One of the clear and sensible assessments reported in the book review of Theodore Ziolkowski's Modes of Belief: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief that I read in the latest issue of Commonweal (as I reported doing on my journey to Montreal) was from a comparison the reviewer made to Charles Taylor's recent masterpiece A Secular Age. (The reviewer was Richard A. Rosengarten, Dean and Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School.) There he noted that:

... Taylor argues that, in modernity, how we think about art shifts from imitation or inheritance to creation, from a shared set of common reference points to the expression of an individual sensibility. Poetics, therefore, reflects not public meaning but private expression. Art in turn becomes a separate form of expression rather than an integral function of religion or politics. While Ziolkowski would recognize the shift Taylor describes from art as imitation to art as creation, Modes of Faith underscores in impressive detail the role of individual sensibility in contemporary art. Ziolkowski shows how that sensibility remains not separate from religion but deeply engaged with it. For Ziolkowski, the modern negotiation of various claims to meaning has complicated religiosity – but it also seems to have deepened it.

These observations have been bouncing around in my head. I had long noticed, and been frustrated by, art's turn to the individual that Taylor mentioned, which more and more seems to me to have bogged art down with biography or individual perspective in ways that leave art less communal, and more in danger of slipping into self-absorption. Ziolkowski's observation makes for a useful balance lest I get pessimistic on the point, although a number of his case studies seem to suffer from all the flaws of modernity's tendency of "do-it-yourself" spirituality where people waste an awful lot of time "re-inventing the wheel" because of loss of any real understanding of the Jewish and Christian spiritual legacy. It is in the context of thinking about all this that I notice a few articles regarding the Vatican and the arts. The articles are newspaper-y, and therefore really basic, but they do point in a limited way to the intentional engagement between faith and art that's going on even at the top of the Church's hierarchy.

Reconcilable differences: The church reaches out to modern arts
Vatican says 262 artists accept invitation for meeting with pope

( Read more... )

Huh. I just had a thought. A Thought, if I be flamboyant enough to capitalize it. I've been unpacking after a tiring separation from my luggage for a day, resulting in me just getting it a little while ago.

In the background is Vienna Teng's oddly exultant "Augustine," which, as I mentioned earlier, had been the occasion for my and Mike's speaking to her a little after her concert in Milwaukee last month. The lyrics led me to think something about the phenomenon of undergoing a spiritual crisis – something that we do more than once in our lives. In the great saints and spiritual masters – as we see stetched out over a decade in Augustine himself, as related in his amazing Confessions – such spiritual crises end not in the defeat of faith, hope or love, but in sometimes astonishing transformations in grace. "The Dark Night of the Soul" and "the silence of God" are phenomena that one finds throughout spiritual experience, as far back as the Jewish prophets themselves.

And then here was my Thought: spiritual literature and scholarship has explored this "Dark Night" experience of feeling only an absence of God, and it is pretty sensibly understood, I think, by those wise in spiritual matters. But it just struck me that that is always dealt with in an individualistic manner: of speaking of God as interacting with an individual person for their spiritual benefit. What if, I suddenly thought, you could look at this as a social phenomenon as well? We speak of Modernity as a time of the fading of religion and highly-developed spirituality in the face of Secularistic philosophical movements like the European Enlightenment. But what if you could look this experience as a social or corporate experience of something similar to the "Dark Night" experience? I frequently speak in my Theology classes of the development of spiritual sensibilities on a corporate level: of the individual, almost childlike, spiritual encounter with God in the revelation to Abraham; of the development in Moses of the giving of the Law to the people of Israel, like a child gaining rules and chores as part of their development; and of the development after the revelation in Christ and Pentecost to young adulthood, of being sent out into the world with your own responsibilities for transforming it.

Well, I thought, what if one looked at Modernity and its challenges to faith as akin, on a societal level, to the individual experience of the "dark night of the soul" and that experience of the absence of God, with all its potential threats and benefits to spiritual growth? I've never heard an analysis of this sort. While I see obvious problems with it – it certainly indulges in generalization, of course – I still wonder whether such an exploration might be an interesting exercise in a kind of spiritual historiography. I've always found compelling the analogy that God relates to humanity through history like a parent or teacher, back since I found that argument or observation in Irenaeus of Lyon and his explanation of why God's approach to Israel or the Church or humanity seems to change and develop through history. On a personal level, the "Dark Night" experience is so critical for developing to a deeper level in faith, so why not the possibility of exploring that possibility on a wider, corporate level, too?

(Now if only it didn't take half an hour to type out an idea like that....)

Utterly exhausted. An unbelievably long and full day, with lots of superstar names.

900-1130 – Rethinking Secularism a panel with Charles Taylor of McGill University, José Casanova of Georgetown University, Saba Mahmood of Berkeley, and Craig Calhoun of New York University
1145-1245 – Contemporary Islam: The Meaning and the Need of a Radical Reform Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University
100-230 – James H. Cone being interviewed by Cornel West
300-430 – The Commission on Reasonable Accommodation in Québec: Reflections with Co-chairs Dr. Charles Taylor and Dr. Gerard Bouchard
430-500 – A conversation with Professor Greer Anne Wenh-In Ng of the Toronto School of Theology, who I met sitting next to me during the previous presentation, on the subject of Canadian multiculturalism and interculturalism
500-630 – Scriptural Reasoning Group: The Other Within and Without: In Loving Memory of Michael Signer a panel featuring papers and readings from Signer, my Judaism professor at Notre Dame who recently passed away, Peter Ochs of the University of Virginia, R. Kendall Soulen of Western Theological Seminary, Medhi Aminrazavi of the University of Mary Washington, and Steven D. Kepnes of Colgate University
630-700 – Further conversation with Michelle Peterson before saying our good-byes

Add to that my getting up well before dawn, a fabulous interview in the afternoon, and a room service pizza and I'm now going to keel over.

The AAR conference is still giving me the impression that it did last year: unbelievably huge. It's much less personally engaging than other conferences I've been to: too big, too diverse, too much happening at once. It's sort of the Wal-Mart of academic conferences. If I recall correctly, it's something like 7000 in attendance, but that might be the numbers from before AAR split with SBL. Normally, the word "diverse" would be a positive one, but this is "diverse" in the way a student paper ought not to be: not enough unity and focus to give it much cohesion. Still, as a buffet or sample bar, it is interesting to be able to take in talks on just about everything, but conferences that are a little more thematically unified seem to be more able to grab my attention and imagination.

I ran into Michelle P., who I met years ago doing summer Master's classes in Spirituality at Notre Dame. I thought that I might see her again, as I had last year at the AAR in Chicago, and so we once again had a good hour or hour-and-a-half of catching up. She's launching into a Paul Ricour-based dissertation on a language of silence, so to speak, analyzing and articulating the raw experience of silence and of awareness of being itself, with a lot of engagement with Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger as part of it. I thought that sounded daring in itself, because it is so difficult to try to articulate such fundamental (and such non-vocal) experiences. It reminded me of a song-writing challenge Kevin and I imagined back during the Road Trip in 2000, when we were struck by the nature of the high-altitude quiet when we stopped along the top of the Beartooth Mountain Pass: to try to somehow capture this distinctive silence in music. That same irony seemed to be driving Michelle's project, whether in language or in music one would try to describe an experience of silence. But what else are we left with, as far as human tools go? Music seems the easier option to me, really, in being able to take refuge in metaphor and in emotion-bearing sounds beyond the scope of language. But I did think that Michelle was setting herself up for a great research agenda after finishing the dissertation in being able to take the language and tools of analysis that she is crafting and then turn those onto a variety of mystical texts that she can explore with those tools. It's easier to go into kataphatic mysticism – the mysticism of "stuff," of metaphor and image and mediation through things, ranging from nature to music to conversation to sacraments – than it is to go into apophatic mysticism, the mysticism of stillness, silence and negation. But both routes are equally valid and equally necessary in human mystical experience. Nor can you really separate them, I think, because even the most kataphatic of mystical experiences, like the sacrament of the Eucharist with its language, story, drama, ritual, bread and wine, always can lead one into an apophatic experience of silence and simple awareness of the presence of God in receiving the Eucharist.

I also ran into Gavril from our Department, who I had also last seen at last year's AAR, and caught up on his news a bit, as well as running into Marquette Professors Hughson, Schultenover, and my Doktorvater Fahey after the end of the afternoon's Ecclesiological Investigations session. I had sat talking with a Dr. Kim from Leeds Trinity University College at the end of that session, where the closing respondent to the papers presented had talked about the work of Ecclesiology having shifted from the older paradigm of being concerned primarily with the question of the relation of church and state, and now had moved to the relation of church and culture. We were both struck, though, that the way that this had been presented was in such a way as to basically reduce Ecclesiology to Missiology, or the study of mission or missions. While my own ecclesiological work is concerned with such activities as an outgrowth of spirituality, it really starts, as in the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, with a much more explicit interest in the Triune God, and only from there moves toward activity and spirituality. That is to say, it is a primarily theological ecclesiology. The respondent's concern with the use of the tools of the social sciences for ecclesiological work just made me wonder whether that would end in the reduction of ecclesiology to sociology, or sociological descriptions of church behaviours, which I don't think is the same thing as ecclesiology at all.

Anyway, it was exciting to see that the Ecclesiology section, which Fahey told me this summer was a relatively recent addition to the AAR, had gathered quite a large group in attendance. Even more interesting was to see how young and diverse that group was. The Scottish presider quipped about this in his closing comment, wondering aloud whether this indicated that the proclamations of a post-Christian culture might be premature.

Had a good interview today, very focused on my teaching skills and history. We most talked about teaching theology to a broad and diverse stretch of students: across religious, ethnic, educational, and age groups. In many ways, my experience at Saint Joe's was more useful background than my experience at Marquette, where I've had only a few non-traditional students, whereas in South Bend I also did some teaching for the diocese, with students thirty or forty years my senior. So it was a very comfortable, "shop-talk" sort of conversation, but she definitely kept me interested in the position.

So that's been the day, with all of its random conversation and stray activities, whether talking online education with a Pagan woman trying to set up an online Pagan seminary in California as we stood in line at a conference center coffeeshop downstairs in the Palais des congrès de Montréal, or whether venturing out a little while ago to a restaurant open in an alley in Chinatown for some late-night food.

Arg. False alarm fire alarm at 430am-ish. Really and for true. Dress and head down the stairs as the alarm turns off, with people coming out into the hallways asking if that's a fire alarm or not. (It was a bit more mild than most fire alarms.) Check at reception. They say that they think it's a false alarm, and they'll make an announcement if not.

Seriously.

As I promised, I ask for a key for the guy next door to me who had walked out and locked himself out of his room, standing in shorts, having realized by the time I asked that no one is going to give me a room key for someone else. (He totally freaked me out, as he looked like beard-version of PJ when he came out of his room.) So I head back up and send him down. He makes it back up with the key (having been asked for ID, which he didn't have) and we end up chatting in the hall half an hour. Cool young pastor named Trip, doing his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion/Metaphysics out at Claremont. He was laughing at how he ended up sitting by Ben Stein on his flight from LA to Cleveland, and then next to Cornel West from Cleveland to Montreal. So we talked programs and metaphysics for a bit, until we get tired again. And I type this out in case I think it's a dream in the morning. Well, later this morning.

