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Engaging Faith

Practical Lesson Ideas and Activities for Catholic Educators
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Teaching with Pope Benedict XVI's Message for Lent 2013

Before announcing his resignation, Pope Benedict XVI released a his message for Lent 2013, "Believing in charity calls forth charity." Each year, the Holy Father shares some thoughts to focus the Church on certain virtues and practices during Lent. This year, in honor of the Year of Faith, the he invites us all to meditate on the relationship between faith and charity (love). It is, no doubt, a taste of what was to come in his now-uncertain encyclical on faith. He begins his letter with a summary of the connections he made between the theological virtues of faith and love in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. Then he goes on to distinguish between the two virtues and how they must go hand in hand. Believe it or not, the Pope's message is not so advanced that you would need a theological degree. A high school student could certainly read and understand the message and apply it to their lives. Have the students take a clean sheet of paper and fold it in half. On the left write "faith" at the top and title the right side "Charity (Love)." Have the students read the message, which can be downloaded at the Vatican website. While they read, have them write how the Pope describes the connection between the two virtues in his message. Start with the third paragraph in section number 2. "Charity as life in faith" to create the chart. Faith and Charity Chart Use the following as a guide/answer key: FAITH || CHARITY Faith is knowing the truth and adhering to it || Charity is "walking" in the truth Through faith we enter into friendship || Through charity this friendship is lived and cultivated Faith = embrace the commandment of the Lord || Charity = happiness of putting it into practice Faith = begotten as children of God || Charity = persevere concretely in our divine sonship Faith = recognize the gifts God has entrusted to us || Charity = makes the gifts fruitful Scaling the mountain || Coming back down, bearing love Apostles proclaim the Gospel || Apostles concern to be of service to the poor Mary || Martha (Lk 10:38-42) Tree || Fruit Baptism || Eucharist Everything begins with the humble acceptance of faith || Everything has to arrive at the truth of charity Here are the differences laid out in a table format: Faith Charity Faith is knowing the truth and adhering to it Charity is "walking" in the truth Through faith we enter into friendship Through charity this friendship is lived and cultivated Faith = embrace the commandment of the Lord Charity = happiness of putting it into practice Faith = begotten as children of God Charity = persevere concretely in our divine sonship Faith = recognize the gifts God has entrusted to us Charity = makes the gifts fruitful Scaling the mountain Coming back down, bearing love Apostles proclaim the Gospel Apostles concern to be of service to the poor Mary Martha (Lk 10:38-42) Tree Fruit Baptism Eucharist Everything begins with the humble acceptance of faith Everything has to arrive at the truth of charity

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Five Opportunities for Evangelization During Lent

During the season of Lent, Catholics visibly practice their faith in unique ways that can catch the attention of non-Catholics. These practices then become opportunities for evangelization. Students should be ready to explain why they do what they do during Lent for their own sakes and for the sakes of those who want to learn about Catholicism. You may want to take each of these five topics per day as you begin the Lenten season. You may also want to reference a past post at Engaging Faith titled "Background Information on Lent." 1. The Ash Wednesday Ashes: Why do you have dirt on your forehead? First, ashes are a symbol for the need for forgiveness in the Old and New Testaments. Ashes on Ash Wednesday remind us that we need forgiveness from God. Second, ashes remind us that God created us from earth and that our bodies will return to the earth after death, but our souls are destined to be with God forever. (Do students know that the ashes come from burning palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday celebration?) Discussion Questions: What does it feel like to need forgiveness from another person? How can we use this human experience to find areas in our lives where we need God’s forgiveness? Why do humans sometimes need a reminder that their physical origin and destination is dirt? 2. Abstaining from Meat on Fridays: Why can’t you have a burger today? Abstaining from meat on Fridays is a small sacrifice for us to make to remember the great sacrifice that Jesus made for us on the cross on Good Friday. In addition, we need to pray for a clean heart, the readiness to follow God’s will, and a connection to others who are suffering, especially the poor. Discussion Questions: Why might it be easier to perform physical acts of sacrifice than to pray for personal conversion? Why does the external act become meaningless if there is not a deeper desire to draw closer to Jesus? 3. Giving Something Up for Lent: Why do you give something up for Lent? Giving something up for Lent strengthens our love for Christ and our resistance to temptations to sin. This practice really does not mean much, however, unless we become more loving persons. Lent gives us the opportunity to pray more and to perform additional acts of kindness and service. Discussion Questions: How does giving something up remind us that it is Lent, a special time? If giving up coffee coffee tends to make a person shout at their kids, should that parent give up coffee for Lent? Why or why not? 4. Palm Sunday: Why do you get palm branches at Church? We take palms home because they remind us of the story behind Palm Sunday in the Bible. Jesus rides into Jerusalem and people put palm branches on the road in front of him as a sign of honor as they call him a king. Palm Sunday is a day to honor Christ as king but also to remember that he is a humble king, riding on a donkey. Discussion Questions: The palm branch is a symbol. What are some other symbols Catholics use to deepen their relationship with God? 5. Good Friday: Why do you go to church on Good Friday afternoon? On Good Friday, we go to church at about 3:00 p.m. to honor Jesus’ hours of suffering on the cross before he died. We reflect on Jesus’ love for us and listen to the story of the Passion as well as participate in other venerations. Discussion Questions: For what practical reasons do you think that some parishes hold their Good Friday service on Good Friday evening rather than at 3:00 p.m.? How does listening to the story of the Passion help us understand Jesus’ love for us? (Adapted from “Six Ways to Evangelize During Lent,” USCCB) (photo credit: LarimdaME)

