Valerie Schultz
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Time to celebrate foster care's successes
"These are the children we serve: the rebellious youth who strikes out against a world that seems hostile and unjust; the empty child unwilling to reach out for fear of being hurt again; the lonely child whose spirit has been crippled by neglect or failure; and the depressed child desperately wanting something or someone to believe in and believe in them."
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Film documents battle for women to be priests
There are things we Catholics are not supposed to consider. Sometimes those things may take up residence in our souls, however, and we feel nudged by the Spirit to ponder them. Such is the issue of the ordination of women to the Catholic priesthood.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: If hair is one's top worry, how bad can life be?
We're reading the Sunday paper together, my husband and I, a weekend luxury because the newspaper still has separate sections that we can trade back and forth, when I turn to a page with a photo that distresses me.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: My one-on-one with the 'Dead Man Walking' nun
Because a face-to-face conversation with one's hero is surely a cause for joy, it was my honor to interview Sister Helen Prejean during her recent visit to Bakersfield. Sister Helen, a writer and lecturer, is well-known as the "Dead Man Walking" nun, the face of the global movement to end the death penalty. I met with her at the home of her local hosts, who were gracious and welcoming. "REJOICE," said the flag outside the door, a most appropriate greeting for this lovely spring morning.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Sad your Facebook life isn't as fabulous as theirs? Go play outside!
We are a people of acronyms.
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VALERIE SCHUTLZ: The best effect in this film isn't 3-D but the profound message
My husband finally got me to watch the movie "Hugo." I'd had no desire to see it when it was first out in the theaters, because it had been advertised as a 3-D film. I'd also somehow had the impression that it was about animation, which it is not, but the killer was the part about it being in 3-D. In my biased mind, 3-D means all show, no substance. Plus I don't want to have to wear cheesy glasses for two hours. And the things rushing at me in 3-D productions make me feel a little nauseous.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Draw of the water makes us only human
On a recent Saturday, my two younger daughters and I had some time to kill in Bakersfield while my husband was attending a church function. We had driven down from Tehachapi together, and after dropping him off, we considered our options. We had already eaten an early dinner, and we didn't have quite enough time to see a movie. Besides, we're all on a budget. It was approaching evening, warm and pleasant. The sun was considering lowering itself in the west. My youngest daughter, who is a CSUB student and lives in Bakersfield, suggested we go to the Park at Riverwalk, which is just past the university. So we did.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Parkinson's visits misery upon sufferers, their families
April is National Parkinson's Awareness Month, which is hardly necessary for someone who lives with Parkinson's disease. To one who has been diagnosed with Parkinson's, the awareness is only too real. One million Americans, and up to 10 million people worldwide, live with Parkinson's. Another 60,000 Americans are diagnosed each year, usually in middle age, and more often men than women. Awareness-raising is for the rest of us, to support the scientific research aimed at finding both a cure and the future prevention of the disease, and to listen with compassion to the human stories of those whose lives are affected and will eventually be taken by Parkinson's.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Easter is dawn to a new season of hope
When I was a grade-school student in the last century, my classroom was graced one spring with the presence of an incubator. Unlike the high-tech incubators in the neonatal nursery, this incubator was a rectangular glass-walled box with a straw-covered floor. It was a little stinky, but magical. The lid was wired with naked light bulbs that provided the heat that the three chicken eggs nestled together atop a clump of straw required to mature.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Whose feet will you wash?
Thursday is Holy Thursday, which, in the Christian faith, precedes Good Friday. All of this week leading to Easter Sunday is referred to as Holy Week, or for you secularists, spring break. The focus of Holy Thursday is on the Last Supper, a traditional Seder meal that Jesus shared with his companions before he was arrested, tried, tortured and executed. Many Christians believe that the first Holy Thursday saw the institution of the sacrament of Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ given for us.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Knowledge a novel approach to preventing teen pregnancy
We have a problem. Kern County's teen birthrate is the highest in the state of California. A recent editorial in The Californian notes that 63.8 babies are born for every 1,000 teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19. Our teens obviously need a stronger sex education program, but whose job is it to teach them: parents, church or school? Controversy swirls around possible solutions. The state's condoms-by-mail program has been pilloried, and funding for Planned Parenthood seems to face a new threat daily. Some adults think that if we talk about sex to teenagers, we are condoning, and perhaps encouraging, their sexual activity, even though studies show that educated teens are less likely to end up a statistic of teen pregnancy. An abstinence-only curriculum is not helpful to those teens who are already making risky decisions.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: I'll take that senior discount - I just hope they card me
"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Let's reduce our atomic footprint before there's another Fukushima
As we mark the one-year anniversary of the terrible earthquake and tsunami that the people of Japan endured last March 11, it is fair to note that, in spite of the ensuing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, no baby has yet been born without limbs. No three-eyed fish have been spotted. The world has not ended in a radioactive kaboom. Yet heretofore undisclosed information regarding that near-cataclysm is still making people nervous as time passes.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Birthdays - even half ones - are reminders of grace in our lives
I forgot my daughter's half-birthday.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Time to get our plates and bodies in shape
A friend told me at the beginning of January that her personal theme for the new year was "lighter, and less." She wasn't only talking about what she ate, but included the stuff she bought or kept, her tread upon the earth and the emotional things she carried. Her wisdom would make a great motto for National Nutrition Month: "Lighter, and less." Most of us would benefit from a lifestyle that replaced "heavy and too much" with "lighter and less." I know I would.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Why is contraception suddenly a big Catholic concern?
We Catholic women are often cast as "less than" by the policies of the religious hierarchy of our church. We are forbidden ordination, and yet we fill the pews, teach the children, run the offices, clean the parish facilities, care for the sick and minister to others in countless ways. We love our church. We trust that the Holy Spirit is moving among us in mysterious ways, and we attend to what is in front of us.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Just curious -- is curiosity dead?
Curiosity has never been a sport for the lazy. Curiosity, it is said, killed the cat, but it is also the thing that gets us up off the couch, out of the house, and into the unknown. Curiosity begins at birth, and has led to invention, discovery, adventure, and insight. Our human DNA compels us to thirst for what we do not know.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Blisters on my lip -- call it a cold sore-spot
Here's a brief diary of one of the more horrible cycles of life:
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: Catholic Mass offers the mystery of faith
In the new translation of the Mass, which Catholics have used since the first Sunday of Advent (the liturgical New Year's Day), a particular change has struck me. During the Eucharistic prayer, the priest no longer says to the congregation, "Let us proclaim the mystery of faith." Instead, he simply says, "The mystery of faith." He says this rather expectantly, as though the phrase were followed by a colon. (It is not: a period punctuates in the text.) We then proclaim the designated response.
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VALERIE SCHULTZ: All the news that's fit -- for our narrow minds
When my children were youngsters, I developed a theory of what I thought of as "conscious parenting," meaning that everything I did as a mother had potential long-term and life-changing effects on my daughters, and I wasn't ever going to know which of my words or actions was going to stick in a way that lasted into adulthood. Everything mattered.