Sooo wiped out. I arrived at 9pm to my hotel across from the convention center where the American Academy of Religion annual meeting is being held in Montreal, after leaving my Milwaukee apartment at 6:30am. It's been a long day. I just ate some room service food and I'm about ready to keel over. That said, though, I did enjoy the travel in many ways. My schedule has just been so busy that, even though I was being carted around the country, I felt like I sat down and was still through this day more than I have been in a long time. I worked my way through the AAR schedule for the first time, checking out sessions I might like to attend, if I can get much time away from interviews at the Job Center. Looking out the window while coming in to land at LaGuardia, I saw Lady Liberty and Manhattan for the first time since flying down the Hudson to transfer at Newark on my way back from Ireland in April 1999. I also saw part of the grounds of the 1939 World's Fair, which totally took me by surprise. Sitting in LaGuardia, waiting an hour and a half for my flight to Montreal (after an earlier four hour layover at O'Hare, the monotony of which was only broken up by a payphone call to Sophie [who nodded, apparently, more than talked], Leslie and Mom), I realized that that was my first time actually being in New York City, although I'm inclined to say it doesn't count, since I didn't actually get outside.

Cleaning out my jacket pockets of old oddments of paper, I found a flyer I had been handed with my ticket for Over The Rhine last month, and had never really seen. I was utterly dismayed to discover that last Sunday, The Swell Season played the Pabst Theatre. The Swell Season are Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the duo from the incredible film Once, which I wrote about some months back. Seeing their show would have made a good dual birthday present for Dan and Amy, Amy having gifted me with the DVD for my own birthday, some time after I had shown them my borrowed copy of the film. Anyway. Arg! Double Arg!

Starting from my departure from O'Hare, I then worked my way through the latest issue of Commonweal, the 85th anniversary issue, which was perfectly engaging. There were great book reviews to read (Eamon Duffy's latest, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, sounds fascinating, and I was almost equally intrigued by Theodore Ziolkowski's Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief. The article entitled "The Tightrope: Loyalty, Independence & the Catholic Press," by John Wilkins former editory of the London Tablet, was perhaps the best thing I've read on the need for an independent Catholic press.

Sidney Callahan wrote a column about a 1973 letter from Dorothy Day which she had recently re-discovered while cleaning out her old files while moving. There was a passage quoted I found fascinating, because of certain heretic suspicions I've been harbouring the last few years. Although I was raised in a household headed by a strong woman, making me assume that ideas like "equal pay for equal work" were just matters of simple justice and common sense, and although my education had me take the arguments of ideological feminism as equally simple matters-of-fact, I have increasingly come to suspect that feminism as a school of thought caused very little of the women's revolution of the 20th century, no matter how much it took credit for it. (Not unlike the Enlightenment philosophers virtually taking credit for the scientific revolution.) The more I look at social history, the more the worldwide shift in the status and opportunities for women seems to me to have been driven by the technological shifts in the 20th century. Thus my interest to read Day, who lived through all this as a most exceptional and aware woman, write, inviting Callahan to come to New York and speak on women's lib:

I feel badly at seeing formerly happy women friends, bitter and angry at all they have suddenly discovered they have suffered. And they get angry for me for not being angry.... Isn't anger a sin?

The women's history I have been particularly working on (and may design a course regarding) is medieval women's history, as background to looking at medieval women mystics, like Julian of Norwich, Hildegard von Bingen, and Catherine of Siena. Reading the great French medievalist Regine Pernoud, I was struck by how far the status of women had come by the High Middle Ages, and how much of that was quickly lost in early modernity with the embrace of Roman legal codes out of the Renaissance. But I was equally struck by Pernoud's accounts of contemporary women's resistance to these facts, and the realization that the ideological articulation of feminism in the later 20th century was willing to effectively denigrate actual women's history in order to preserve its own personal narrative as the ideological liberator of women. That's all too sweeping and over-stated, I'm sure, but that sort of thing was the first real insight that I had into 1960s-1970s feminism as not just a political or social movement, but as an ideological narrative. Of course, there is no single "feminism" any more, but it is interesting to see in Day a woman who was very much at the "cutting edge" of anything like the 20th century's movement for social justice for women, but who also recognized that period's feminist narrative as a particular narrative and declined to just sign off on the whole of it in the way most people did. Anyway, I'm so interested in the way ideas do drive events that I have to be extra-careful to watch for these other kinds of causal components in history.

Coming into Montreal, the city was all lite up, with the high-rise downtown impressively glowing like all big cities at night. I saw Saint Joseph's Oratory, all solemn and subdued on the far side of the big hill in the center of town, and remembered Chris Cox, CSC telling me my first stories of Brother Andre, back during my first year at Notre Dame, walking over to Moreau Seminary after a football game. I don't think I'll be able to make it over there, but it would be kind of flooring to see the walls lined with crutches and wheelchairs and all the tangible remains of people gifted with all the strange healings reported in his company.

Off to bed. Amen.

Heh. I woke up in an absolute snit from a dream where I was back in high school, in the days when my sister and I used to fight like the proverbial cats and dogs. For the very vivid duration of the dream, I was back in high school, where Leslie had dismissively informed me that she had taken my favourite sweater (a rich crimson knit sweater, which never existed in reality, although I now realize it reminds me of a rich purple sweater I wore at the time) and had shrunk it down to fit her because she thought it looked better on her. Naturally, I blew up because she did this without even asking me and was acting as though she had a perfect right to do so. I woke up wanting to shout something like, "You've got to be kidding me!" Then, after a breath to get my bearings and realize what was going on, busted out laughing.

Well, my head is still spinning from work, from the couple days' ache I always seem to get after getting the flu vaccine, from sleep deprivation, and from getting the last of the main applications all out. It's going to feel sweet just to settle back into regular writing with the dissertation.

But I do have to note that The Gathering Storm, the new volume of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, posthumously published with the aid of Brandon Sanderson working from the notes and outlines Jordan left along with those chapters he had completed, is absolutely out of this world. Several threads of the story have come to their climax, and even when there was enough foreshadowing to make for a reasonable guess as to the way some plot point or other was going to be resolved, it still was nevertheless edge-of-your-seat action and drama. Seven stars on a five-point scale. It's just too bad my brother can't keep up with the reading: now that Joe's a dad (Nate's first birthday was on Thursday) he only gets time for a bit to read here and there, and so he (slightly) ruefully said on Thursday that he was only up to chapter eight by the time I had finished the volume. But that just means to get to extend the pleasure of reading it for the first time, so I don't think there's anything wrong with that....

I meant to pass my volume on to Mike last night when we all gathered at Dan and Amy's to celebrate Amy's birthday and to enjoy the company of Bob, who was back in town for another dissertation sprint, but I left it on the shelf when I rushed out the door. Mike was dismayed, as he thought it wasn't going to be released for a little while longer, yet, and so I ended up being a tease in that he could have had it "early," if only I had remembered. So I owe him one, there.

Some interesting criticism articles I found online regarding Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

Little space in between: preliminary notes on Before Sunrise
Love’s Moment: Before Sunrise and Before Sunset

Little space in between: preliminary notes on Before Sunrise

Author: Robin Wood
Date: Jan 1, 1996
Words: 6036
Publication: CineAction
ISSN: 0826-9866


"...You know, if there's any kind of god, it wouldn't be in any of us, not you, or me, but just...this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really?

The answer must be in the attempt..."

-- Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise

I knew, the first time I saw Before Sunrise, that here was a film for which I felt not only interest or admiration but love; a film I would want to revisit repeatedly over the years; one that would join the short list of films that remain constant favourites; and one that I would ultimately want to write about, as a means at once of exploring it more systematically and of sharing my delight in it with others--of finding that "magic" in the "attempt". I believe in the possibility of a `definitive' reading of a work only in the sense that it is definitive for myself at a certain stage of my evolution, that it `defines' not the work but my own temporary sense of it, the degree of contact I have been able to achieve, as clearly and completely as I can; but I do not feel ready, with Before Sunrise, for even that limited and provisional undertaking. What follows, then, should be read as a series of loosely interconnected and often tentative probes, the beginning of a `work in progress': a preliminary attempt to define why, for me personally, this film belongs among the dozen or so that exemplify `cinema' at its finest.

( Read more... )

I have been too busy or distracted to keep a log for a few days. After my long talk with Kate last Sunday night, I had a similarly long phone conversation with Kevin, until we both wore out our phone batteries, while I squirmed with envy to hear him describing the view as he was talking to me from the hot tub on his in-laws' deck overlooking a clear, warm sunset behind the Grand Tetons, and then later oo-ing and ah-ing from seeing a pair of large shooting stars over the mountaintops. That was Wednesday night. Thursday night I went to an art opening at the Harley-Davidson Museum called "The Helmet Project," which was put together by students at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. My former high school student Leslie Sutton is there now, and she invited me to the opening, where we caught up while taking in the exhibition together, and then kept talking over drinks and dessert over at the Hotel Metro. Friday night featured a long evening with the gang, joined by Anthony and Kelly, who drove up from northern Illinois and treated us to Boeuf Bourguignon, along with their company. So Saturday I got back more exclusively to work, although I did have a good long talk with Mom in the evening. More on all that later, I hope.

But Wednesday afternoon, after I had posted my tongue-in-cheek rant about the weather this October, and my feeling that I had been robbed of our usual glorious Peak Week experience, suddenly cleared up, as if in answer to my protest/whine. It still wasn't terribly sunny, but it was a definite improvement. When I got done teaching at 2pm, I walked back over to my apartment, had lunch, and then grabbed my camera and headed back out. Crossing Wisconsin Avenue, I ran into Jessica, and we quickly found out that she was free to join me for an hour taking a look at the colours before she started her shift at Starbucks. This gave her a good laugh in itself, given the several abortive attempts we had made at trying to get together over the last several weeks, only to be able to spontaneously just hang out without trying to make our schedules work.

And so we strolled around the center of campus, swapping off on the camera, and shooting what caught our eye, while we talked of her and Nathan's upcoming plans for the Fall Break, where they were actually going to be constructing the bed she had designed and showed me the other week, in a vaguely Chinese style, as part of their work building up to their wedding in January. We talked about learning to fight fairly with a Significant Other, and the importance of figuring out that skill. Some of my job application stories came up, and we talked about the different kinds of emphases in different positions, and the pros and cons of each of these. And in and out of all the more concrete specifics of life and living as we were currently experiencing it, we talked about angles and colour and composition, and what beauty we were finding in the heart of Marquette's otherwise urban campus. Good times.

I was particularly pleased with the portrait shots I took of her, sitting on a bench by the Chapel of Joan of Arc, of which this is a cropped version of my favourite. This one definitely goes into my "Portraiture" album.

I have to admit, I feel ripped off this year. Yesterday was it: our first and only clear, bright, crisp, not-too-cold autumn afternoon, just after what seems to have been the peak of Peak Week. Otherwise, Milwaukee's October this year has been uniformly cold and overcast, and mostly rainy. We had one day yesterday that fits into that glorious mould of the "Peak Week" time that I love, and today it is once again gone, replaced by the dull chill gloom I described, with more rain on the way tomorrow and through the rest of the week.

