Bed Time Stories of the Saints
When children are young, it can be difficult for parents to teach them certain skills and lessons to live a good life. For example, toilet training a young person is something all parents suffer through and most of the time it is hard for them to teach their young ones how to use the bathroom. Several methods have been developed by psychologists, pediatricians, and other scholarly people on the toilet-training process. In addition to this, children’s books are published that are strictly directed at teaching children about their own bodily functions, and using the restroom. The language used, the illustrations, and the delivery of the language, is directed at children. Even children’s bibles are made because children cannot comprehend, or hold the attention to the King James version on the Bible, and so the stories of the bible and its teachings are rewritten in a language children can understand, as well as presented in a manner that will hold a child’s attention. This same approach is used for Catholic stories of their saints in order to teach children about them and their lives that they lived, which reflects how the Church instructs its followers to live in order to go on to everlasting life with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Each children’s story evaluated, although directed to teach children, or to help the parents teach the child, also contains a certain sub-text, and by comparing the same children’s stories to those written for adults and the general public about saints, and by examining the authors intent, as well as the intent of the Catholic church, the importance of these different story styles and their purpose will be determined.
The first story analyzed will be th...
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...ersion of a saint’s story is read, the reader will learn something different and take something different from each one.
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Each morning, “the men of the household left in a hurry. The Catholic schoolchildren also left in a hurry; putting on their coats, squeezing their books against their chests, and heading towards St. Bede’s church school” (Dillard 1). The men slowly drove near the children as the children banged the car (1). Once everyone was out of sight from the view of the author, her “day of silence and waiting began” (Dillard 1).
The perception of religion is different for everyone and for the grandmother in the story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, being a lady with good Christian values was how she defined herself. The grandmother’s innocence of the evil existing in the world cost her and her family their lives. The story “Cathedral” however, has a more positive outlook on faith. The narrator, “Bub”guided by a blind man named Robert was able to visualize and draw a picture of a cathedral, without really knowing what one was. This essay will examine how the outcomes of both stories were affected by the beliefs of those involved.
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The purpose of these boundaries was not only to separate the temporal world from the divine, but also to facilitate a specific response from the viewer. The devotional triptych was meant to establish a mode of communication that is well illustrated in a miniature from the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, (fig. 1). This book of hours was completed c. 1477 by an unknown artist for Mary of Burgundy, the only child of Charles the Bold. The miniature shows the owner of the book, Mary of Burgundy, attired in a yellow-brown gown, seated with a dog and a book of hours in her lap. She sits next to an open window that shows the interior of a church. In the center of the church is the Virgin dressed in blue and holding the Christ child in front of an altar.
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