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Emerging Youth Cultures

“Emerging youth cultures” will be the focus of the upcoming Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture to be held this week in Rome. Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi shares an overview of the theme of the Council: "Walking down the streets with their ears blocked up with earphones, listening to their music, gives a sign that they are 'disconnected' from the unbearable social, political, and religious complexities that we adults have created. In a certain sense, they drop their gaze so as to exclude themselves because we have excluded them with our corruption and inconsistency, with uncertainty, unemployment, and marginalization. We parents, teachers, and priests, the ruling class, we must examine our conscience. The 'diversity' of youth, which in fact is not only negative, contains surprising seeds of fruitfulness and authenticity. We need only think of the choice to volunteer made by many young persons or their passion for music, sports, and friendship, which is their ways of telling us that man does not live by bread alone. We need only think of their spirituality, which is so original in its sincerity, or their freedom, which is hidden under a blanket of seeming indifference." "For these and for many other reasons," concluded Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture. "I am interested in the youth, who are the present (not only the future) of humanity. Read the full article announcing the Council here. For Your Consideration Take a moment to think about the teenagers that you teach. Write three or four sentences describing them both individually and collectively. What do you believe to be the future of today's youth? What type of Catholics will the teens you teach be like in ten years? If you could ask the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture to consider one topic, what would that be? Feel free to share your observations in the comment section below.

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Super Bowl and the Mass

There is an ambiguous relationship between sports and religion in the United States. On the one hand, we might wonder why it is easy to get 70,000 fans to a football game but it is difficult be to fill a church on Sunday morning. On the other hand, spectator sports can be a healthy family activity. Ask students to compare these aspects of the Mass and a NFL football game to find similarities and differences. (Suggested answers provided) Entrance procession (Announcement of players, coaches, and refs/Priest processes in with deacon, readers, and altar servers) Statement of Beliefs (Pledge of allegiance/Creed) Music (Fight song, Liturgical Music) Expected Dress (Team colors/nicer clothes) Types of Participation (Cheering/In the Mass, a person participates in the Celebration of the Eucharist – visible participation includes responses to the priest’s statements) Social element (both are places to meet family and friends) After considering the parallels, complete the activity by posing this dilemma and question: The popularity of sports in the United States reveals that Americans have a real desire to invest themselves in something bigger than they are. Does this fascination with spectator sports disguise a deeper longing that sports do not fulfill?

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Why Be a Catholic?

Catholic Schools Week is a great chance to point out the reasons teens and adults alike are Catholic. Share or adapt the following assignment from Sr. Kieran Sawyer, SSND, to help teens answer the question "Why be a Catholic?" Part 1 First, give the students the question "Why be a Catholic?" Tell each person to list at least five reasons why a person would want to be a member of the Catholic Church. Next, make a composite list on the board of all the reasons why a person might want to be Catholic. List both "good" and "bad" reasons. When the list is complete ask the students to put a plus (+) sign next to what they consider to be good reasons and a minus (-) sign next to what they consider to be bad reasons for being a Catholic. Then have them pick out three reasons that best answer the question for themselves: "Why are you Catholic?" Part 2 Call on individual students to be interviewed in front of the class. Some of the possible questions you can use are: Do you think you will be a practicing Catholic ten years from now? Do you think you will want to be married in the Church? Do you think you will want to raise your children Catholic? Do you think you will send your children to Catholic grade school? high school? Do you think you will be the kind of Catholic that will serve the Church on a parish council, as a lector, in the choir, as a religious education teacher? Part 3 Take the discussion in a new direction. Ask the students to imagine that they are being put on trial for being a Catholic? Call on volunteers to come before the class. Present them with the classic question scenario. Say, "You are on trial for being a Catholic. How do you plead?" Continue in a mock trial format, perhaps choosing prosecutors and defense lawyers to "try" the case before the class. After some time, play this new seven minute video La evidencia as a summary.

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Reviewing Internet Safety

The well-documented incident with former Notre Dame football player Manti Te'o serves as a reminder to teens and others to observe Internet safety. Make sure to take some time to review Internet protocol, rules, and potential dangers with your students. Here are a few helpful web links. Please feel free to add other helpful tips in the comment section. New York Public Library Basic safety rules. The My House Initiative Specific message dealing with reasons for and ways to avoid pornography on the Internet sponsored by the Archdiocese of Kansas City. Online Dating Tips From the CatholicMatch website. Several articles on online dating, mainly intended for adults but with some appropriate rules for teens to consider as well. Pope Benedict on Online Relationships Pope Benedict XVI offers a reminder that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact.