So I feel ripped off. I mean, Peak Week is my favourite time of the year, no question. I feel as though, weather-wise and season-wise, the rest of the year are the dues I pay, the cover charge, just to get in this one week of unrestrained, exploding colour, to watch the variety of trees the groundskeepers have cultivated on campus do their magic, to watch the row down the center of Wisconsin Avenue explode into a red that threatens to go pink. At Notre Dame, where we got a much more welcome full week of Fall Break, I would take that mid-semester catch-up time for grad student work to read while walking around Saint Mary's Lake (and less frequently Saint Joe's, too) taking in the beauty along with the theology, as is fitting.

So. Whine whine whine. Yes, I fully know that there's a lot worse going on in the world. But still. Drat.

Had a long, lovely talk with Kate last night, up in British Columbia. It had been a while since we caught up, and it was good just to hear her voice and feel her spirit. It's been five years since we have actually laid eyes on one another, when she and Paul flew me up to visit them using their own frequent flyer miles for me, while they were trying to get in all the visitors they could before Kate gave birth to their first, Sophia, the next month. Now Sophia, who was almost my goddaughter, before I was disqualified for being too distant, is five years old and starting in a French immersion school. Kate and Paul are both working different careers than when I saw them, and life rolls on. One of the things that attracts me to a Canadian teaching position is just to take advantage of some of those in-country travel opportunities, just so that I could see them more frequently. I've been repeatedly blessed in not only having old "best friends" who have remained such despite the interruptions of time and distance, but also in their acquiring spouses who I enjoy just as fully, and who welcome me just as generously.

So we talked current job stuff, and I filled her in on the prospects for professorships in the coming year, some of which we talked over in greater detail. We ranged from the seriousness of talking about interviews, with her full of what she cheerfully admitted was unsolicited advice, all of which was more than sensible, to less serious bits of fun like the upcoming release of the 12th volume of The Wheel of Time the latest season of Smallville, and the not-entirely-unrealistic possibilities of getting onto the Vancouver set of Smallville as extras, just to look around. We did a bit of mutual net-surfing, directing one another to a few things we wanted the other to see, and she got a good laugh or two out of seeing my shots of her eight months pregnant in my photo album, which she hadn't seen before, especially the one she had forgotten about where she posed in a large garden pot, since she was "about to bloom." She even sketched out for me the kernel idea of a writing project she's starting to play with, which was a great surprise, and which I thought was a timely theme with a lot of innate potential. She would not tell me any more, however, until she could do so in a coffeehouse, which just adds to my need to get up thereabouts as soon as reasonably possible.

Since Dan received his birthday gift of a guitar from Amy, I've given him a couple of very basic guitar lessons. Just that sentence will make my musician friends laugh, because I'm nobody's idea of a guitar player. I picked up enough from Mark, J.P., Doug and Erik to start writing down the music I heard in my head, for which I'll forever be grateful, but I was pretty sure up front, having a poor innate sense of rhythm, that I could only go so far as a guitar player, and so I've not invested much effort on getting past that point. Just being able to go into the studio and tell the guys, "Play that, in such-and-such a way, but better," was enough for me.

But in showing Dan around the guitar, I've had to go with what I know. To start with, we don't know much of the same music. Dan's taste seems as eclectic as mine, which I enjoy, but it's all over the place with lots of things I don't know, and so I've come back from his house with borrowed CDs ranging from Coldplay to Johnny Mathis' Christmas music. Last week, while trying to show him a thing or two, we ended up playing around with things like U2's "Mysterious Ways" and Sixpence None The Richer's "Kiss Me," that I knew he knew as well. But to show him a chord, a technique, or a sound, I've had to go with what I know.

Thus entered the Freeks.

I have explained my liaison at Notre Dame with George and the Freeks elsewhere, and so I won't repeat that here. But it is a bit inconvenient to give guitar lessons when the music that you have mostly played on the guitar is from a band that very few people have heard of. Dan said something about passing some of the band's music to him, which seemed the easiest way to build a common guitar idiom. I've been listening to the Freeks a lot the last week or two because of this guitar-playing, and I thought that perhaps the easiest way to get Dan familiar with some of the music was to put some on the internet that I had intended to upload for quite some time, anyway.

At an earlier stretch of graduate school, as the ten-year anniversaries (Yikes!) of a lot of gigs the band played rolled around, I had been uploading digital files I had made from tapes of the band's gigs. (Since then all made available for easy downloading from MegaUpload.) I had first uploaded the Freeks' private second album, recorded during their Senior Week at Notre Dame. A bunch of early songs recorded in an "unplugged" acoustic setting, The Senior Week Sessions had long been a fun listening experience. These had been followed by Live at Bridget's Pub, a February 1996 gig that was one of the highlights of my first months working sound for the band, and the best recording with the original lineup with Erik as lead guitar. Live in Dayton followed, which is probably the clearest recording from the 1996-97 Freeks lineup, with Chris replacing Bryan on drums and Mark starting to get more comfortable in his rushed move up to lead guitar. I had also uploaded Live at Corby's Pub, another South Bend venue, which was the first recording I had of the latter Freeks lineup, and features the introduction of some material that would be a staple of the rest of the year, as the Freeks began touring regionally. With graduate school proving a horrible distraction, I had not gotten around to uploading anything else, other than the Freekish first Chrysogonus Fest from the summer of 1997, after the Freeks had officially broken up once some of the guys decided that they didn't want to make a full-time go of it in music and with the others heading to D.C. to become Hoobajoob.

But I had always meant to do something. Before getting around to uploading some of the other gigs, I thought I would try to eliminate some of the problematic nature of live music, of me being a soundguy who had not yet learned to listen simultaneously to the full band playing (a skill I really wouldn't start to master until recording in Nashville), and of having to mix the soundboard and main speakers against whatever level of sound was coming out of the band's amplifiers: I would make a "Best Of" collection.

And so I did. And George and the Freeks: Greatest Live has remained among my iTunes playlists for a few years. Until now. With Dan needing to hear some of this music, and some of the Freeks having not heard a lot of this taped music since we moved into the Digital Age, I figured it was finally time to get off my tush, upload these tunes, and make them available. I stand by my assessment that this music is something special, that the tunes – whether pure fun, grim introspection, or moving into the mystical – have a lot to offer both heart and mind. As a vocalist, I had to love a group that, depending on the lineup, had anywhere from three to five singers, four of whom were good songwriters, and thus had a variety of voices in the literal and literary senses. Doug, LiveJournal's own weaklingrecords, remains, in particular, one of the most gifted songwriters I have ever heard, and it's a tragedy that his music didn't get a wider chance to be heard, although given the delight he has had in following his parents and creating a family of his own, I imagine that he wouldn't pick musical success over his personal success, anyway.

George and the Freeks: Greatest Live (FREE DOWNLOAD)

Gotta Be Good (McKenna) Every bit as "bad ass" a tune as Mark says at the end: words you wouldn't associate with the Irish Blessing until Doug's adaptation.
Wanting, Waiting (McKenna) One of Chris' first contributions was giving Doug's new song this irresistible groove, over lyrics more sober than they sound.
Join Us On the Ride (Lang) Mark's classic invitation to the audience: a song frequently found around the opening of a gig.
Bittersweet Highway (McKenna) Andy's organ explodes in this version of Doug's raging song of self-conflict.
Thoughts (McKenna) Doug never felt finished with this song, but it remained one of the Freeks' staples, although you never knew what the lyrics would be at the end.
Let Your Spirit (Brenner) Andy's longing, hopeful tune draws on the deep wells of no less than Augustine's Confessions. I always hear this chorus in my head during the consecration.
Away (McKenna) The rarest treasure of this collection. In one of Erik's farewell gigs, his guitar goes as far to the edge as Doug's vocals.
The Search for Aeneas (Lang) One of Mark's early mystical pieces, later aptly re-recorded as "The Search for Sophia," the song tries to move toward pure self-abandonment.
Beginnings (McKenna) Another early Freeks staple, Doug's exploration of the drama of ambiguity and fidelity is as sharp as ever.
Tree (McKenna) Spanning everything from surviving a typhoon in India to the Cross, Doug serves up terror and triumph with one of the most dangerous riffs ever, here with the rare extended ending.
Oddity of a Stranger (Goldschmidt) Erik's searching self-exploration, here served up in a rare acoustic gig.
Only Beauty (McKenna) One of Doug's most popular songs, here with a perfect duet of a jam between Andy's piano and Mark's lead guitar.
Gypsy Moths and Cantaloupe (Goldschmidt) This version of Erik's failed mystical dialogue with God remains a band legend, even for the self-confessed "Most Narcissistic Band on Campus."
Good-Bye (McKenna) A slower version of Doug's testament to love lost, and all the more heartfelt for it.
Empty Space (Brenner) The beauty in music redeems even the pain of breakup and emptiness in this earlier tune of Andy's.
Don't Go (McKenna) Bassist J.P.'s genius for arrangement is evident in this moody masterpiece of Doug's, such as in his changing the bridge from the song's 6/8 time to 5/4.
Gratitude (McKenna) A gem of Doug's last year with the Freeks, and a personal favourite, this chord progression alone is perfection and I probably play it on guitar more than any of my own songs.
If I Go On My Way (Lang) A rarity of Mark's, this gorgeous song crept out for one acoustic warm-up for a few early fans before a gig, never to be heard again, except for here.
Field of Bliss (Goldschmidt) Another exploration of mystical frustration, with elements as old as the Song of Songs and as modern as the Allman Brothers, this song will make you shoot out of your mind.

Gave my Midterm earlier this afternoon. I got a grand compliment when one guy, turning in his exam, asked me if I was teaching any mid-level courses this spring. I was slightly amazed, both that someone already had decided I was worth taking again, and because of the context of asking while I was terrifying them with my exam.

Now I'm eating a late lunch and watching last night's Grey's Anatomy. I know Mercy West hospital is merging with Seattle Grace Hospital, but honestly: it's more like the wonderful cast of my favourite family drama, the late and celebrated Everwood is merging with Grey's. Last week had the versatile Tom Amandes guest-starring, who I still miss in the choice role of Dr. Harold Abbott, who began as the occasional comic relief and became the social heart of the show. And now this week has all of Amy Abbott's friends joining the staff, with the wonderful Sarah Drew, who played Hannah Rogers on Everwood, and Nora Zehetner, who played Laynie Hart, the girl Hannah replaced as Amy's best friend. Now if Grey's would just give homes to the Everwood powerhouses: writers like Michael Green and John E. Pogue....

Just back in after doing a two hour review session with some students for my Midterm Exam tomorrow for Introduction To Theology. I talked with Sophie and then Grace on the phone today, with Haley declining phone conversation, as usual. Sophie talked mostly of painting flowers at pre-school (green and purple), and tried to tell me that she was playing with puzzles a lot at home, although I needed Grace to translate that for me. Grace spoke of doing a lot of math at school, of the cold and drizzly weather we were both having, and expressed her horror when I mentioned having to deal with a student who cheated. Then Sophie, I think, opened a door and Lucky shot right through it, leading to confused scrambling just as Grace was going to ask Haley again if she wanted to talk. She put down the phone and everyone tore after the little Yorkshire terrier. While Leslie then drilled the girls on taking care of the dog before opening doors to the outside, Grace forgot about the phone. I listened to the house settled down and everyone getting back into their routines for about seven minutes while I did some typing, laughing to myself about when Grace might remember the phone or someone might discover the open line. At that point, I just decided to stop spending any more minutes. A little while later, Leslie callled, laughing about discovering the phone beeping, and Grace suddenly remembering and saying, "Uh-oh...."

