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One of the benefits of my recent living space changes has been the opportunity to revisit my library cataloguing scheme.

For years, I used Dewey Decimal Classification coding to organize my books. The Dewey system has the advantage of having had the majority of books already catalogued within the system – and most of the newer volumes include a Dewey number assignment within the Library of Congress cataloguing information after the title page, meaning that not only would I not need to go through the process of categorizing and assigning lookup numbers to the books, but I would often have the cataloguing information readily at hand, without even having to look them up in another library’s holdings. It’s a ready-made system that can be implemented with very little effort – and, furthermore, knowing the system makes it very easy to find works in many other libraries.

However, I decided a few years ago to move to a simpler system – and lacking ready access to a suitable alternative, I resorted to making up my own. The problem I had with the Dewey system was that it made too fine a distinction,for a library as small as mine, among subjects. I find it very useful in larger libraries that the Dewey system co-locates books based on fairly precise subject matter (all within a simple framework of basic disciplines), but it tends to scatter multiple books by the same author, which is pretty non-intuitive. Moreover, in a small library, there won’t be a lot of exact duplication of call numbers among the various volumes, unless the collection is quite topically focused. The end result is a library that seems inadequately grouped.

A library ordering scheme needs to implement two organizing functions: grouping and sequencing. For a personal library like mine, I think a broader categorization at the subject level is appropriate, facilitating the co-location of most or all of a writer’s body of work. For example, Thomas Oden wrote a three-volume systematic theology, where one volume focused on God the Father, a second on the Word of God, and a third on the Spirit of God. One could argue that these belong together as a set regardless, but apart from that, in a large theological library, one could justifiably locate the second volume among Christological works, the third volume among Pneumatology, etc. But this would hardly make any sense in a library with few if any other pneumatological works.

Sequencing the collection is equally important, as good sequencing not only makes a logical path through a collection to facilitate finding things, but should also serve the grouping principle so as to keep somewhat more loosely related works near each other. But sequencing, done well, should also reflect the order of knowledge. One of my beefs with the Dewey system is that it fails to reflect any concept of the hierarchical ordering of knowledge in its sequencing – even though it does a pretty decent job of reflecting such a hierarchy in it grouping. To wit, the Dewey system basically places miscellany at the head of the order of knowledge, very much reflecting the modern era’s loss of any sensibility of teleology. Ironically, this “General” section has of late largely been taken over by Computer Science – a perhaps ominous development.

My system, in contrast, reverts to the pre-Enlightenment recognition of theology as the queen of the sciences (and their necessary unifying principle), and goes even further, recognizing Revelation as the source of all knowledge (including, of course, theology). The following table reflects the differences between my ordering and the Dewey system, at the highest level:

If I had more books in the higher numerical ranges, I would break up the 7000s into hard and soft science (making soft science and technology an 8000 range), but there’s no point in doing that given the content of my collection – especially since I’ve thrown out the vast majority of my IT books, which have no lasting value.

The system is still far from perfect. For starters, there are many works that could fit into more than one classification – even at the highest level (e.g. should Aquinas be classified under theology or philosophy? I chose theology, but that’s certainly debatable). An electronic “tagging” system would be an ideal means of classifying (so that works could easily fall into multiple categories), but there’s no way that’s going to help me arrange the shelves.

However, having all the books in the same room is helping me see how I could improve some of the inner sequencing. I’ve already made minor revisions to the scheme at least twice since moving everything in here in late May. But I still have refinements to make, and I’d like to complete them by my birthday. I’ll post the detailed schedule when I’m done. Perhaps I’ll break up the empirical and pseudo-empirical sciences after all – I’d really like to find a way to sequence psychology to flow into fiction, it would be just.

Having a small family in an eight-room colonial tends to leave quite a bit of flexibility in terms of space – and this has certainly become quite a small family again since Kelly, and then Leigh, moved out. I’ve wanted for years to be able to offer a guest room, and it took quite a while to work through all the machinations necessary to reach that point. But six months worth of shifting, consolidating, lifting, and remodeling have finally borne fruit in a finished bedroom available to friends, family, and other passers-through.

Nastia and Yulia will occupy the room through most of July, and the space is earmarked during the coming school year for a Korean exchange student – a school-mate of Abby’s from the Montrose School, named Zoey. We will likely continue to host exchange students for most of the next decade as our girls complete their schooling, but sooner or later I would also like to be able to offer safe room and board on a transitory basis to some of the needy young mothers who come to the Church’s Pro-Life office seeking help.

