Goertz Thoughts

When I was growing up, Sunday Mass was different. Not necessarily wrong (except in some instances), but definitely not what you are used to. I'm not talking about pre-conciliar Latin Mass (I'm not that old). I grew up in the 80s and 90s. During that time, the church in the US was still experimenting with new forms of liturgy. Architecture I went to St. William growing up. It's not the St. William that you know. For one thing, it was about a half mile further down McNeil Road. For another, it didn't look like a Catholic Church. It was built in 1981, if I remember correctly Inside, it was also weird. Here's a series of pictures from Christmas/Easter over several years. See if you can spot what's missing. Nice hat, mom! Did you (not) see it? There's no crucifix! I guess that was "too depressing"? (There was usually a cross, off to the side, but no corpus) Life Teen Mass These days, a Life Teen mass usually just means a Sunday evening Mass with rock mu...

 I love maps. I think that I always have.  Here are some of my favorites. Birdseye maps like this one of Austin used to be popular in the late 1800s. The Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums is one of my favorite spots. And of course, Middle Earth But the maps that you are used to (like the ones on Google), those are relatively new inventions. When I was growing up, everyone used to have huge road atlases in the trunks of their cars for road trips. Maybe some of you still have them, but I removed mine almost 20 years ago. Major cities had zoomed in insets to show local roads. You would have to plan out trips ahead of time and hope that there wasn't bad traffic. If there was, you could pull over, get the atlas out of your trunk, and plan a new route. I remember doing this in Tennessee once when moving Mrs. Goertz's sister down to Texas for college. A step up from atlases was GPS devices (they weren't always in phones). GPS was originally developed for military purposes a...