jacqueline J. Goodnow and George A. Austin, inspired a generation of psychologists and helped break the hold of behaviorism on the field. To build a more complete theory, he and the experimentalist George A. Miller, a Harvard colleague, founded the Center for Cognitive Studies, which supported investigation into the inner workings of human thought. Much later, this shift in focus from behavior to information processing came to be known as the cognitive revolution. Bruner’s work made him a sought-after expert on development and education. In the late 1950s, after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite in space, officials and prominent educators called for a deeper commitment to education, particularly in the sciences. In 1959, federal science agencies convened a meeting of top scholars at Woods Hole, in Massachusetts, to brainstorm about possible reforms. Bruner, who ran the meeting, summarized participants’ views in The Process of Education (1960), a book that quickly became a landmark text in education reform and theory. One idea that emerged from the meeting was the “spiral curriculum,” in which teachers introduce students to topics early, in age-appropriate language, and revisit the same subjects in subsequent years, adding depth and complexity. Many school districts have incorporated that approach, beginning in grade school. Later, Bruner drew on his experience at Woods Hole to help design Head Start, the federal program introduced in 1965 to improve preschool development. In 1972 Bruner took a position at Oxford University, where, always intellectually restless, he began arguing that cognitive psychology should be broadened to include narrative construction and culture, which also shape the strategies people use to make sense of the world. Bruner wrote or co-wrote a dozen influential books and won a long list of awards in psychology and education. In the 1990s, he became an educational ambassador of sorts, working with preschools in Reggio Emilia, an Italian town near Bologna, and elsewhere. A number of preschools around the world use the Reggio Emilia approach, inspired by Bruner’s work there. He finished his career at N.Y.U. as a law professor, using his ideas about thinking, culture and storytelling to analyze legal reasoning and punishment. He retired in 2013 (died 2016): “We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any age of development.”
From The Recamier 