That’s down the road, however, as the day-to-day lives of my two youngest children will dictate the pace of domestic living for several years to come. To that end, a major part of the reconfiguration I did in the house over the first half of the year was to prepare a room on the upper floor into which I consolidated the “office” space in the house – moving myself and most of my collection of about a thousand books out of a basement area I’d refinished when we bought the house at the beginning of the decade, as well as the remnants of Joyce’s former home office from a different room on the second floor. I liked the basement (especially the inherent coolness during the summer months, which I particularly miss on days like today), but I seem much less isolated up here from the rest of the family when I retreat to read, study, or work on something at my desk.

Getting that desk up here was a bit more of an adventure than I’d bargained for. I shouldn’t complain – it went well, after all. My friend Rich came over to help me with it, and we got it and all the bulky stuff moved in under an hour, but I ended up leaving work with chest pains a few days later, and it’s hard for me not to draw causal conclusions from that, given the overall lack of discomfort I’ve had since my second stent procedure last September. The desk is an old, post-WWII, green linoleum-topped steel office desk, a clunker I made a little less unpresentable some years back by painting the steel black and adding sleek drawer pulls. I’ve been lugging this thing around since I bought it for $10 in 1980, and it almost got me this time. Someone around here would like to see it gone, but it would cost me over $1,000 to replace functionally – and frankly, I’ve grown rather fond of it.

The third key driver for this project, apart from opening up a guest room and getting my work space out of the basement, was to move Abby and Rebecca out of the only bedroom in the house lacking a safe fire exit to an adjacent porch or garage roof. That was done by repainting Leigh’s old room, and moving them in there. I then remodeled their old room with enough shelf space to accommodate all my non-fiction. The finishing work included what I took at the time to be the supremely silly effort of sanding the hardwood floor with hand tools (and not very well, I should add). When I moved on to the final (guest) room, I discovered that I could do even sillier things, as I went out and rented a drum sander to handle that floor.

Whatever possessed me to think I would be able to get one of those things up to the second floor, two years (to the weekend!) after having a heart attack, I surely do not understand – I was afraid I’d trip the ticker just lifting the thing into the van to bring it home! I improvised a ramp to handle the bulk of the distance on the larger set of stairs, and otherwise just prayed it wouldn’t be my last act on earth – who, then, would apply the varnish, after all? Man, am I glad to finally have this job behind me.

But as I settle into this latest phase of my life – what with my new digs, my return to school, and the prospect of hosting lodgers – I need to think seriously about understanding my quickly changing limitations. I need to lean more on other people, so that I can do things I’ve never done before – or at least be around to try. Times change, indeed. Some doors open while others shut, as we all march relentlessly toward life’s final curtain.

Well, here we go. A few months ago, Joyce proposed that we should pick up on an old idea, and host a couple children from the Chernobyl Children’s Project this summer. Nasta and Yulia arrived this evening (pictured here along with Zoya, a very nice local woman with Russian roots who was serving as a volunteer translator for the evening). We managed to get them home, acclimate them somewhat to the house (including Mungus, our frisky young cockapoo), feed them a little something, settle them down, and get them into bed, but it sure is going to be an adventure dealing with the challenges of the language barrier between us.

Abby told me later in the evening that her life had changed today. Never lacking for melodrama, that one, but she’s right in a way. You don’t bring anyone – especially a child – into your life without being changed in some way. It is going to be very interesting to see how our family is changed over the next four weeks by these zesty little girls whom fate has consigned to grow up in an area poisoned by radiation – and who deal daily with the inevitable medical consequences of that misfortune.

I don’t agree very often with what Michael Paulson says over at the Articles of Faith blog at Boston.com – he doesn’t even ask the right questions, as a rule – but I had to concur with something he said the other day about President Obama’s address introducing Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for Justice Souter’s Supreme Court seat: he said he was struck by “the language he used to describe the role of Catholic schools in offering children a path out of poverty.” Here is the quote from the President’s remarks:

“But Sonia’s mom bought the only set of encyclopedias in the neighborhood, sent her children to a Catholic school called Cardinal Spellman out of the belief that with a good education here in America all things are possible."

You won’t get any argument out of me by suggesting that the way to get your children a good education here in America is to send them to Catholic schools, but I have to wonder what the President’s good friends and supporters in the public school teachers’ unions (never mind management) thought about that remark.

