Charlotte Ostermann

Catholic Speaker

Let's talk about your need for holy leisure, interior freedom, poetic education, creative expression and cultural engagement. Authentic, joyful, humorous...many talks to choose from...custom crafted presentations...workshops, retreats, group facilitation...let me help you!

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The Mind of the Maker

mind of maker sayersI love Dorothy Sayers’ book The Mind of the Maker, and enjoy taking people through it to share her insights into the creative mind of God. She and I are both struck by the strange truth that, though God is (above all things?) a Creator, and we are made in His image, there is not much attention paid to developing an understanding of what ‘being a creator’ means.

It seems extra-spiritual, perhaps, but isn’t this right to the point? If we care what it means to be a good father, a wise ruler, a truthful judge (because these metaphors help us understand God and our own roles in life), but we care nothing about learning to be a creator, a storyteller, a dramatist, a musician, a poet, an artist of any kind, what does that say about our ‘spirituality’??

Yet rarely do I see Christians taking  a drawing class, for instance, because they assume there is something huge to learn there about God and His ways; about themselves and their ways. But there is! When you realize it is the whole person who sees and not just the eyes or brain, you begin to realize how much more there is to see than you have understood.

When you try to act, but cannot release yourself to allow the giving of the character to a waiting audience, you find out something about your self-consciousness, and understand more deeply what the Incarnation cost Christ. When you think you have sound (even great) ideas, but never put them to the test of struggling to articulate them, opening them to scrutiny and judgment and comparison, you are missing something about who you are and what virtue is.

Well, I could go on and on, and wouldn’t have to if everyone would just get on board and read books like this! Being a creator, an artist, a maker of form, is a path of spiritual growth, if you understand the potential and the limits of this metaphor.

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Blogging About My Talks

Grow Up In All Things

Grow Up In All Things

This was one long talk! I gave it as three separate one-hour talks for an all-day RCIA retreat, and felt a real excitement about the adventure of growing up ‘unto Christ’ among those new Catholics and their sponsors. What does it mean to ‘grow up unto Christ’, and how do we actually accomplish it? How […]

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Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners

Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners

I consider Mystery and Manners must reading! I have discussed different aspects of this work with parent educators, spiritual seekers, the Catholic Creatives Salon, and as a book study overview. It is a rich source of insight into the life of the artist, of the human person, and into literature’s capacity to be a vessel […]

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We Will Be Like Trees

We Will Be Like Trees

I enjoyed creating this talk to fit into a women’s retreat about Christ’s offer of “living water”. They gave me a free hand to choose my topic and approach, and I chose the promise, in Psalm 1, that we “shall be like trees, planted by streams of living water.” Their focus was on the woman […]

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Logs On Fire

Logs On Fire

St. Teresa of Avila had such great advice for us on how to pray. Her ‘method’ is simple, but profoundly helpful. I’ve noticed that the simple, interior hospitality toward God is the most helpful disposition to cultivate in order to avoid intellectual confusion and ideology that interferes with that sweet communion of the heart. I […]

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Filling Your Net

Filling Your Net

Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to the, “Children, have you any fish?” They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast […]

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Poetic Education: Seeing Through Words

Poetic Education: Seeing Through Words

One of my all-time favorite teaching experiences was a five-day poetry intensive for middle-school homeschoolers. I wrote a book just to get ready for this one, and hope to do it all over again some time. Meanwhile, I’ve adapted the material for parents, and for a high school classroom,  and enjoyed those venues, too.  For […]

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About a Landscape

About a Landscape

In “Stour Valley and Dedham Church”  Constable has painted the Vale of Dedham – a familiar and beloved area of his native England. Related

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Looking for Catholic Poets

Looking for Catholic Poets

During National Poetry Month, I’m on the lookout for Catholic poets who might want a bit of promoting. It’s easy for the dead poets – they are safely in the canon, and people can recommend the best of them knowing others have vetted their work (and that they didn’t do anything too embarassing before they […]

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Flatitudes and Floatitudes

Flatitudes and Floatitudes

Do You Suffer from PERS?!?!? In a recent talk – Home Schooling to Rock the World – I mentioned some symptoms that a person may be suffering from ‘post-Enlightenment reduction syndrome,’ (PERS) or ‘flattening’. This is the atrophy of one’s analogic sense – a reduction in the metaphoric dimension of human being. The problem is […]

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A Wedding Feast

A Wedding Feast

Giotto’s painting, The Wedding Feast at Cana, portrays the literal and spiritual senses of this story. Related

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Three-Dimensional Transcendentals

Three-Dimensional Transcendentals

Benedictine College hosted a Symposium for Advancing the New Evangelization in 2014. The theme was Transcendentals as Preambles to Faith, and I got to propose my take on that as a paper. Anyone who knows me could probably have bet good money I’d do something ‘three dimensional’ with that, and they’d have won those bets. […]

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Loved the Chesterton Conference!

Link to the whole talk on YouTube, here. Related

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Tertiary Epic in C.S. Lewis

Tertiary Epic in C.S. Lewis

Gosh, I enjoy giving papers at C.S. Lewis Conferences! But it’s expensive. Most of those who do it have, it seems, college department budgets paying their expenses. For an amateur Lewis ‘scholar,’ it’s hard to get there from here. I’ve been lucky to have a C.S. Lewis studies class nearby so as to become a […]

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Communicating Reality to a Child

Communicating Reality to a Child

Women raising children stand in a very powerful place as the mediator of reality. We are great at being womb-and-placentas for our babies. We do fairly well at providing a home life that expands their contact with the wider world. We must also be, like a healthy cell wall, a semi-permeable boundary controlling incoming intellectual, […]

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