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Using Different Colored Highlights to Increase Reading Comprehension

In the last iPad tutorial, I explained how teachers and students can use the Study Cards feature of the iBooks app to review glossary terms, main ideas, and Review Questions. A major part of that tutorial focused on effective highlighting with a designated color for Study Cards. One of the important advantages of eBooks for education is that highlights don't have to be final. When you highlight a book with colored ink, the highlight is there forever. It is a static experience. You highlight, then you review. You can't change it. The highlighting experience for eBooks and eTextbooks can be a much more engaging experience. One of our responsibilities as teachers is to use the tools to effectively teach students how to be better independent learners. The highlighting feature, when it allows you to have multiple colors, can be used in exciting new ways. Check your eTextbook reader app to be sure it offers multiple colors for your highlights. The iBooks iPad app, the Direct Digital app, and the GoodReader app (for PDF eTextbooks) all include the ability to highlight in more than one color. Teaching Good Highlighting Skills First, let's focus on the purpose of highlighting. To increase engagement with what students are reading, they need to do something active to help them organize new information into their brains. When reading printed books, this may include highlighting, writing notes in the margins, taking notes on paper, outlining what they read, or creating a mind map. Unfortunately, highlighting becomes an incredibly passive way to read books. We end up highlighting well-written sentences or long paragraphs with important information. What we are left with is a set of interesting sentences and paragraphs. Now that highlights and notes are so easy to see in a book and access outside of the book context, we need to become better highlighters and teachers of highlighting skills. What is the purpose of a highlight? Review. If we never review the highlights we've made, then we've wasted our time. If we do review our highlights, and notice that we've highlighted nearly the entire text, then we are again wasting our time. Instead, try and teach this: Highlight sentences that summarize main ideas of paragraphs and sections. Highlight supporting arguments of main ideas (sometimes numbered lists or bullet points). Highlight words, sentences, or concepts that you don't understand (for now). Highlight words or sentences that your teacher points to. Turn your highlights into outlines, questions, and summary points. Or, consult the highlighting suggestions in the final section of the Study Cards Tutorial, "Using iPad Study Cards to Review Reading." Most kids don't know how to study for tests and quizzes. Studying is a process that begins the first time you read something and ends in thinking creatively about ideas. Highlighting with Multiple Colors: A Pre-Reading Strategy I'm a huge proponent of pre-reading strategies. Most of us, whether we are teachers or students, skip this important step in reading new material. Pre-reading is reading before you read. It requires a quick scan of a section of text looking at the headings, the images, the bold words, and the first and last sentences of paragraphs to get an idea of what a selection of text is about before we even read the details. So how do you use highlighting to do pre-reading? Remember that highlights in an eBook/eTextbook can always be changed. So if you highlight something now, it can be deleted later. If you highlight something in yellow, it can easily be changed to green. Before releasing the students to read, ask them to use the following colors to highlight parts of the text: Green: Words, concepts, and ideas that you already know well. Blue: Words, concepts, and ideas you've heard of or understand a little bit. Red: Words, concepts, and ideas you've never heard of. Give students a little direction by pointing out certain words or concepts you want them to preview and highlight in green, blue, or red. Next, give them five to ten minutes to look up the words or concepts they highlighted in red and blue (kind of know and never heard of). In most eReaders, students can do this directly from the app by clicking on a word or highlighted text and selecting "Search Web" or "Search Wikipedia." Have them write what they've learned in a note connected with the red highlights. As a class discuss some of the concepts they didn't know before reading that they understand now. When they read the text, they can either delete the highlights to their liking or change the colors from blue and red to green. You will need to practice this activity to get students used to this kind of pre-reading and highlighting, but eventually these will become habits. Students will find the things they don't know and utilize the incredible tools at their disposal to quickly increase comprehension. You will find that in the long run they will learn faster by engaging in a text in this way than in just reading and answering the review questions.

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The Global Religious Landscape

The Pew Forum recently released The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010, a country-by-country analysis of data from more than 2500 censuses, surveys, and population registers. You may want to explore some of this data with your students. While the content may fit perfectly into a World Religions course, the report really contains information that all of our students should know. 73 percent of the world’s people live in countries where the majority of the population are of the same faith. How do you think that a person’s experience of faith differs if one is in the majority group rather than the minority group? The median age for Muslims is 23, 26 for Hindus, 30 for Christians, and 36 for Jews. (Can a religious group’s median age suggest anything significant about the people in each religious group?) A further breakdown indicates that the median age for Christians in the United States is 39, Europe (42), sub-Saharan African (19) and in Latin America/Caribbean (27). (Do these ages suggest anything about Christianity in the past or future?) Catholics make up about 50 percent of Christians. (Do you think that the Catholic Church has leadership responsibilities or other obligations to the larger Christian community because of its size?) Currently only one percent of the global Christian community lives in the Middle East and North Africa where Christianity originated. (How and why do think that the Christian community spread so far from its location in the time of the early Church?) The study finds that 16.3% of the people in the world are “unaffiliated” with a religious group. (Who are the “unaffiliated?” Why might the majority of the population in China, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, and North Korea be “unaffiliated”?) Check this link for this data and more.

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