Running around all day today, preparing for Midterm Exams for my students, I was pleasantly surprised to be taken out of the tyrannical now and thrown back 20 years in time by a note from Angie. She wanted to use a story I had told her as an illustration for something she was writing, and wanted both my permission and a reminder as to where she might find it on my journal. The thing was, I realized, that she was remembering a story I had told her, and not a story I had written down already.

And so: The Great LOMC Prairie Fire of 1988.

It was the first of my three summers working at Lutheran Outdoor Ministries Center, LOMC, and it was a week with a smaller group of kids in attendance, and so I was spending the week working maintenance for Virgil Rocke, the Property Manager. I was actually rather enjoying myself because I was teamed up with another SGL (Small Group Leader, a.k.a. "camp counselor") who was also on maintenance duty for the week, Murray Weldon, a student in Agronomy who was, along with me and Marine Lt. Rob Guy, the other real enthusiast for deep woods hiking and exploration on the staff. Murray was, naturally, particularly interested in the plants growing in the woods and prairie of the property, and was forever murmuring Latin plant names to himself, and forcing me to eat things he found growing along our hiking routes.

This particular hot day, in July, I think, we were up on the roof of Hillside House, replacing shingles or something of that sort. It was late morning, if I recall correctly, with the day having not yet the fullness of its considerable heat. Northern Illinois had been suffering from a drought that summer, and everything was growing brown and dead, so much so that you were starting to get that horrible dead dust rising up as you crunched your way across the lawn.

Suddenly! A hue and cry broke out! Junior high school-aged boys came running up from the pond where they had been starting to fish from the dock, I think, crying out that a fire had broken out on the campfire ring on the far side of pond, where a group had failed to extinguish all the embers from their evening campfire the night before. As this news was shouted up toward us, Murray and I straightened up and, sure enough, smoke was rising beyond the trees circling the pond to the north. "My biscuits are burning! My biscuits are burning!" Murray cried out, in perfect imitation of the Yosemite Sam from that summer's hit film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, though the movie reference was more to the seat of his pants afire, not something else. The two of us scrambled off the roof and down the hill toward the Administration Building. We knew that the fire department in Oregon, Illinois would be coming, but it was a volunteer department, and aid would take time to arrive. And a summer grass fire can move fast. Steve, the lifeguard at the camp's pool, had already pulled out the camp's prairie fire equipment, kept for both occasions like this and for the intentional burns that are a part of the life cycle of prairie plants. LOMC featured a number of areas of restored prairie and areas where the original prairie plants of Illinois were in the process of being restored, and so had the equipment to go with that project, in this case a wheelbarrow full of shovels and of wide and thick rubber flaps at the end of shovel handles, used for slapping out grass fire. Murray and I each grabbed one of these off the top of the pile in the wheelbarrow and began running for the fire.

I was still in the height of my distance-running shape, and I took off at race speed, something like a five-minute mile pace, leaving Murray behind as I ran toward the trees ringing the pond. When I burst through the gap in the trees made by the service road, I saw that the whole eastern side of the campfire space was aflame, with smoke pouring into the sky eastward in the wind. I kept running, passing the campers and their SGLs still at the dock and tearing around the pond, stopping at the end of the flames and looking back to see the rest of the available staff starting to come around the shore after me. I pulled off my t-shirt and tied it around my nose and mouth for a little breathing protection and waded into the fire.

The simple truth of the matter was that I had the time of my life. The heat, the danger, however great it was or was not, the urgency, and the utter unity of the staff members as we beat at the fire – all of these were enthralling when put together. Whether smacking down the small traces of fire as sparks threatened to set new patches of grass ablaze, or whether being confronted or mostly surrounded with sudden walls of fire taller than me, every motion counted, every choice mattered. We beat and smothered what we could, shoveled dirt onto the flames, both trying to create a firebreak and to smother what was already burning. I cannot remember if it was twenty minutes or an hour before the firetruck came lumbering around the pond: I probably couldn't have said at the time. When we stepped back to let the firefighters finish the job, I was black with soot and ash, looking like I had been used to clean out an old chimney. But I had also had an adventure, done something useful, and was drunk on a not-inconsiderable adrenaline binge. I still get a bit of a rush, remembering the flame all around me, of locking eyes with Murray or one of the others and seeing in that look the agreement to tackle this or that section of fire next, of darting back from the heat and then plunging in for another round. It's one of those tiny episodes in life that is writ much larger in memory than the time it actually took or occupied.

Dan just emailed me this link to the 17th Wonder of the World: The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company

Had I only known, I could have spent $19,000 of student loan money, myself, and alarmed Mom beyond all reason....

Art experts find possible new da Vinci
Oct 14, 10:32 AM (ET)

By ROB GILLIES

TORONTO (AP) - A new painting by Leonardo da Vinci may have been discovered thanks to a centuries-old fingerprint.

Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said Tuesday that a fingerprint on what was presumed to be a 19th-century German painting of a young woman has convinced art experts that it's actually a Leonardo.

Canadian-born art collector Peter Silverman bought "Profile of the Bella Principessa" at the Ganz gallery in New York on behalf of an anonymous Swiss collector in 2007 for about $19,000. New York art dealer Kate Ganz had owned it for about 11 years after buying it at auction for a similar price.

One London art dealer now says it could be worth more than $150 million.

If experts are correct, it will be the first major work by Leonardo to be identified in 100 years.

Biro said the print of an index or middle finger was found on the painting and that it matched a fingerprint from Leonardo's "St. Jerome" in the Vatican. Biro examined multispectral images of the painting taken by the Luminere Technology laboratory in Paris. The lab used a special digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.

"Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works," Biro said. "I was able to make use of multispectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint."

Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence also point to it being a Leonardo. Biro said there's strong consensus among art experts that it is a Leonardo painting.

"I would say it is priceless. There aren't that many Leonardos in existence," Biro said. He said he had heard that one London dealer felt it could be worth 100 million British pounds (more than $150 million).

Silverman said his Swiss friend saw it first and told him it didn't look like a 19th century painting. When Silverman took a look at the painting at the Ganz gallery in 2007, he thought it might be a Leonardo, although that seemed far-fetched. He hurriedly bought the painting for his Swiss friend and then started researching it.

"Of course you say, 'Come on, that's ridiculous. There's no such thing as a da Vinci floating around,'" Silverman said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "I started looking in the areas around da Vinci and all the people who could have possibly done it and through elimination I came back to da Vinci."

Last year, Silverman bumped into Nicholas Turner, a former curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the British Museum. Turner said it was a Leonardo and other leading art experts have backed it up as well.

Silverman said thanks to the fingerprint image at the Luminere Technology laboratory it was confirmed.

"That was icing on the cake," he said.

Silverman describes the Swiss private collector as a very rich man who has promised to buy him "lunch and dinner and caviar for the rest of my life if it ever does get sold."

Just back in from the 10pm campus Mass at the Chapel of the Holy Family right after arriving home from my quick weekend with family celebrating nephew Nate's first birthday, which is actually coming up on the 29th. Nate was in his (more-or-less) characteristic good spirits, being a pretty amiable baby. I thought he's looking more like Daniele now, whereas at first I mostly saw Dave, Daniele's dad in him. He was amazingly wired last night on cake and ice cream, so he stayed up 'til late hours with the adults giggling and cooing until he finally crashed. He's still far more muscle-ly and strong than any recorded Novak: far more of an upper-body workout in taking care of him than any of the nieces were. He gives you that whole Charles Atlas thing: the "dynamic tension" of constantly pushing back against you or trying to climb over you, so that holding him is always kind of wrestling him (with lots of laughing).

Niece highlights included Grace telling me once again (as she did a few weeks ago when I babysat), "You need to get married before you turn fifty." That gave me an interesting perspective on how I look to a seven year old: a pre-geriatric uncle guilty of nothing more than laziness, apparently, in not just getting off my rear and giving her cousins to have fun with. I did, of course, also appreciate the root idea that I think was in there, of just her wanting her uncle to be happy. Once I got over the initial moment of horror. Smelling blood in the water, she also made a poster for me today while I was in the shower which referred to me as "Old Person." I think the Sweeney blood is coming on strong. However, she doesn't yet know to take the long view on these things, and never considered that I'm likely to be alive when she reaches my age. Mom and Joe both thought it would be good to save the poster for her and present it back to her at that time. Of other note, Grace told me today that she studied "conscience" ("which is spelled like 'con-science'" she noted) in Religious Ed this morning. And she got the idea. I was into the Apollo program when I was in second grade: I don't think I learned about conscience for years. I was a bit impressed.

Haley got more and more chatty as the weekend went on, which was a pleasure in itself because although she's now five, she's still the shyest in many ways. When she was little, she seemed quite the thrillseeker or mini adrenaline junkie, and so I foresaw her becoming the radical bungee-jumping college student among the daughters. I mentioned something like this to her today, and she didn't know what bungee-jumping was, so I showed her on YouTube. "So you think you'd like to do that?" "NO WAY!" The last few visits, she had mentioned art as her current thought of What She Wanted To Be When She Grew Up: that she was going to be a painter. I liked that image, too, and so I thought about bringing her one of my art books this weekend, if I could find something that I thought she might enjoy paging through, as these girls enjoy paging through scientific field guides and the like, despite their young age. But it turned out that she was going to be a painter no more. Current plan? Tap dancer. This is because she and Grace are very much under the influence of The Fresh Beat Band, and she had been really excited by one of their tap routines. So I made a point of watching Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor do their "Moses" routine from Singin' In The Rain with her.

Sophie continued to be a cutie unless she was tired and grumpy. She cooed over Nate quite a bit, and was much more gentle with him than she thinks to be with the much smaller Lucky, their still-new Yorkshire Terrier. She was just very enthusiastic in whatever grabbed her attention at a given moment, from wanting to watch my old YouTube videos of her sisters when they were younger or her age, to showing me (at last!) the hi-definition video of the blue whales they saw off California in the summer. She's got an already-evident musical enthusiasm and love for singing that I don't see in the other two, and she demanded to watch the Vienna Teng YouTube video I linked in the previous entry more than once, taken in by the keyboard and vocal. Unlike Grace, who was definitely practicing razzing me, Sophie was completely innocent when we were looking at one of her books this morning and engaged in this routine:

Mike: "And what's this?"
Sophie: "A duck!"
"And what's this?"
"A chicken!"
"And what's this?"
"A cow!"
[stops looking at the book and looks closely at me for a moment]
". . . You have a big nose!"

This was followed with a very 2-year-old contrast of, "I have a little nose!" When I then asked her if she liked my big nose, she smiled and nodded enthusiastically. And thus showed that she was still very innocent or becoming very smart.

Low point: getting on the wrong train in Chicago. (I forgot about the express trains on the commuter rush.) I got on the right route, but ended up in the outer suburbs before I realized what was going on, got off and waited outside in the 40-degree autumn twilight for fifty minutes before I caught a train going back in toward the city and my actual stop. (Which train turned out to be the one I had gotten off fifty minutes earlier, so I could have just stayed aboard, and warm.) This made me recall my favourite mock-motivational poster, and wondering if this, in the end, will really best sum up my life:

Just in from an evening with Mike and Donna (and Mike's visiting brother Nick) down at the gorgeous old Papst Theater in Milwaukee taking in a show by Over The Rhine, with Vienna Teng opening for them. She was new to me, with me only have heard one song of hers from Emily. Swoon. Both with lovely sets, and OTR as good as I've ever seen them. I wish I could follow them the next two nights to Madison and Minneapolis, as Mike was thinking would be cool, if only I weren't going to trump good music with visiting family over the weekend. Anyway, concert details to follow. And bootlegs.

