Carnival of Homeschooling

And in a very odd format, too. From Category Five, a weather blog: interesting piece, but if you're just looking for the homeschool links, scroll to the bottom.

Good post from The Common Room with a followup on eBay's bizarro policy banning teacher's manuals. Apparently eBay's explanations are shifting from the unconvincingly altruistic (yes, it hurts our business, especially with homeschoolers whom we really really like, but it's necessary for protecting cheating children from themselves) to the long-suspected bottom line (textbook publishers are leaning on us, and they're a bigger chunk of business than are homeschoolers).

Of course, eBay keeps p*rn out of the hands of the under-18's (who aren't supposed to be buying anything on eBay anyway) through the foolproof method of making buyers click on a button saying "I'm 18 or over." But those TMs with the answers to the even-numbered problems in the back--you can't leave dynamite like that where little hands can get to it.

Mrs. Darwin passed on the homeschool-book-meme tag, which seems to be a variant of a popular book meme going around the net. Here we go...

Homeschool books I actually enjoyed reading
The first "homeschool" book I read was a much-recommended John Holt book. I enjoyed it in the way some people enjoy bad movies: there was a perverse pleasure in muttering "wrong! wrong!" at nearly every turn of the page. This was the book that convinced me not only that I wasn't an unschooler, but that the philosophical basis of unschooling was what had poisoned the American school system in the first place.

The first book I enjoyed in a normal way was Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform, though it's not really a "homeschooling" book. The first few chapters tell the depressing saga of how the turn-of-the-century "classical curriculum" (college prep) was reasonably critiqued by those who advocated instead the "academic curriculum," which replaced Greek with modern languages, added science and more advanced mathematics, and was argued for as a universal curriculum not limited to the college-bound. The debate was just warming up when educational progressivism suddenly steamrollered them both, and it's been downhill ever since (to summarize Ravitch's next 400 pages).

Left Back crystallized everything I had felt was wrong with American educational theories, and convinced me that the Academic Curriculum was what we were following and needed to keep pursuing. Homeschoolers call it a "classical education," though it's rarely actually that; but even at the beginning of the twentieth century, schools offering a classical education often combined it with elements of the "modern" academic curriculum.

Resources I won't live without
-The humongous university library, with its massive juvenile section and Eudoxus' free borrowing privileges (& somehow faculty aren't ever made to pay late charges).
-The book scanner.
-Half-Price Books (sensing a theme here...)
-bookfinder.com - for what the bookstore doesn't have.
-My iPod. A surprisingly handy homeschool device: mine is loaded up with Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, and Pete Seeger industrial ballads (which last have had the unfortunate effect of convincing O#1 that she only has to put in 40 hours of work each week).
-My dear husband Eudoxus: because who else around here is going to teach Trig or Greek?
-My Catholic Faith (Fr. Morrow, 1949). All you ever need for catechesis. Traditional, but not in an obnoxious trad way.
-Artes Latinae.

Resources you wish you had never bought
-The Alan Jemison piano series. Not that it's bad; we just hadn't realized that Offspring #1 was actually and genuinely tone-deaf, and she went through a world of misery and frustration before our epiphany.
-A second year of Calvert: again, nothing wrong with it, but after about a month we realized we didn't need a boxed curriculum anymore as we had found our feet and were now doing it our own way with our own resources.
-The Italic Handwriting Series. Why have handwriting with tears when you can have Handwriting Without Tears?

Resources you enjoyed last year

Offspring #2:
-Handwriting Without Tears (see above)
-Cathedral Readers. Found a stack of 'em in the used book store; the little one really likes them. Like Dick and Jane but with black-habited nuns instead of teachers, and little stories about why you shouldn't use medals superstitiously, and the like. A fascinatingly retro look into a Golden Age of American Catholicism that lasted for about five minutes.

