10 Years of "Keeping It Catholic" on the Net!

It all began with my small but growing email list for Catholic homeschooling parents. In the summer of 1996, one of my articles - "How to Keep Your Homeschool Catholic" - made a surprising impact on Catholic homeschooling parents nationwide.  In fact, the response was so incredible that I wrote another version of that commentary, which later appeared (in my "Sursum Corda" homeschooling column). In its own turn, that one piece of writing brought forth more emails, phone calls, and letters from around the world. 

A simple yet important reminder about how (and why) we must keep our homeschools thoroughly Catholic, that single article brought to contemporary Catholic parents a long over-due awareness of the Catholic Church's doctrine on the Christian (meaning Catholic) education of youth. It also brought to a clearer focus the true purpose of my already existing email list, which was promptly christened "Keeping It Catholic" (KIC). 

From KIC's email list sprang the KIC website, followed by my books - The Keeping It Catholic Home Education Guides. On this site, you will find sample reviews from both Volume I: The Foundations (see The Importance of Keeping It Catholic plus my Catholic Homestudy Reviews and Parent Help Reviews), and Volume 2: History  (which, despite the brief title, is about teaching and learning history with a Catholic conscience  rather than a "Catholic perspective").

Both books help you learn more about the Church's doctrine on the Christian education of children and teens, discover the "four main temperaments" and which ones can be found in your own family, customize your own Catholic curriculum, review Catholic home study programs, companies, and publishers, locate the best materials for your family, recognize Red Flags in resources, understand the main educational methods, set goals, keep records, reference handy history lists (appreciate "living books" when read "through eyes of faith"), use the Internet to supplement your homeschool, and more.

As you can see, the KIC site also features articles for Catholic homeschooling families, my blog "Keeping It Catholic with Marianna Bartold," FAQ's (a "Q&A" about Catholic education at home, with answers from Church doctrine), the Homeschool News Archives, info on "homeschool" sacramental guidelines which starts here, the now-famous Red Flag pages that help you avoid "Pitfalls on the Path," a few inspiring stories and humor collected from the Internet, and, hopefully, more to come in the following years!

In the meantime,  I personally invite you to read the excerpts below , which are taken from my books, the The Keeping It Catholic Home Education Guides .

Incidentally, the first excerpt below introduces you to a re-discovered truth well-described by none other than the Catholic historian and apologist, Hillaire Belloc, and the second is about "living" books in the Catholic curriculum.  But keep scrolling after that, because there's more!

Once you're finished perusing the KIC website, why not join the Keeping It Catholic Email List - the very same list that really started it all? We'll be glad to see you with us! ~ Marianna C. Bartold, KIC

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A Catholic "Perspective" or a Catholic Conscience?
  Excerpt from Keeping It Catholic's Home Education Guide, Volume I:  The Foundations

"Catholic sources give us more than what some call the "Catholic perspective," which is a limiting and neutralizing phrase, for perspective is too often a mere viewpoint. Today, all viewpoints are perceived as equal and valid, but we know that a viewpoint is not necessarily the truth..."

"Words and phrases are powerful. Words become ideas and ideas become actions. Since words which we tend to pick up and tend to repeat eventually impact our thinking, I suggest that we drop the phrase "Catholic perspective" and instead speak of the Catholic conscience , as explained by Hillaire Belloc in his book, Europe and the Faith. In the book's Introduction, Belloc wrote: "

" 'This talk of 'aspects' is modern and therefore part of a decline: I will not  stoop to it. I will rather do homage to the truth and say that there is no such thing as a Catholic 'aspect' of European history. There is no such thing as a 'Catholic' aspect to history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all of these look on Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe from within.' "

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Living Books through Eyes of Faith
  Excerpt from Keeping It Catholic's  Home Education Guide, Volume 2:  [Teaching] History

"Story telling is the simplest and most enjoyable way of teaching elementary age students about history. A 'living book' is often a short story, a novel or a biography in print form that takes the readers into another person's life and time. Parents can help their children discover the world around them through the eyes of faith by using both Catholic history texts and 'living' books in the curriculum."

"The motives for reading living books are two, one obvious and one not. The obvious aim is to make history real to the student; the second (and more important objective) is to cultivate the Catholic conscience."

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Light a Single Candle:
  The Secret of the Catholic City
[With an article from KIC's Special "Return of the King" Issue ]
 

In "A Letter to Dean Inge," Hillaire Belloc wrote, "One thing in this world is different from all other things. It has a personality and a force. It is recognized and (when recognized) most violently loved or hated. It is the Catholic Church. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it, is the night."

If, as Belloc observed, outside the Church is the night, then truly: "It is better to light a single candle than to sit and curse the dark." Marianna Bartold writes about the Church's mission to "restore all things in Christ" in "Light a Single Candle: The Secret of the Catholic City."

What Readers are Saying
...about the Keeping It Catholic Home Education Guides

"The 'Expanded Red Flag List' (in Volume 1) is the best! We are finally determined to keep those Red Flags out of our house. We've justified too much over the years. Thank you for all you are doing."
-Lisa V., PA

"I cannot live without either one of these books! Love the sections on personalities, Red Flags, basically love everything about both books! Keep the 'Keeping It Catholic' volumes coming!"
- Diane G., GA


"ALL of Volume I: The Foundations has been a lifeline to me, sort of the way The Lord of the Rings, Narnia and the Curdie books are... it's that appeal to normalcy and faith and the ways things ought to be...Kyrie Eleison! Can't we just have things the way they ought to be?"
- Syler W., TX

"Finally, a Catholic resource that we Catholic homeschooling parents can completely trust! ...What else can I say except - thanks to you and your books...we will be 'Keeping It Catholic' and there will not be any more RED FLAGS in our house!"