Living Our Faith

No use complaining about this summer's drought, explained Bill Kaimann, a farmer in Lincoln County and member of Immaculate Conception Parish in Old Monroe.

"Whatever the Lord wants to give us," is his philosophy, shared by many others in the parish.

Kaimann, who has chosen to go without crop insurance, is "working for the Lord," he said, so his view is to just "do it all again" and see how it turns out.

The farm community around Immaculate Conception Parish has "a sense of ownership in their parish that I've never seen before," according to the parish pastor.

The combines moving through the corn crops sometimes were lost in dust clouds.

Some of the corn crops burned, leaving brown or black stalks without an ear of corn.

The drought of 2012 in America's Midwest was not friendly to farmers. Harvesting corn at the Feast of Assumption (Aug. 15) was an unusual sight. Usually it takes place much later in the year.

Sitting at his kitchen table, 8-year-old Aidan Peters peered into a computer screen, blinking from behind his glasses at the woman on the other end of the video chat. Occasionally he would stretch and yawn. On this early weekday morning, he was meeting with his teacher, Barb Meyers, for a lesson to help improve his speech and vocabulary.

"Baaa," he repeated after his teacher. "Shhh," he echoed the sound.

"I heard 'clo ... your eyes.' There's an 's' in there, Cookie," Meyers gently explained to her fidgety student, who was seated next to his mom, Becky.

NAPLES, Fla. -- Catholic agencies were working Aug. 27 to assess damage in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Isaac's pass over the Caribbean, where at least 24 people died and tens of thousands were evacuated.

The storm left widespread flooding and wind damage in Cuba and Hispaniola, the island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, before turning north toward the U.S. Gulf Coast, where it was expected to make landfall Aug. 28.

The islands largely escaped a direct hit, however, as the storm's center passed south of Hispaniola before scraping the northwest coast of Cuba.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Power outages, widespread flooding, canceled flights and a delayed Republican National Convention in Tampa will be the legacy of Tropical Storm Isaac (later upgraded to Hurricane Isaac) in South Florida.

But with the center of the storm staying offshore and sparing Florida the full brunt of its strongest winds, Isaac's outer bands left the state soaked but largely unscathed, apart from isolated tornado damage reported in the Venice and Palm Beach dioceses.

ANTIOCH, Turkey -- Patriarch Bechara Boutros Rai of Antioch, the head of the Maronite Church, has warned that the armed conflict in Syria is affecting neighboring Lebanon and could trigger a major conflict in the country.

"The civil war in Syria between the Sunni majority and the Alawite minority has already begun to have an impact on the Sunnis and Alawites in north Lebanon, in Tripoli and Akkar," the patriarch said last week, speaking to Aid to the Church in Need, an international Catholic charity that has provided emergency aid for victims of the Syrian conflict.