Mike and I were naturally curious in seeing a song entitled "Augustine" on her latest disc, and in talking with her after the show, she told us of reading The Confessions as a freshman at Stanford, and the sense of struggle or challenge in the text staying with her across the years until she wrote the song. So I'll drop her name for a little extra celebrity glitter when I try to sell reading our large selection of The Confessions to my own freshmen in a few weeks.

October 6th. I always liked doing a re-read of The Lord of the Rings right about now, so that I could hit the October 6th attack under Weathertop (and it's "under" – sooo much better and creepier in the book than Peter Jackson's movie staging of it) at the right time of the year, maybe reading by a window with the dark and the wind and the moon on the other side. Thinking about just the reading of my favourite novel now always gets me excited for the day when the next generation of the family can read it, although at seven years old, Grace is still too young to handle it. Although she might be about ready to read or to have The Hobbit read to her. But autumn is the best time of the year to read The Lord of the Rings, because the look and the weather make it all the more easy to enter into the story. This was especially true growing up in Oregon, Illinois, which looked so much like Tolkien's descriptions of the Shire to begin with.

I've been working all day on job applications: plodding, pedantic, detail-oriented work, with each school needing something just different enough to demand lots of consideration for each version of an application. And all I can really think is that I'd rather be talking to Sophie on the phone, even when she has lots to say about nothing, and most of that unintelligible to me. I had a phone message from Mom the other day, when she was over there babysitting the girls, and she started to laugh as Sophie was anxiously screaming in the background, "I want it! I want it!" regarding the phone, although she didn't quite get that I wasn't actually on it. So Mom asked her questions or prompted her in lieu of my actually conversing with Sophie:

"Say 'Hello.'"
"Hi!"
"Say 'How are you?'"
". . . ? Goood."
"Say 'I'm behaving.'"
"No!"

I'm really looking forward to seeing all the kids this weekend, when Joe and Daniele bring Nate up to celebrate his immanent first birthday with the family.

I actually met Professor Morales today for the first time, a young guy the department hired to do Pauline work last year. I knew he was a friend of Deirdre's from our conversation at Summerfest this year, but I didn't know that he was also a friend of aristotle2002 from when he did his Master's at Notre Dame, while I was teaching at Saint Joe's. He popped in when I was talking to Mickey during office hours today, and we all ended up mostly talking about Notre Dame's catechetical initiative and Mac hard drives. Go figure. Anyway, he seemed like a great guy – someone who would make a good friend, and so it's too bad that I met him as I am on my way out the door.

Huh. I'm always curious and interested to hear or read a story about the way in which the news media conveys news to us, because any reasonably-informed person in our media world (here I mean "media" in the broad sense) knows that the method can have as much impact as the content of what is reported. While I am aware of the difference in the historical reaction to John Paul, I was not aware that things had "faded" to this extent in international coverage. And that's too bad, because while I was fully aware of Karol Wojtyla's/John Paul II's curiously emblematic role as a man of the 20th century, I rather am more impressed with Benedict XVI as a theologian-pope. And I didn't think at all about any of these particularly "Italian" implications. So: huh.

The pope has become an Italian story

By John L Allen Jr for National Catholic Reporter
Created Oct 02, 2009

Rome -- At one point during Pope Benedict XVI's trip to the Czech Republic last weekend, I strolled across the press center in the Prague Hilton. Taking in the conversations floating through the air, and gazing at the people in the room, I was struck by this insight: The pope has once again become largely an Italian story.

Pope John Paul II was a global newsmaker, and the press corps that followed him was strikingly international. These days, the non-Italians who regularly travel with the pope have dwindled to the media equivalent of a remnant church. On this trip, there was no one from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, or CNN (unless you count me, but my phone never rang), all of whom used to be regulars. Fox was on the papal plane, but only because their Rome correspondent is invested in the Vatican story; if he weren't around, it's a good bet Fox wouldn't be in the mix either.

To be sure, those agencies have a presence in Prague, so it's not like they blew off the story. But once upon a time, all would have had a correspondent moving with the papal party and filing daily coverage. At that level, the American presence boiled down to the Associated Press, a producer from ABC, and the Catholic News Service. (I made the trip, but not on the plane.)

Probably the lone thing that people who get their news from American TV know about the trip is that at one point a spider crawled across the pope's garments. That clip has become popular on You-Tube, and of course it doesn't require any reporting or analysis to understand.

Two points probably help explain this lack of global interest.

( Read more... )

Corollary to my earlier entry about complications of living in the Ardmore in the autumn: it is also sucky, though less so than the early comment about the heat, to have to re-learn every autumn that the electricity in my apartment blows out if I use the floor heater and the microwave at the same time. Okay, so maybe that's really more a comment about me than the the apartment....

I made a discovery last night while working on the dissertation over at Starbucks. In the history of discoveries, it's not much – it's virtually nothing, but nevertheless it was still kind of exciting for me. Working on a text from the Second Vatican Council dealing with a particular idea of a charism (a spiritual gift from God), I was lead back a century and had to read through a parallel text from the First Vatican Council in 1870. Comparing the two documents helped me see something distinct about this particular charism, and then it was just as though something slid into place in my mind.

Basically, I had a taxonomical insight: like a biologist working on different species of animals, I've started to be able to see relations and levels that I don't think anyone's identified before. You can look at animals and just see lots of different species. And that's perfectly fine. In the same way, you can look at all sorts of natural and spiritual gifts and just see charisms or gifts. Or you can look at animals and see domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species: the different biological levels of classification. I'm starting to understand more of what seems to be a logical taxonomy of charisms. Sullivan had made a few important insights in this direction, and last night, the logic of another level came clear for me. I ran a couple of logic tests on it, and it seemed to hold up well as I wrote up the definition in the section I was writing. I'm not going to go into more detail here, because I realized that I'm putting together enough of a set of ideas here that I think this could develop into a "side" article for publication from my dissertation research.

But is just One Of Those Things: the sweet experience of an insight you weren't at all expecting just showing up in front of you, like what I call a "Mozart Experience" in songwriting, when a song just shows up, unannounced, and the whole thing – lyrics, melody, chords – just pours out of you, complete, in a matter of minutes. "Simple Things," "Begin To Be," "My Mom," "I Met You When You Just Got Going (Uh-Huh)," and "This Romance" were all like that. It's a treat to have had an analogous theological experience, too.

I now enter the only sucky aspect of living at the Ardmore: that post-equinox period where the management tries to hold off as long as possible turning on the building's furnace before they can be sure that no more hot weather is coming our way. The same is true in the spring as hints of summer appear in the weather. It's either all-on in our old steam-radiator building, or all off. So now, as the evenings are dropping into the 40s, begins the period of multiple layers of clothing, gasping exits from the shower, and plug-in floor heaters that you keep away from everything lest they do that thing floor heaters always get in the news for. In our world of difficulties, this is not much of a difficulty. I'm grateful to have a home. But apparently I feel willing to complain a bit.

Keeping with my own little tradition:

MICHAELMAS!

Milk; Tuscon, Arizona, 1976? - ; Saint Michael, 2008

When I went looking for a new Saint Michael image to decorate my page with for this year's Michaelmas, I couldn't make myself really consider anything but this stunning contemporary take on the Saint Michael motif by a Tuscon artist called Milk. The combination of classical aspects of the representation, along with contemporary details of dress and accessories, and some of the characteristic items or flourishes in Milk's other work – it just couldn't be beat.

I really shouldn't do anything to celebrate the Feast today, because I've been feasted by friends all thoughout the weekend: I just really need to work! Even after all the scheduled and impromptu festivities of Friday and Saturday, I was surprised Sunday evening to find Bob Foster at my door, having zipped into town for a one night only, drive-by library attack. He had sent out a warning email the day before, which I only heard about from Dan because my incoming email had been fritzing for a few days, and wanted me, Dan, and Mike to have lunch with him on Monday. I had just sent back an email explaining that I taught from 12-2pm, and wouldn't be able to make it, and so I found him at my door, insisting on taking me out to dinner. I suggested we just walk over to the classic Miss Katie's Diner, which students never go to, for some reason, and which he didn't think he had ever been to, himself. (Although as we approached he remembered going over there with me and Kari-Shane back around our first year at Marquette or so.) There we had a huge talk, mostly me getting news of Carmen and the kids, and then the two of us wandering off into a discussion of the historical boundaries of what's recorded in the New Testament and when you recognize the historicized presentation of literary motifs (like the details of Jesus' temptation in the desert following conventions of Jewish midrash or commentary, rather than being presented in the text as a blow-by-blow narrative or historical description). How and what you teach to the more general reader or believer was where we were really going with that, and the problems of academic yet still orthodox biblical reading in the Evangelical world. It was interesting to hear his thoughts as a biblical scholar and teacher. As we dashed back through the rain to campus, we congratulated ourselves on this ongoing friendship that has stayed strong despite the comparative rarity of our being able to actually enjoy one another's company. Describing the evening to Dad when he called later that evening, he remarked once again just how blessed I've been in my friendships.

So Tuesday remains a strong work day, sending out a pair of job applications and doing some more chapter work. The job listings continue to fill out. Even though there's still less entries than last year, it seems that the ones I'm qualified for are more consistently looking for someone with my particular qualifications, so it may be a pretty fertile job field, after all. Let's hope!

I just have not been able to keep up with my own life! I knew September would get crazy: the drive to the conclusion of the dissertation is ongoing, and starting to teach two full sections of Introduction To Theology with all its attendant grading was going to add enough to that full schedule. But September gets its extra dose of crazy with job applications for the Fall 2010 term getting underway as positions begin to be announced. Then, since I was going to be on train and bus quite a bit around the last weekend, and since I couldn't use my laptop in those settings to do dissertation work, I finished out my Rahner and Aquinas article with pen corrections in the margins of an earlier draft. I'm glad I didn't send it out when I thought I was done with it right before heading down to babysit the nieces: I thought I'd "sit on it" over the weekend and give it a re-reading, just in case, and I found a great deal more to polish. So that made it into the mail this week, giving me one big "check" to mark off of my mental To-Do list.

Other Noteworthies:

Being stopped by a former student, a guy I had as a giggly freshman who is now a grim-faced Pre-Law senior, who I hadn't spoken to in those in-between years, who came up to me as I was walking to class and told me that I was the best teacher he'd had at Marquette, for love of the subject and love of the students. I know there's always a matter of taste in such things regarding students, but I was still floored by the generosity in saying that to me. After class that day, one of my new students, a Naval ROTC freshman taking the Marines option, wanted to hear my thoughts on Christianity and participation in military service, because my opinion meant a great deal to him, which I hardly expected to hear three weeks into my course. It blows me away, sometimes, to hear that I can make an impact on someone like that, even if they only recognize it later. This balances out for the people I call on in class by surprise, instead of discussing with those volunteering to talk, and see that strange look, both startled and dazed, of the person whose feigned attention has just been broken into, and who has inadvertently revealed that they were paying no attention to the class whatsoever.

