Tsh Oxenreider

I completely believe it. When young parents ask me for early homeschooling advice, I tell them to start curating a good home library (used are great!) and keep it in the public spaces in the home. Then designate mandatory DEAR (drop everything and read) time once a day, where everyone reads for an hour. If you do this, you’ll be 90% of the way there for the earlier years (and heck, even the adolescent years if you’ve built this into a habit).

@FrBreslin It’s an HDO for those of us with the @CSPOrd. 💪

Happy Ascension Thursday to those who know how to count to 40

70 years of marriage for my parents. Eleven children, 68 grandchildren, 109 great grandchildren with 11 on the way. One of the grandsons is a priest and celebrated a Mass for them while other grandsons served. A schola by great granchildren. We filled the church. Blessed!!!

@HarrisonGarlic1 Great choice in a read-aloud!

Reading Call of the Wild with my eldest boy. So good.

@ZubyMusic It’s a beautiful day here today, too! 🌤️

It feels good to be back in the great state of Texas. It's been a while!

After a year of reading the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Church Fathers, Roman Stoics, tons of historic documents, and more… On the last day of classes I love giving my go-to graduation gift to my senior students.

Happy 100th anniversary of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien's first meeting, and this entry from Lewis's journal. “He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap … No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.”

@LostInFilm It’s a tie between Rope and Before Sunrise.

What's your favorite film that takes place over a single day or night? ☀️🌙

@AndrewPetiprin @LostInFilm Which one is this?

@LostInFilm How about a single meal?

@problogger Amazing, Darren!

NEW: How I Built Two Free Bible Apps with Claude Code darrenrowse.com/posts/how-i-bu…

This radio station is called “classic rock” but it’s playing cool current music like Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

@jdflynn Yeah, it’s weird that my high school students wear Nirvana t-shirts the way we wore Beatles t-shirts.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

"Sic transit gloria" is Latin It means "You have a nice car, Gloria"

2 out of the 3 of our kids who’ve graduated from homeschool have gone/are going to their first-choice universities. Our last is still in high school but is also doing very well. It’ll be our 18th year homeschooling—all the kids are doing great at life. Would absolutely do it again.

I've said it many times before, and I'll say it again. We homeschooled our children because, as a professor, the absolute worst students I had were education majors. When my 5-year-old daughter asked me what she was supposed to say when other children's parents asked why she was homeschooled, I told her to say, "because my daddy loves me."

Darren! This is super interesting. I’m in charge of my church’s website, newsletter, and announcement slides, so I’m really intrigued by what you built to make all that more streamlined… I may pick your brain a little bit sometime. (Also, good to know”see” you! Hope your family is well.)

If you lead a team and you're wondering whether AI could actually change how you work, not just speed up a few tasks but genuinely change it, this might be worth 5 minutes.

I'm a 54-year-old pastor. My coding knowledge is a bit of HTML from 20 years of blogging. That's genuinely it. In the last year, I've built six tools that my ministry team uses every week.

May the fourth be with you

@SteveSkojec I completely agree with this. And yet also, I know *tons* of couples in their 20s and 30s these days having multiple children. They’re ALL religious.

He’s dead on.

@joeljmiller Footnotes are actually read. Endnotes just tell you the author did the research. (Hoping my publisher allows me my 3k words of footnotes in my next book. 🤞)

Where do you stand in the great Footnote vs. Endnote wars?

@dlongenecker1 Yes and amen. Which is why I’m so grateful for the Ordinariate.

The gap between the Anglican and Catholic Churches is not wide, but it is very deep.

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