Offspring #1:
-Artes Latinae (see above)
-Athenaze Greek
-Drums, from the Scribner School Paperback series from 1968. This series is the best literature curriculum I've seen, but the books are very hard to find and the study guide doesn't come with a teacher's guide, so you will have to think through the answers with the student. (The link doesn't take you to a student edition; you have to hunt for those.)
-American Mathematics Competitions (old tests). Don't ask me; ask Eudoxus.
-TOPS science: Radishes and Planets & Stars.
-Rosetta Stone German: the curriculum to use when your child wants to learn a language you don't know a word of. Pricey, but not so bad if you buy a pirated (oops) version off of e-bay.
-Standard Service Arithmetics: Grade Five (Knight, Studebaker, & Ruch: 1927). Because your calculator can't always be your brain, and only in a textbook this old will you find drills that give you 15 minutes to solve 15 problems like "5736 times 3916" and "21462 divided by 735." Actually Offspring #1 doesn't enjoy this resource at all; but she doesn't enjoy flossing, either.
-Gawain and the Green Knight, read in Middle English (accompany with text edited by J.R.R. Tolkien). The Chaucer Studio is a great overlooked resource. And free shipping. And if you buy enough, a free tote bag!

Resources you'll be using this year
As above, since we homeschool through the summer and take our long break from Thanksgiving to New Year's, with the following additions/changes:

Offspring #2:
-Miquon. A great math series, as is its companion series for older children, Key To....
-The Bible Story (Fr. Johnson, Fr. Hannan, & Sr. Dominica: 1931). When Offspring #1 was a wee bit, she loved this book, especially the little ink drawing of the (temporary) survivors of the Flood clambering onto a rock, vainly waving down the ark. Ha ha, they're not stopping for you...

Offspring #1:
-General Chemistry (Whitten, Davis, Peck, Stanley, 7th ed.). We've already started using this, as a replacement for the dreadful and confusing high school textbook we tried to use. This is what our local university uses for Intro Chemistry for Hopeless Liberal Arts Students, and is basically a high-school level text, except with clear explanations and no committee-required sidebars about cultural diversity among chemists. The accompanying Study Guide can function as a test booklet.
-TOPS Far Out Math (build your own slide rule while you learn about logarithms!), Cohesion and Adhesion, & Oxidation.
-Church History (Fr. Laux). Features end-of-chapter research assignments in the Catholic Encyclopedia, conveniently available on-line.
-Standard Service Arithmetics: Grade Six. Just when she was so excited at having finished the previous book.

Resources you'd like to buy
This. These actually exist--and in a superior form, where the pieces are individual countries--and I'm darned if I can find where you get one. A friend found one of these in a second-hand store, and I've been living in a recurring state of anguished envy since.

One resource you wished existed
A really good Greek curriculum for pre-high school. Eight years ago when we were looking for such a thing we could only find the Hey, Andrew! curriculum, which isn't terrible, but isn't great either. Fast-forward to today, and there's still nothing else out there. Yes, I know Greek is hard, but there are plenty of young kids learning Hebrew (which is harder) with decent curricula. Someone make one for Attic Greek!

Homeschool catalogs you enjoy reading
-Rainbow Resource
-Chaucer Studio
-Home Science Tools
-American Home School Publishing. An undeservedly obscure catalog; AHSP has a great selection of resources for classical homeschoolers. Very much my favorite "read."

One homeschooling website you use regularly
I agree with Mrs. Darwin on love2learn. Great site, with detailed reviews.

Phew. If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and Happy Birthday to me! Oh, and I'm tagging Sophia.

Carnival of Homeschooling

... is up at Patricia Ann's Pollywog Creek Porch. She's got an Everglades theme going. Link to a good post on Days To Come about how badly we homeschoolers often handle conversations with non-homeschoolers, ignoring the underlying conversation that's really going on. I've often been guilty of this: someone would say "Oh, I could never homeschool," and I'd immediately launch into the reasons they could, and how great it is, and basically responding to their slightly defensive answer with my terribly defensive reaction. Now I just say "Every family has to figure out what's best for them," and get rewarded by a grateful smile.

Feeling Complainy

I can't homeschool in these conditions anymore. The construction project outside, which involves ripping up the entire intersection (we live on the corner) all the way onto the city easements (i.e. ten feet into our yard, tearing out tree roots and disabling our sprinkler system during one of the worst droughts we've had in years) has moved into a new phase which is causing the entire house to vibrate non-stop. Everything is vibrating. I'm trying to toast an Eggo for Offspring #2 and the toaster oven is rattling away. This has been going on for months now: the incredible noise, the dust, the increasingly crispy-brown yard. Work starts at seven o'clock promptly, weekends included.