Meanwhile, at about the same time this remark was made, the papers reported that the last Catholic parochial school in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston would be closing next year, due primarily to declining enrollment. And as true as it is that the academic performance is superior, and as important as a sound academic foundation is to the life of the intellect, you can believe me when I say that academics is about the least of the good reasons I send my children to Catholic schools.

It wasn’t very long ago that Catholic families were strongly encouraged by the faith community to utilize the parochial schools as an important element of providing their children a good Catholic upbringing. As the parochial school systems sags and slowly collapses under the weight of indifference, it strikes me that such encouragement is almost wholly lacking these days in parish life. Local sponsorship of the responsibility for Catholic education seems limited to bulletin notices of area open houses, and an occasional fair to provide schools tables from which to hand out marketing literature normally reserved in magazine racks in the back of the church.

This seems to be part of a trend among much of the laity of abandoning anything distinctively Catholic. People just want to fit in – and I don’t understand why the priests seem so disinterested in resisting the trend. Maybe they try harder than I give them credit for, but there is simply insufficient depth to the soil of parish life in the form of supportive and receptive laity – I don’t know. It just seems to me that if so many Catholics want to blend in seamlessly to the larger, secular, culture – without being willing at the same time to abandon their Catholic name, then they can’t possibly discern a necessary difference between Catholicism and the spirit of the age.

Regarding the schools, it is as if people view the parochial schools as nothing more than public schools with incrementally better academics, and unwanted tuition bills. Actually, the parochial schools offer an environment relatively free of the fashionable academic conceit of godlessness, as well as a moral seriousness that not only doesn’t nurture the narcissistic insolence prevalent among too many youth today, but refuses to tolerate it very far. I won’t even mention the sexual mores.

You can’t put a price tag on that, and if Catholics, on the whole, could get their act together around this, there is no good reason why the tuition bill for parochial education couldn’t be at least cut to a nominal stipend, if not avoided altogether. It is widely said that the parochial schools do their superior work while spending less per child than the public schools do. Whether it be through vouchers or some other method, it would only take political will to allow Catholics (or anyone: non-Catholics are at least a significant minority in most parochial schools) to choose to send their children to Church-operated schools instead of government-operated schools, without paying twice.

The easy answer to the acculturation puzzle is to make a distinction between “real” Catholics and nominal Catholics, and to expect the nominal Catholics to find the exits, but I think that attitude does a disservice to those we might call spiritually poor. From the bishops on down, we try too hard to get along, and, in consequence, we fail to make the case to the many that Catholicism has something radical to offer; that being a Catholic is different than anything else. The loss of interest in the schools is just an obvious example of the loss of Catholic meaning through the withering of Catholic culture – although, for all it’s worth, I have little confidence that Justice Sotomayor, if she is confirmed, will demonstrate how a Catholic education can help shape the moral character with Catholic meaning… I hope I’m wrong.

Still thinking tonight about the assassination of George Tiller; a few things have surprised me. I lead a busy life, and don’t spend a lot of time perusing news sources and other media outlets, so my sample size is rather small, but it seems from my limited perspective that the press coverage has been strangely muted. There is no serious debating that the journalistic class almost purely represents the cultural elite that embraces abortion, and I really thought they would be harping all over this.

I suppose it’s early yet, and it could still become a cause célèbre over the next few days, but it seems odd to see it low on the ratings totem pole of major liberal news outlets. Of course, that could very well be explained by the likelihood that the web site layouts, unlike the newsprint of old, are driven much more by visitor interest – by clicks – rather than by pure editorial agenda. That would suggest that the readers of these sites have more interest in plane crashes, and in Susan what’s-her-name who sings on British television. Strange, that, and it doesn’t fill me with a new optimism for my country or my countrymen.

The biggest surprise, though, was reading yesterday that Tiller had been killed while serving as an usher at church. In what kind of church could such a man possibly be a member in good standing, one might reasonably be tempted to ask? A community of devil worshippers? We’re not talking here about some clueless, complicit politician without moral spine, or something like that, we’re talking about a man who actually killed the babies with his own hands – thousands of them – and who was proud of what he’d done. But no, this was a Lutheran church. That is just staggering. Was the money he made from abortions put into the collection basket as the Lord’s portion? Did this guy have it in his head that he was a disciple of Jesus Christ? How could the condition of the Church ever have been brought to such scandalous woe?