Giveaway Winner and other stuff

Drum roll, please.....

Unlike some other possibly shady special needs stuff goings-on in the blog world (ahem), this blog is awarding one lucky winner a copy of Mothers of Intention, edited by PunditMom's Joanne Bamberger that includes some punditry of mine.

And the winner is:

KARIO of The Writing Life who, I believe, is having a serendipitous week! Congratulations, Kario. Please email me your mailing address at elsophie at gmail dot com.

The other stuff is this interesting article about nuns and brains and Alzheimers and the ability to create long, complicated, complex sentences in a constant, concerted effort to maintain your linguistic skills, because such maintenance is associated with a lack of dementia.

Veddy, veddy interesting.

Speaking of brains -- and nuns -- about twenty-five years ago, I read a really interesting book about anorexia and the female saints of old -- how their fasting and self-flagellation and deprivations were perhaps the exact manifestations of the modern disease of anorexia except directed toward "God." Anorexia mirabilis literally means miraculous lack of appetite. Scary stuff.

Catherine of Siena -- saint/mystic or anorexic?

I read another book, too, that spoke of some of the famous female saints as being epileptic -- that their visions and hallucinations were of the temporal lobe variety. Fascinating stuff --

Jules Bastien le Page's Joan of Arc