Both kids are perpetually bleary-eyed because they can never sleep in. Offspring #1 had spacers put between her teeth yesterday (as a prelude to braces), and despite the ibuprofen passed an uncomfortable and sleepless night. But at seven sharp, the pounding and the beeping and the shaking and the shouting started again just a few feet from her window, just like it has for months. She's miserable and exhausted: not much chance of getting lesson work done today.

And did I mention the drought? We've had one day this month that the temperature dropped below 99; we called that our "cold front" (it got down to 96 and we saw some clouds). Not a drop of rain. We can't open our windows in the evenings because the dust takes all night to settle. Our house, our car, and our dying shrubbery are all thickly coated with dust; no point in trying to wash anything; we can see the billowing clouds out the (dusty) window all day. Eudoxus has been having respiratory nastiness. Those guys doing the construction must be suffering. It's like The Grapes of Wrath, only we can't pack the family into an old jalopy and leave for California.

On the bright side, between the dryness and the dust, there are no mosquitoes at all this year. Maybe they've all gone to California.

Merton on Being a Mom

Mom, monk, whatever.

Charity makes me seek far more than the satisfaction of my own desires, even though they be aimed at another's good. It must also make me an instrument of God's Providence in their lives. I must become convinced and penetrated by the realization that without my love for them they may perhaps not achieve the things God has willed for them. My will must be the instrument of God's will in helping them create their destiny. My love must be to them the "sacrament" of the mysterious and infinitely selfless love God has for them. My love must be for them the minister not of my own spirit but of the Holy Spirit. The words I speak to them must be no other than the words of Christ Who deigns to reveal Himself to them in me.

(No Man is an Island, 1955 )

7 Things For Beginning Homeschoolers To Keep in Mind

Maureen at TrinityPrepSchool is tagging people for a list of “7 Habits of Highly Effective Homeschoolers.” I’m not sure enough of being a highly effective homeschooler to phrase it quite that way, but here’s things I’ve found worth reminding myself of, especially when starting out the homeschool adventure, or just beginning the new “school” year.

1. You can always quit.
Sounds defeatist, but it's actually quite a helpful thing to remind yourself of. Parents of preschoolers often worry that they don’t know enough to homeschool through high school, or about college admissions. Don’t fear the future. If it doesn’t work, you can always put them in school. Tell yourself this a lot. Later, you can reassure your kids this way, too: “If you don’t quit that right now, I swear I’m putting you on the first yellow bus that drives by!”

2. Everybody unschools.
Every homeschooler lets little kids play around and have fun; every homeschooler lets older kids have input into their curriculum in a way that reflects their loves and talents. Every homeschooler with a child who is suddenly progressing terrifically in a subject or at a project lets him have his head (as they say of horses), at least for a while, because it would be stupid not to relax the reins when they’re galloping. It's not clear that the word "unschooling" even has meaningful content anymore. So don’t agonize over whether you should unschool, or be structured, or follow a classical curriculum, or whatever. You’ll end up calling yourself “eclectic” anyway, like everyone else.

3. Think about what education is.
This seems almost the opposite of #2, where I said not to worry about your “homeschooling approach” too much. But it’s actually antecedent to #2. You can’t let yourself be blown around by the winds of every enticing philosophy, or of every exciting new curriculum, or by the fear that somebody else is doing it in a different way that seems so much more successful. The way to stay anchored is to ask yourself, and keep asking yourself until the last bird has left the nest, what an education is, what it’s for, what it does, and why you want it for your children. Stay clear on the fundamentals. It puts you on top of the mountain, and all the confusing hills and valleys below, with their highways and dead ends, will sort themselves out.

4. Know the difference between a failed approach and “hitting the wall.”
Many homeschoolers, especially those who don’t put some mental work into #3, find themselves buying curriculum after curriculum, looking for one that “works” (math and learning-to-read curricula especially). Besides being expensive, this sometimes results from blaming the curriculum for the normal phenomenon of education I like to call “hitting the wall.” Every subject is new and exciting at first; even the most astute and eager child will, after a while, discover that the novelty has worn off, and the subject has become more difficult and tedious. Every kid likes to learn the first dozen Latin words and chant “amo, amas, amat” with Mommy. But eventually there’s the vocabulary drill, and the principal parts, and the deponent verbs. And if parent and child have both convinced themself that learning must be fun, when they hit that wall, the child may balk and the parent may start hunting around for something that keeps the child’s interest the way the first curriculum used to, or even needlessly drop the subject altogether.