I had the fun surprise of running into Meg at the train station on my way to Chicago, and sitting near her and a pair of her friends on the way south, which gave us a little chance to catch up. Because of all the work, I've been utterly invisible to all friends other than the gang right in front of me from school. I especially owed Meg and Diane a ton of back social time, and so now Diane especially, since I got this spontaneous chance to see Meg.

Another awesome Friday night with the gang and special guest star Markus. It was interesting to hear the conversation go out of my depth for a few hours as everyone talked cooking and recipes. Mike, Dan and Amy are all enthusiastic and skillful chefs enough that just talking the combinations of ingredients, they are able to put together tastes (at least at some level) in their imaginations. Donna and I laughed about how that just didn't work with us, as the talk of various dishes swirled and built mostly among the other four. Along with conversation that built on his talent as a chef and as one of Germany's most well-known food critics, we talked quite a bit more about Markus's life back in Germany, both family stories and the different kind of teaching and research responsibilities that he is currently engaged in, as he now is one of the top two or three scholars of Martin Luther and his era. The nine million Euro grant for the research program he's just put together on the 16th century is a project that will be going on for the next eighteen years we found out, and so we were trying to wrap our minds around something like that, which would take him through to retirement. Along with imagining that for him, we also tried to imagine being one of the Ph.D. students he now has money to fund, who – in their doctoral program and beyond – would also be part of that eighteen year commitment. That makes more sense in the German higher education schema, where you might be a teacher or a researcher, and these two roles didn't necessarily cross paths, but it seemed epic and a bit harsh to us who love teaching. After nine hours of food and conversation (and eight bottles of wine), we called it a night at 2am.

Saturday featured quite a bit of unexpected fun as I went with Dan to help him buy his early birthday present from Amy: a beginner's guitar kit. I've been taking my guitar over of late, starting to teach him some chords and such, and so it was a bit of a sentimental flashback to Notre Dame 1996 for me, of Mark giving me a first three-chord guitar lesson, and then starting to pick up more from Erik, weaklingrecords, and J.P. over the next year, in the most haphazard guitar education ever, as I worked for the Freeks. So I went back to Dan and Amy's place with him, unwilling to let him go through stringing his guitar and tuning it alone, as that could be a bit hair-raising and confusing for a first-timer. Then, over pasta and the tomato sauce they were canning (which Anna and Owen proudly assured me that they had helped with) and more of a yummy salad of Amy's from the night before that I had quite liked, there were lots of little music stories, mini-lessons, and "how-does-this-work" moments. After the kids were put down, the three of us continued talking mostly music and such, and I shared more stories than I probably ever have of my own little music lessons and education with the band, as well as about the Notre Dame equivalent of Dan and Amy's place as the social center of our Marquette world: the musical and spiritual whirl of Friday nights at Scott and Karen Kirner's place back in those turn-of-the-millennium years. It's fun to see a little bit of that musical side of things starting to come out here, too.

Just putting together my paperwork for applications has been illuminating: to see inhow much has changed in this last year. My research for the dissertation has become concrete and brimming with further possibilities in ways my imagination couldn't foresee a year ago. The early sketches for a continuing research agenda with this material that I began discussing with Professor Fahey in Boston has got me excited in ways that make me want to turn several pages ahead in my life story just so I can get to that. What I had to do with the doctoral education is simply feeling more and more finished, which I don't think I had ever sensed in quite that way before. It reminds me of finishing my M.A. and starting to teach, in that getting the Ph.D. in Theology is really just a beginning – to begin to be a professor of this material, and to grow into what I have staked out for my work. It's tough to describe exactly: it's like the feeling of excitement in seeing the image in a puzzle starting to become apparent as enough of the pieces fall into place, and, even though you have been doing the work yourself the whole time, you start to perceive other dimensions to what you've been doing.

Holy Moses! It is now being announced that in July, a massive, unprecedented hoard of Anglo-Saxon art in gold, silver, and precious stones was unearthed in Straffordshire. The "Staffordshire Hoard" is one of the great finds of my lifetime, tied only perhaps by the Ivory Pomegranate of the Temple of Solomon, the inscription of which is now debated as being perhaps a modern forgery. But in sheer scale, there's nothing like the Hoard. The artwork is on the scale of the Book of Kells, with fabulous interlaced figures. Check it out: The Staffordshire Hoard

Largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure found in UK
Sep 24, 12:39 PM (ET)

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER

LONDON (AP) - An amateur treasure hunter prowling English farmland with a metal detector stumbled upon the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found, a massive seventh-century hoard of gold and silver sword decorations, crosses and other items, British archaeologists said Thursday.

One expert said the treasure found by 55-year-old Terry Herbert would revolutionize understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people who ruled England from the fifth century until the Norman conquest in 1066. Another said the find would rank among Britain's best-known historic treasures.

"This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue," Roger Bland, who managed the cache's excavation, told The Associated Press. "It will make us rethink the Dark Ages."

( Read more... )

It has been crazy-busy these last few weeks: dissertation-writing plus teaching and grading plus job applications plus finishing my Rahner/Thomas Logos article and now this last weekend taking some time to help babysit my nieces for the weekend. It's good work if you can get it, but it's keeping me zooming around, and this can't yet try to be a full entry about the time I spent with the girls. I did get some personal time Monday night to go over to the cookout at the Lloyds' house celebrating Crip Stephenson's successful defense of his dissertation on theological method among pentecostal systematic/constructive theologians, which I think Dabney directed. So it was cool to catch up with Crip and Lisa over brautwurst, to see Bill and Rachel as well, and to be joined by Professor Del Colle later in the evening.

Some of you mentioned getting a kick out of the odd sense of humour my nieces displayed in July when they presented me with their gag gifts of paper underwear emblazoned with slogans. Never ones to let a joke just fade away, they continued this trend, having a large pile of these gifts waiting for me on Saturday morning when they woke. Their preferred colours had switched from red and blue to greens and yellows, and they were experimenting with new, thicker material. They had also – I have no idea where – become enthralled with a new figure in their imaginations: Pac-Man. And so, here are my new treasures:




I also note that their earlier delight in potty humour still was lingering around in that last sheet, much, I'm sure, to their mother's chagrin. Although I recognize the creativity and industry that went into the underwear emblazoned with a full Pac-Man figure, my favourite out of this lot, though, has to be the slogan "Awsome [sic] Underpants World". I don't think that they could dream up a better name for their fashion line or store. Second place (with my chagrin) has to go to the "Shake It" slogan, which I think is evidence of their too-great fondness for contemporary dance music. To hear 2 1/2 year-old Sophie shout out "Shake it!" over music both makes me want to bust out laughing and grit my teeth in fear of their developing terminal bad taste. I made a point of listening to more Ray Charles with them over the weekend.

At long last, I just finished my article on Karl Rahner and Thomas Aquinas on the necessity of the Second Person of the Trinity becoming incarnate. I had originally thought to get this article out in the spring with the article on the Odes of Solomon. But once I opened the material back up, I realized that there was a considerable amount to think through again, that I had to re-learn material that I had forgotten since writing the first draft as a paper for Professor Del Colle, and I just ended up not really having the time with the more pressing demands of the dissertation. Today and yesterday, though, I realized that I had a number of errands that were going to have me rolling back and forth through the city on the bus system, where I couldn't really do any of my current dissertation work, which is pretty much all writing at the moment. But that made it a perfect time to do the reading and pen-and-paper margin notes and corrections for the Rahner and Thomas article. So I did the bulk of that on the bus over the last few days, taking my late-night stint at the library tonight to put all my paper changes into the computer file. I still had to stop and re-think a few positions, but it came together pretty readily.

Having realized that it was no esoteric question, I put Karl Rahner and Thomas Aquinas into direct confrontation with one another, because I realized I couldn't let Aquinas's position enjoy the renaissance it is currently experience. Thomas reasoned that, given the common power of the Persons of God, that any one of them could have become incarnate in history, and that it didn't have to be the Second Person, although that it was "fitting" that the Word should become human in Jesus of Nazareth. Recalling that this odd category of "fittingness" was something that went back to Anselm of Canterbury's book on the Incarnation, I followed up on what exactly that might mean. Then I turned to the 20th century's great genius, Karl Rahner, who had broken strongly with Thomas on this point, insisting that only the Word could have become incarnate out of the Three Persons. It sounds esoteric, I suppose, to people not prepared for Trinitarian theology, in the same way that quantum mechanics isn't something that one can just pick up from talk on the streets. But what I realized was that Thomas's position, followed in its implications, actually ended up effectively denying any possible knowledge of the Triune God, which is certainly incompatible with what Christianity has held. Ultimately, for Christianity to "work," only Rahner's reasoning worked: that the distinct characteristics of the three Persons of God are part of their essence, and essential to our experience and knowledge of them, and that they are not all effectively "interchangeable" because of their unity as God.

I think it's actually the most important piece of theology I have ever written, other than the dissertation, and so it's off to months of silent appraisal once I get it over to the post office.

I spent yesterday talking with my students about Genesis 12-24, and the experiences of my great-great x approx. 120 times great-grandfather Abraham. What did we think of him? Who did God appear to be to him? What do we make of this experience, of this one man's experience that set in motion a series of events that continues to change the course of human history? He heard and listened to a Voice. In time he came to see a figure or set of figures representing the Voice. A command, a chance at obedience. No system of theology. No inheritance of generations of religious experience and reflection to form a Tradition to draw upon. Only the most raw circumstances imaginable to draw out a gift of faith – a profound capacity for trust that had no spiritual resources to draw upon beyond itself.

It is all too easy for us to laugh this off, to pull of a cheap witticism at the expense of a man who heard a Voice, which was probably not a good sign thirty-odd centuries ago, either. Or to sneer at stories that have been passed down, obviously edited in the centuries between their origin and the rise of the manuscripts we have in the centuries before Christ, and assume in all our Enlightenment dogmatism that nothing probably really happened. But I still cannot help but suspect – especially in light of all the other things that happened later for which we have piles of historical evidence – that there must have been something back there to cause these shockwaves that come rumbling down through the centuries: the power of a faith so raw and bold that the great wave of Judaism – and from it Christianity, and from them Islam – should be the results, shaping and moulding history to this day.

For whatever reason, I couldn't get much sleep last night, and so a more listless version of myself taught my classes today, and was (tiredly) very excited to return to his apartment now under the influence of genuine tiredness. He keeled over and took a nap almost on the spot. Unfortunately, when the well-rested and chipper me woke up in place of that weary fellow, I discovered that in keeling over, he had left his groceries on the floor inside the door, including a few now-not-so-frozen items. Not Cool.

I just enjoyed a wonderful burst of writing tonight over at the library, after an unproductive (but very enjoyable) last two days during which the little avatars of my Mum and my dissertation director that live in my head were yelling at me like nobody's business. I had thought as I went over to Raynor Library that "Tonight's a Shawnee kind of night," thinking of my "study buddy" from coursework days at Marquette, Shawnee Daniels-Sykes, SSNN, who haven't seen much since she defended her dissertation and graduated two years ago, and who is now teaching in the suburbs at her Order's Mount Mary College. So I was positively delighted when, working down on the 24-hour first floor since my carrel is on the closed-for-the-night fifth floor of Memorial Library, I looked up to see Shawnee walking over to a pile of her work scattered around a computer on the other side of the room from me. Perfect!