By all means, if you’ve invested in a lousy curriculum, get rid of it ASAP and (more carefully this time) get a new one. But don’t substitute the natural fun of a new adventure for the mature satsifaction and joy of mastery that comes only with the effort of hard, and sometimes boring, work.

5. Be careful to get socialization.
Not for your kids; if you’ve started homeschooling, you’ve already discovered how much time they’re spending with other kids at soccer and chess club and theatre and 4-H and choir and park day and.... No, make sure to get socialization for you.

6. You can’t own too many books.
You probably just need more bookshelves. Or even a library wing added on to the house. Is your husband handy with carpentry? By the way, the best used-book search engine is Bookfinder, which searches multiple bookselling services like Alibris and Biblio.

7. God gave your children to you, not to someone else.
So don’t be plunged into despair that someone else is homeschooling better, or that you yell at your kids too much (work on that, though), or that you’re not as good a teacher as their favorite teacher back in public school was. Don’t get caught up in disputes over childrearing practices. Most especially, ignore anything anyone says to you--whether it’s a parent, pastor, or neighbor--that makes you feel unhappy about your child as a person. Nobody is advocating for your child but you.

[Special thanks to C. for #7]

Texas, as many of the readers of this blog know, has no regulations regarding homeschooling: the Leeper litigation, besides forcing school districts to stop having homeschoolers prosecuted for truancy, clarified that home schools are private schools for the purposes of Texas law, and since private schools in Texas are unregulated (and will be forever, or for however long the Southern Baptist Conference is a major political player, which is the same thing), ergo homeschooling is unregulated.

Sure there's the requirement that homeschoolers have a curriculum which includes spelling, good citizenship, and a few non-useless subjects, but importantly, there is no legal mechanism by which the state or the school districts may force families to show their curriculum or demonstrate that they are in fact teaching anything.

The rationales for the complete de facto deregulation of homeschooling include the (reasonable, IMHO) assumption that parents have a much greater stake than state agents, including teachers, in making sure their children receive an adequate education at the least, and therefore are unlikely to direct their education in such a way that their children are not academically prepared for adulthood. While there may be some small number of parents who, for whatever reason, fail their children academically, the percentage is likely to be much smaller than the percentage of children enrolled in public or private schools who are failed academically by school systems. (I'm using the passive construction to limit this to children who might have been expected to succeed academically with a different form of education.)

The academic success of homeschooled kids has (mostly) stilled the old suspicious accusation that many of them are certainly being raised by religious zealots who teach them nothing but the Bible and who will leave them woefully unprepared for work or college at 18. It's true that on Catholic homeschooling forums (I'm not familiar enough with other Christian forums to comment) you'll find remarks like "Remember your goal isn't to make your kids super-book-smart, but to get them into Heaven"--but, un-Catholic anti-intellectuallism aside (can you imagine St. Thomas Aquinas' mom saying that?), it's usually a comment meant to calm down an anxious parent who is concerned precisely about some area of academics. Even the most intensely religious homeschoolers--actually, especially the most intensely religious homeschoolers (the more zealous unschoolers don't tend to be terribly religious)--are very keen on academics.

So what happens when homeschoolers or small private schools (especially when they're the same thing under the law) are found to be living up to the old caricature? A New York Times article (HT to Joanne Jacobs) discusses New York schools where middle-school aged children train to be a hafiz, a person who has memorized the entirety of the Koran and who will be rewarded with certain entrance into Heaven, along with ten other Moslems of his choosing. The children don't understand the words but only memorize the syllables; the education takes two or three years, lasting all day and throughout the entire year; and the children study no other subjects during this time.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? Ann Althouse does; and certainly it's contrary to New York law, which requires multiple subjects each year.

But here's some counter-arguments. First, these are middle-school kids. Not very long ago, educationists were very explicit that one of the goals of middle school was to give hormone-riddle children a chance to not do any real academic work for a while. Many parents pull their kids out after fifth grade, homeschool for three years, then re-enroll them in high school, just to keep up their academics. (I've met them.) How much worse could this be? Second, a hafiz is important in Islamic culture, apparently having a special role at Ramadan. However strange it might sound to others, this is a kind of job training. Just because it won't help you get into Harvard doesn't mean it's educationally meaningless for these kids and their families.

Third, it's clear from the NYT account that the families enrolling their children in hafiz schools are just as driven as any other parents, and are unlikely to let even two or three years "out of school" leave their kids behind the curve. I spent half a year out of school, with no make-up work of any kind, and was still bored out of my mind when I went back. I'm pretty sure I could have managed at least a year and a half of middle school and still not have had to lift a finger to "catch up." Finally, until we have some evidence that this is educationally disastrous for the kids, maybe we should wait and see. What will we say if they really do end up as doctors and lawyers?

So the Feast of the Assumption has come and gone, and the big question we all have is: Were there riots this year?

A brief history for the uninformed: For about 130 years, a Franciscan basilica in Ohio has had a big Assumption Day mass, complete with old-fashioned procession, to which Catholics throughout the area have flocked. There's a significant Chaldean Maronite Catholic population in that neck of the woods, and they've been big participants. For the last several years, a new tradition has developed in which incredibly obnoxious Protestant "street preachers" would confront the worshippers during the procession, screaming (literally) such interesting tidbits of ecumenical dialogue as "Your Mary is a whore" and "You worship Satan." What with the first amendment and all, there's not much to be done but ignore them.

Last year, there was a development. Those of you who remember where Chaldea is won't be surprised to learn that the Iraq war and subsequent emigration of large parts of the indigenous Christian population has meant a vast and sudden increase in the number of Maronites in Ohio, many of them young men whose families only recently escaped a place where people who hate their faith were shooting at them and bombing their churches. They apparently didn't take the in-your-face whore-worshipping charges in the American spirit intended, and a small riot broke out.

So eyes have been on Ohio this year. Amy Welborn has a good roundup of the coverage, with some first-person coverage by journalist David Hartline:

It was more than a little disconcerting, while attending Mass inside the basilica, to hear the bellowing voices of the street preachers over the readings and homily. The church isn’t air conditioned so one can easily hear what is occurring outside. While what the street preachers were saying wasn’t decipherable, it could be heard. I attended the English Mass but it must have been more than a bit ironic to hear the din of the street preacher’s comments during the Chaldean Mass. The Chaledans say their Mass in Aramaic, the ancient language of Jesus. Can you imagine a group of fundamentalists, whose primary doctrine concerning such topics as the rapture and salvation that comes from the 19th or 20th century, lecturing a group whose traditions and language go back to the Apostolic era?

A couple of the protesters, a Pastor David Ickes, "Franklin," and "George the Preacher," were kind enough to leave comments at Hartline's blog with compelling defenses for their annual behavior:

Have you forgotten the consitutional privledges granted when you stage a PUBLIC EVENT!! If you stayed within your church doors WITHOUT publically parading down a public street, we would let you worship anyway you want to! We have been preaching for a LONG TIME and preached many different events and this one rates just like the Sodomite parades of this year and previous years! VIOLENCE AND WAR IS IN THEIR HEARTS! Who do you think you are fooling except yourselves. We have the RIGHT in America to preach in the public and if you do not like it, just walk away, but NO, instead you Catholics would have KILLED us given the opportunity!!! You know NOTHING of the love of God to care about anything except your lies and distortion of the truth. You will continue to lie and distort THE TRUTH about Mary, the priesthood of BELIEVERS, the church, the Lord Jesus Christ, grace and faith, and EVERY biblical principal found in the scriptures! Carry on.

Yada yada. Is there some kind of biblical principal [sic] that you must never use paragraph breaks? Here's their website, if you feel called to make friends.

Anyway good to see that, this year, the Maronite kids were made to understand that in the U.S., the flipside of getting to worship Christ without your family being shot or your church being bombed is that other people get to scream vile things about your faith without fear of retaliation.

Just as followup, and in case any of those charming gentlemen should follow the links (as they seem to have with Hartline's blog) and drop by, if you've read this far, definitely take the time to read Mark Shea's recent posts on the Assumption: the first more theological, the second more apologetical. Take and read.

33rd Carnival of Homeschooling

At The Common Room. Check out the Homeschool Math giveaway! If that interests you, be sure also to click on the Math Forum Problem of the Week Giveaway. Free stuff is oh so good.