So we had a good piece of catch-up, with her telling me about the article she had to finish by next weekend on how biological components of cosmetics seemed to be provoking early puberty in girls. (Shawnee is a medical ethicist.) In turn I was updating her on my dissertation as it works toward its conclusion, which I now see comes almost three years to the day when I made my initial breakthrough in the library of what would become the idea for the dissertation, and which I bounced off of her and Tony Bonta in my first, excited moments of thinking that I might be on to something.... Tonight I made a textual breakthrough as I am justifying some of the use of this ecclesiology of charisms, and she was just as excited for me as she was in those first moments three years ago. So it was very cool to be able to catch up with an old friend like that, and to swap family news and the like, as well.

Thursday is shaping up to normally be a big dissertation work day for me, and that was the plan two days ago as I was leaving Weasler Auditorium after attending Markus' Luther Studies in a Catholic Context Lecture, "How did Luther's teaching become a doctrine?" Markus insisted that I must come out with the group that was going out for an authentically Lutheran beer and theology bash, despite the fact that I hate beer. It was now 4pm and I was looking forward to a long sprint until midnight on my dissertation, along with some grading I needed to take care of before the next day. I tried to explain this to Markus, and to point out that I was already scheduled to have dinner with him over at the Lloyds' the following night, only to be told "The poor you will always have with you; me you will not always have with you." In the face of such an awesomely funny and irreverant one-liner, I surrendered. Everyone trooped down to the Rockbottom Brewery, and then this turned into an after-lecture beer, appetizers, dinner, after-dinner beer, and then just more beer, until we left at 11pm. Markus graciously bought dinner for everyone present, and I inadequately tried to express my thanks by insisting on at least buying one of the late rounds. It was a night of fabulous talk, much of which was spent debating the contemporary implications of the historical point Markus was making (and which I won't attempt to reproduce here, other than noting that the big question seemed to have to do with the relative importance of the question of Truth in theology or in Christian claims). I was only disappointed in that Barnes had disappeared before we went down to the Brewery, as a question of his had most challenged Markus on this point, but I consoled myself in that I was having dinner with the both of them the following night, and then we could pick up that specific conversation at our leisure.

So Friday picked up with (dare I say such a thing?) a typically wonderful evening of food, drink, community and conversation at the Lloyds' house. I am likely growing spoiled being surrounded by such friends and opportunities to enjoy them. I woke this morning to a note from Markus, who, coming from Germany each semester (our last gathering like this with Markus was in February, after all), isn't so likely to get spoiled by the regularity of the nights, writing:

Folks - thank you so much for this wonderful night out in your house and garden. Amy's cooking was truly outstanding and the wine just caught up with it. I enjoyed our conversation very much - as the book "Tuesdays with Morrie" I like to write a sequel "Fridays at the Lloyds" which than would contain a larger amount of Christian identity and a much better eschatological vision than Mitch Albom's book has.

Though I usually go much earlier to bed - and I am afraid you too - you see what happens if you get me involved in good conversations grounded on even better food and wine ....

Along with being a Luther and medieval scholar of note, Markus has also been one of Germany's most famed food critics, and his praise of Amy's cooking, and his thought that she could open a restaurant, had to be heard in that context. I, on the other hand, am a miserable cook, and so my equally-miserable understanding of what Amy prepared had to be understood in that light: her experimental dish last night – a kind of eggplant roll with some kind of cheese, raisins, pine nuts and I don't know what else in it – was a big, sweet surprise for me: I had never had an eggplant dish I enjoyed so much. She served that with lamb and chicken kebabs and a thing that I think was a sort of curry with a tomato chutny in it. All tasty and daring.

Appetizers were served in the living room while the kids ate in the kitchen, and then the adults moved out to the patio for dinner, talking about the kids, the still-new experiences and thoughts regarding Renée and Anna at the German-immersion school (even Zeke greeted Markus with "Guten Morgen!"), and pretty much everything but "shop" theology talk. Barnes and Rayna took off, as usual, given granddaughter Rayna's schedule, around 8pm, leaving me disappointed that I still hadn't gotten a chance to get him and Markus to follow up on their different points from the lecture the day before. The Harrises were wiped out after a long school day, and so they ended up taking off unusually early, as well. That was too bad, as the talk was typically long and rich, hitting all the classical topics of love, marriage, raising children, and life in faith, with interesting specifics and stories from Markus' German experience, more on his adventures in life with Suzanne, and us summoning up our own American experiences to share with that less-usual cross-cultural eye. I wish I could capture all of it, instead of only being able to pull up these sentimental sounds about what it is like. Jupiter was rising just above the mid-point of the neighbours' house, from my perspective, when we began around 7-ish, and was nearly setting behind the corner of the Lloyds' garage when we called it a night at 1:30am, equaling our time from the week before, but this time with Amy making it all the way to the end.

Lingering over our third or fourth wine of the night, a slice of Key Lime pie, and a final glass of sherry, somewhere in there I remember Markus chiming in strongly with me on a point I had been thinking of in the last few days, about how these times are intrinsic to what I understand by "Church," in that the idea of Church is about the fullness of the experience of Christian community, and certainly not merely the gathering for ritual and sacramental worship and spirituality. If that's all that people conceive in the word "church" – and if that's all we convey in our teaching of that word – then it's no wonder that it seems like a sterile concept to people, especially if they have a very hit-or-miss experience in "feeling" or really being aware of what is being done in ritual worship. But the idea that I could conceive of Church without all the rest of it – these nights at the Lloyds', a full-on Freeks or Folkheads jam night back in South Bend, a gathering around a campfire at LOMC, or a late-night dorm group coming together back during my undergrad – that's inconceivable to me. I was pleased Markus was on the same page, and saw that as a "professionally" sensible thing to see and say in what we were experiencing together, too.

One of my students just asked me at the end of my second section how much of a response I wanted to a written assignment. After telling her, I then started explaining that I would give enough feedback with the first few assignments especially to make them more confident of what I wanted, "... and this will let you know how to –"

"Stop sucking." she said in the most matter-of-fact tone.

"... Well... yeah. I guess that sums it up."

Some four or five years ago, I had a long conversation with filmmaker magdalene1 that played for a while with the idea about how it would be fascinating to do a film adaptation of Augustine's Confessions. After all, a book that's still selling well and influential after 1600 years? That's a good book! And I've taught it a number of times, and been more and more amazed every time I read it. And so magdalene1 and I chatted about how you could adapt such a text, whether straight narrative, whether with the voice-over of Augustine's commentary looking back at his life across the years, or whether with some more artsy attempt with both the in-narrative Augustine and the invisible-to-the-narrative later Augustine together in the frame. We did agree on having Don Cheadle star in it, or a now somewhat younger Don Cheadle, which I still think would be amazingly bad-ass.

But then there's the other thought: filmmakers' (especially Hollywood's) constant desire to "improve" an historical story by spicing it up with extra action or skin, or worst of all, with their own contemporary worldviews transplanted back into the mouths of historical figures. Thus we have had Mel Gibson's William Wallace in Braveheart spouting about individual freedom as though he were Thomas Jefferson fresh from the 18th century. Similarly we have Orlando Bloom's Balian of Ibelin in Kingdom of Heaven righteously telling the [evil and ignorant] Bishop of Jerusalem that "you've taught me much about religion" at the end of the spiritual quest he had begun when he righteously murdered his [evil and ignorant] parish priest, as though being "spiritual but not religious" would have been anything but laughable before the Modern world. And of course, who could forget the self-described and much-trumpeted "historical" version of King Arthur in 2004? So, the thought of a film on Augustine? Maybe there's something to be feared in such a thing. In fact, as I just discovered through an accidental Google find, blogger Kevin Jones described in wry, blow-by-blow detail just how such a "Hollywood Augustine" might play out, making fun and making use of every painful stereotype of contemporary cinematic politics along the way. Funny stuff. And then there's the opposite worry of 1950s-style pious schmaltz....

But then here's the real news and point of this all: someone's gone and done it. I saw that an Augustine film had just been screened for our current-day theological giant (and Augustine scholar) Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI. Director Chrstian Duguay, whose action film The Art of War I remember enjoying, has helmed a mini-series titled Augustine: The Decline of the Roman Empire, produced by three production companies from Poland, Italy and Germany. So... what to think? The trailer has a certain amount of pure hype that I fear, but it's a trailer, of course. The few glimpses of the theology articulated by the characters are ambiguous: does my man Ambrose mean "we don't find Truth" or God in the sense that initiative is ultimately on God's side? I'll stand by that. Does he mean that theology and faith has no recourse or basis in reason and logic? Then that's entirely the opposite of what Ambrose would have said, and just more Modern anti-Christian propaganda straight from the 18th century Enlightenment that produced the United States shoved into the mouth of an historical character. The glimpse of the mystical experience Augustine and Monica share by the shore in Ostia sounds like it might be on target, so that gives me some hope: in the Confessions, that scene is hugely important, not least for showing that access to God is no elite matter, like for the Gnostics, but entirely open in grace, whether to the great genius of Augustine, or to the less-educated faith of his mother. So, basically, it looks like I'll just have to wait and see, as with any film. I do have to admit that I'm curious, in a simple way, just to see what's been done.

I'm falling all kinds of behind with my journal right now, mostly due to school starting this week. I have two good groups of students, I think, for my two sections of Introduction To Theology. I start out with a difficult piece of reading in the "Theology as Knowledge: A Symposium" article I mentioned in my previous entry, but I think they dealt with it reasonably well.

And now I'm just dragging back in after a looong night at the Lloyds' with the gang, with Barnes and Rayna in attendance. "Around" was the theme, I think. It began with us standing around the kitchen as the food was finishing up, hearing about the last-minute move of Anna over to join Renée for her kindergarten year at the German-immersion school after the Italian-immersion school proved to be just a little too far on the crazy-crazy side. That moved over to Mexican around the patio table and the kids at their little picnic table, with everyone sliding over to be around the fire for marshmallow roasting, to a circle around the living room for a few hours after Barnes and Ray left and the kids were put down, to ending up around the fire again, with wine and cookies, me teaching Dan some guitar chords, and talk ranging from pulling up 80s/90s music videos on YouTube to long debate on whether a moderate form of Islam is really possible in the Middle East, and whether Islam is, strictly speaking, a scripturally literalist religion or whether it just claims to be. We finally surrendered as 1:30am rolled around, and the fire still going.

An awesome dinner out Wednesday night with Markus, who is already back in town from Germany. He treated me at a good Italian place in the Third Ward called Fratello's that I had never before visited. This was partially in celebration of returning to Milwaukee and Marquette, and partially in celebration of a nine-million Euro research grant he had just been awarded that, as I understand it, will be examining the chains of intellectual and spiritual "descent" and influence starting from early Protestantism, which will be directed toward the creation of a vast database devoted to the project. The grant will allow him to fund no less that 15 doctorates on both sides of the Atlantic, and so he's going to be bringing a slew of talent to Marquette on that basis alone. So that was well worth celebrating.

We actually began with drinks at the rooftop bar at the Milwaukee Athletic Club, where he is living while in Milwaukee, and I had to kick myself for not having brought my camera, as part of my mind had told me to do. The views of the city – of what the Germans call "the fourth dimension," which is appreciating a city skyline from an elevated position – were rather stunning. I had no idea from all my time "below" on the street level, that there was quite so much variation in the city, all of which grabbed my architecture-loving eye. The building across the street had a gorgeous penthouse that looked slightly castle-ish, which I had never seen. And so we talked about architecture and the similarities and differences between Markus's hometown of Hamburg and Milwaukee, among other things.

Dinner conversation was wonderful, lasting long over good food, and continuing all the way through our walk back to the MAC. We spoke an awful lot about family and relationships, as well as the inevitable business of my dissertation coming to a conclusion and the job prospects, as they're currently known, for 2010. Listening to Markus talk about coming up on (I think) his 25th anniversary with Susanna, and these years with his daughter and son coming of age ranged back and forth from interesting to moving. I heard a bit more detail of how the two of them got together, a slightly different telling of the story he shared with us all last year, and I think I was most struck by his realization that he simply wanted to continue a long night's walk and conversation with her "for the next thirty years." Good stuff.

And on the phone the other night, Grace, who just started her second grade year, charmed me to no end when, with no idea of what she was really saying, estimated that they had just paid "um, about 18 thousand dollars" for their new puppy. I had to try not to laugh out loud, and contented myself with suggesting that she not tell her friends at school that particular fact, as she might end up being expected to buy all their lunches.

Each semester that I teach Introduction To Theology, I begin with raising the question, "Is Theology Make-Believe?" (This is the English translation of the Irish form of the question as I have it in the title of this entry.) I do this for one simple reason: all of us have grown up in a culture defined philosophically by the movement called The Enlightenment, an 18th-century philosophical movement that is at the root of contemporary European and American thinking. Having graced itself with this name, "the Enlightenment," which more than implies the correctness of its own positions, this movement was radically anti-spiritual, effectively dismissing all of religious faith as a matter of personal, subjective, "belief" that has nothing to do with any actual facts about the universe. Since those kind of ideas are – whether accepted or resisted – saturating the brains of my students, I prefer to address them directly, and to examine whether there is in fact good reason to consider Theology as a discipline a science that produces knowledge, and not a kind of mental self-pleasuring for those who are interested in "that sort of thing."

To this end, I open up with an article that I know will be too difficult for most of my beginning students, but which I will help them through. This article is a symposium, a conversation by four scholars: a Political Science professor from Louisiana State University, a Methodist Ethics professor from Duke University, a Catholic Studies professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an Orthodox theologian. Entitled " Theology as Knowledge: A Symposium", this conversation takes on the question of whether Theology as a discipline truly produces knowledge (just like, say, history, sociology, or chemistry) and whether it properly belongs in the university. Although all of these participants reject the Enlightenment's decree that Theology no longer counts as a real discipline, they represent a diversity of perspectives on Theology's relation to knowledge and its place in the contemporary university. As I said, I guide my students through this material and through the new vocabulary and concepts, but I want them to see what an informed person with a reasonable university education should be able to read regarding matters religious or theological. This is not USA Today, designed for sixth-grade readers. At the end of the semester, the students revisit this article for a final exam essay, and in that way I give them an experiential insight into how much their own capacity to read this subject intelligently has developed over the length of the course.

I was struck today by our opening-of-the-year Department of Theology convocation today, where, as it turned out, this very question was addressed in a public discussion by the faculty. This attitude toward Theology as a discipline is not just a problem among under-read and under-educated freshmen, but is also the general way of thinking among the bulk of the faculty in the other departments, even at a Catholic university. This has been recently highlighted for us by the feature article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, "The Ethics of Being A Theologian". The author, K.L. Noll, a Canadian professor of Religious Studies, took for granted that his discipline, secular Religious Studies, produced real knowledge, while Theology does not. This was an article published in the primary journal for the university community as a whole, and is so full of the sort of ill-considered stereotypes that the scholars in the "Theology as Knowledge" symposium attempt to address that it fills me with dismay to see the kind of obstinate avoidance of any thought that can challenge Enlightenment dogma – and this among university educators. Despite being a Religious Studies professor, he had no idea of what theologians actually do, and the variety of methodologies by which they conduct their research and produce their conclusions. In the face of contemporary atheist critiques, he says, all theologians are just dismissive. Maybe that's what I sound like I am being here, but I'm not here going to try to reproduce in print an exhaustive and book-length explanation of everything that theologians do. But I can make that case.

At the convocation, Kurz responded with a detailed examination of the variety of methods he employs as a biblical theologian, highlighting the vast intellectual requirements necessary to do his work, and the sorts of results they produce. Masson addressed a variety of points in response to Noll, one of which specifically addressed the engagement with reason and sense-data incumbent upon the theologian, specifically in his case coming from the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas: the same medieval affirmation of the truth of sense-data that helped give rise to the modern physical sciences. Long waded into Noll's basing his argument on the philosophy known as Logical Positivism, as almost all of today's "scientific fact versus religious faith" arguments are, despite the repeated discrediting of this philosophical approach in recent decades, as well noting how Noll's article persists in believing that one can separate "reason" from "faith" in human thinking, as though any system of thought does not depend on first principles, presuppositions, or dogmas. That insight is one of the most basic insights in post-Modern thinking, but is absent in this kind of recycled 18th century Enlightenment anti-religious folk wisdom. Barnes was the quietest and yet most damning. He took issue with Noll's characterization that

In sum, the religion researcher is related to the theologian as the biologist is related to the frog in her lab. Theologians try to invigorate their own religion, perpetuate it, expound it, defend it, or explain its relationship to other religions. Religion researchers select sample religions, slice them open, and poke around inside, which tends to "kill" the religion, or at least to kill the romantic or magical aspects of the religion and focus instead on how that religion actually works.

The idea, Barnes argued, that in this illustration, one can get at the truth of a thing by the examination of its corpse was as false for the frog as it is for as complex a human reality as religion. (I couldn't help but be reminded of the passage in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings where Gandalf says to Saruman that, "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.") More than that, though, Barnes was quietly outraged at the cheek of an atheist to even employ the metaphor of vivasection as a path to truth. (And despite his claim to be personally a theist and professionally an agnostic, Noll's methods assume and necessarily conclude the reality of atheism – another major problem with his approach.) If Christians today, Barnes argued, have to always answer for incidents of the past where Christianity as a whole is held responsible for any crimes of past individuals – excesses in the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Galileo trial – then atheists today cannot be excused from answering for the crimes of organized atheist regimes: the vast genocides of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the People's Republic of China. Programmatic atheism repeatedly ends in death; vast, organized, death. Barnes argued that an atheistic argument would here casually employ a metaphor of killing the subject in order to get at the truth of it, without the slightest shame by the author of that argument, had come to the limits of tolerance in educated conversation. Christians, Barnes believed, have too long been too generous in letting atheists be treated as individual and noble conversation-partners, without ever raising an issue of atheist complicity in atheist social atrocities. As I said, that made for a sobering end to the four panelists who responded to the article.

The last question, then, it seemed to me, was whether this response would be heard beyond those who came to the convocation. Would theologians push the matter, into a wider Marquette publication, or, even better yet, an attempt to print a version of the convocation as a response in the Chronicle of Higher Education itself? That seems to me the most important of goals, as it is there that the distortions and stereotypes were being most widely distributed among academics who didn't have the necessary education specialities to be able to locate the weaknesses in the article by themselves.

The 70th anniversary of the start of World War II in Europe. I'm amazed at how we are moving away from this epic period of history. Reading the youth histories of the war that littered my public library was how I really got into history as a kid. And there were always veterans to speak to about their experiences, not least being William Ellerby, my very gifted primary high school history teacher. Now that generation is fading away, as everyone has already commented-upon.

And I cannot help but notice my aging and shifting locus in living history, that I am now old enough to have my birth be closer to, rather than farther from, the start of the war. I can remember like yesterday being moved enough at the 50th anniversary of this day, writing what was probably a very bad poem called "The Bells of September" in my dorm room while talking with David about the significance of the day. I even considered making a point of going to the library over the course of the next seven years and reading, day by day, the New York Times from 50 years earlier, so that I could get a feel for how the war was reported over that time, as opposed to everything I can know all at once by reading history books. It's still a cool idea, I think, but one that would have made more sense if that ended up being the era I specialized in as an historian.

Poland marks anniversary of WWII beginning
Sep 1, 12:39 AM (ET)

By RYAN LUCAS

GDANSK, Poland (AP) - Polish leaders marked the 70th anniversary of World War II in a somber ceremony at dawn Tuesday on the Baltic peninsula where the conflict began, hailing those who gave their lives to defeat Nazi Germany.

Later in the day, European and American officials - former friends and foes from the war - were to meet in Gdansk for other ceremonies to pay tribute to the tens of millions who lost their lives in the conflict.

At the Westerplatte peninsula - the site of Nazi Germany's opening assault on Poland - Polish political and religious leaders recalled the sacrifices their countrymen made in the struggle against the overwhelming forces of Hitler's Germany.

"Westerplatte is a symbol, a symbol of the heroic fight of the weaker against the stronger," President Lech Kaczynski said. "It is proof of patriotism and an unbreakable spirit. Glory to the heroes of those days, glory to the heroes of Westerplatte, glory to all of the soldiers who fought in World War II against German Nazism, and against Bolshevik totalitarianism."

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My old housemate bassmike posted an account on South Bend Power 90s of the night that Ida and Babe The Blue Ox played in our grungy basement on their national tour in October of 1996. I had nothing to do with it, but being as surreal as it was to just arrive home from spending part of the evening with my girlfriend to finding a concert going on in my house, it remains one of my favourite memories of times at Clifford The Big Red House.

So: Ida + Babe The Blue Ox @ Clifford The Big Red House (Oct. 21, 1996)

Op-Ed Columnist
Until Medical Bills Do Us Part
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: August 29, 2009 in The New York Times

Critics fret that health care reform would undermine American family values, not least by convening somber death panels to wheel away Grandma as if she were Old Yeller.

But peel away the emotions and fearmongering, and in fact it is the existing system that unnecessarily takes lives and breaks apart families.

My friend M. — you’ll understand in a moment why she’s terrified of my using her name — had to make a searing decision a year ago. She was married to a sweet, gentle man whom she loved, but who had become increasingly absent-minded. Finally, he was diagnosed with early-onset dementia.

The disease is degenerative, and he will become steadily less able to care for himself. At some point, as his medical needs multiply, he will probably need to be institutionalized.

The hospital arranged a conference call with a social worker, who outlined how the dementia and its financial toll on the family would progress, and then added, out of the blue: “Maybe you should divorce.”

“I was blown away,” M. told me. But, she said, the hospital staff members explained that they had seen it all before, many times. If M.’s husband required long-term care, the costs would be catastrophic even for a middle-class family with savings.

Eventually, after the expenses whittled away their combined assets, her husband could go on Medicaid — but by then their children’s nest egg would be gone, along with her 401(k) plan. She would face a bleak retirement with neither her husband nor her savings.

A complicating factor was that this was a second marriage. M.’s first husband had died, leaving an inheritance that he had intended for their children. She and her second husband had a prenuptial agreement, but that would not protect her assets from his medical expenses.

The hospital told M. not to waste time in dissolving the marriage. For five years after any divorce, her assets could be seized — precisely because the government knows that people sometimes divorce husbands or wives to escape their medical bills.

“How could I divorce him? I loved him,” she told me.

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