Oh, the required boilerplate:

The Math Forum's mission is to provide interactive learning services and a library of resources from the online mathematics community that enrich and support teaching and learning in an increasingly technological world.

Toys in the Attic (to Koine phrase)

Here's some interesting resources for the dedicated classical homeschooler who is determined to be part of the Hellenistic revival sweeping* the country. My favorite is down at the bottom: a file of Greek history worksheets called "Acropolis Now."

*In its own small way. I knew a young woman who, after an idiosyncratic classical education that included generous helpings of Greek and Latin, was admitted to Stanford, where she looked forward to at last hobnobbing with those of a similar education. She was excited to see right away flyers for a "Greek Social," and showed up eager to share her love of Aeschylus and Xenophon with the likeminded. It seems, alas, the classical revival had not quite fully swept the ivied halls.

32nd Carnival of Homeschooling

With a wild west theme, over at Sprittibee. Folks from around here will be especially interested in J. Frank Dobie's (you know, the guy they named the campus mall/dorm after) recipe for frijoles over at Gathering Manna. Scroll to the bottom of the CoH for Roy Rogers' Riders Club Rules.

The Amarillo Signs

Here we go off-topic. Actually, that's exactly the kind of saying that you might find on a large, metal, diamond-shaped road sign, placed incongruously in a front yard in Amarillo. Random, irrelevant, inscrutable; or perhaps just an icon, a pair of scissors, perhaps, that you would think must indicate the homeowner runs a hairdressing shop out of his house, but no, he just has a great big sign with scissors on it. Or some other random image.

If you haven't seen this phenomenon for yourself, it's hard to explain. I did a search around the net, and found it hadn't passed unobserved. From another confused visitor:

ok, now the weird story…

we were going down what i think was 2nd street when i noticed an odd sign… like a diamond-shaped traffic sign… odder still, it was in someone’s yard… what was odd about the sign was what it said…

“his movements are dull and graceless
he reminds me of a factory machine”

huh?

then a bit later, i saw another in someone else’s yard…
and then another…

i have a note in my psion that we saw most of them in the mcmasters/amarillo road area…

enough talk, here are some pics of a few of them…

is that weird or what?

ok, then, we were going down amarillo road, headed out of town, satisfied we had gotten pics of some of the more interesting ones (once we started driving around and looking, we found there were dozens of them, no two exactly alike, yet only in this one part of the town), when we saw one on the side of the road, so we stopped and got this pic of it…

as i am standing there, i happened to see something off in the distance…
on sort of a hill quite a ways out, among quite a few trees on the hill, i noticed that what i at first thought were more trees were actually black letters that must have been at least six feet tall…
i took a pic, you may see what i mean and perhaps get an idea of the scale, but, you will not be able to read them… (again, we need a real cam, one with ZOOM!)

the letters say “ACTUAL SIZE”…

curiouser and curiouser, as alice was wont to say…

Yes indeed. Here's the explanation, found in an English news source, of all places:

Though Cadillac Ranch is the best-known of the millionaire's projects, several other examples exist. Some years ago Marsh reacted when he saw a street sign which said "Road Ends Ahead": he immediately had a similar sign made and erected nearby reading "Road Does Not End". When told that he was breaking the law (as the USA is a signatory to an international agreement on the conformity of road signs), he decided that this kind of rebellion was fun and had dozens more different signs made and erected seemingly at random by the side of streets all over Amarillo. Marsh's signs are diamond-shaped, sized, and in many cases coloured, just as the official ones. But instead of banning parking or granting rights-of-way, his carry a selection of sayings, quotes, proverbs, lines from songs, and anything else that a committee (on which Marsh sits) decides. Not all appear to make sense.

Eccentric millionaire, then. Sure, it all makes sense.

Blessing for Beer

Benedic, Domine, creaturam istam cerevisae, quam ex adipe frumenti producere dignatus es: ut sit remedium salutare humano generi: et praesta per invocationem nominis tui sancti, ut, quicumque ex ea biberint, sanitatem corporis, et animae tutelam percipiant. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen

Bless, O Lord, this creature beer, that Thou hast been pleased to bring forth from the sweetness of the grain: that it might be a salutary remedy for the human race: and grant by the invocation of Thy holy name, that, whosoever drinks of it may obtain health of body and a sure safeguard for the soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

(From the Rituale Romanum)