Even when they're just playing in my head and memory, my nieces are ridiculously cute and distracting. (I especially can't shake the moment on the phone the other night, where I tried to encourage Sophie in her quest to pee before bed, and she – ever so polite – whispered "Thank You!" back into the phone to me.)

Still, I'm squeezing in good thoughts, vibes, and even prayer for Emily while she's defending now down at Missouri and bringing that story to an end.

This is the other historical/artistic column by Sandro Magister that caught my eye in recent days. I am interested especially in Pope Benedict XVI giving a new interpretation to the pair of recently-restored Michelangelo frescoes in the Pauline Chapel. I've done a lot of my artistic work on Michelangelo, who has become my favourite artist in the last decade, and who I take seriously, in fact, as a theologian. So it's interesting for me to hear a sitting Pope, especially one who is one of the greatest theologians alive, also take Michelangelo seriously.

The Pauline Chapel Reopened for Worship. With Two New Features

It is the pope's private chapel, in the Vatican buildings. Subjected to a complete restoration, it again has the altar turned toward the tabernacle. But also new is the interpretation that Benedict XVI has given to the two frescoes by Michelangelo, especially concerning the expression of the apostle Peter...

by Sandro Magister


ROME, July 6, 2009 - The illustrations reproduced above are two details from two frescoes by Michelangelo, facing each other in the Pauline Chapel: the conversion of Paul, and the crucifixion of Peter.

The Pauline Chapel is not open to visitors. Situated in the Vatican buildings just a few steps from the Sistine Chapel, it is a place of prayer reserved for the pope. After undergoing a complete restoration, it was reopened for worship on Saturday, July 4, by Benedict XVI, who presided over vespers there.

The news of the reopening of the Pauline Chapel for worship received scant coverage in the media, being overshadowed by the imminent publication of the encyclical "Caritas in Veritate" and by the meeting between the pope and Barack Obama.

But at least two new developments must be noted.

( Read more... )

The big theological news of the day – or the last several days – is really the new social justice encyclical that Pope Benedict has published. While my areas of academic interest and competence are more in the historical and artistic kind of things I mentioned in my last entry, I have to sit up and take notice of something this significant. Already I had some involved conversation about it with Dan at the library tonight, and so I thought I would start to keep more formal track of what's being said, as well as trying to get around to digesting the thing itself. It's very economics-oriented, which I find even less professionally and personally appealing as a subject that ethics, I'm afraid.

Included here I have the following items from The New York Times, the Associated Press, Catholic News Service, and the Vatican website:

Pope Urges New World Economic Order
Pope proposes new financial order guided by ethics
Pope says moral values must be part of economic recovery, development
In new encyclical, pope calls for sharing earth's resources equitably
Economist: UN could create economic body with teeth, as pope suggested
Encyclical breaks new ground on social issues, commentators say
Caritas in veritate (On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth: the new encyclical in English translation)

( Read more... )

There's a couple of interesting things that have been coming out of Rome the last few weeks dealing with earliest Church History: New Testament-era stuff, in fact. So I thought I would jot them down here for me and whoever of you might deign to read this. I tossed in a CNS article, but the main thing is from Sandro Magister's column:

New Discoveries. Why St. Paul Was Given a Philosopher's Face

The oldest depiction of the apostle has been found just a short distance from his tomb, which is also the object of new investigations. The Church wanted to represent him as the Christian Plato. A daring decision. And still extremely relevant, even today

by Sandro Magister

ROME, June 30, 2009 - The year dedicated to St. Paul, two millennia after his birth, has concluded with two important discoveries announced on the same day, the vigil of the saint's feast.

The first discovery was revealed by Benedict XVI in person, in his homily for vespers on June 28, in the Roman basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls:

"We are gathered at the tomb of the apostle, whose sarcophagus, kept under the papal altar, was recently made the object of a careful scientific analysis. A tiny perforation was made in the sarcophagus, which had not been opened for many centuries, for a special probe that picked up traces of a valuable linen cloth dyed purple, laminated with pure gold and a blue-colored cloth with linen thread. It also detected grains of red incense and of substances containing protein and calcium. Moreover, very tiny fragments of bone, subjected to Carbon-14 dating by experts who were unaware of their origin, were determined to belong to a person who lived between the first and second centuries. This seems to confirm the unanimous and unopposed tradition that these are the mortal remains of the apostle Paul."

So for Paul, too - as also for the apostle Peter, whose tomb has already been identified with certainty beneath the main altar of the basilica of St. Peter at the Vatican - there is important confirmation that he is buried precisely where he has always been venerated: under the main altar of the Roman basilica dedicated to him.

***

The second discovery was announced by "L'Osservatore Romano" in its June 28 edition.

It is the discovery of the oldest known depiction of the apostle Paul, dating back to the fourth century: the depiction reproduced at the top of this page.

This image of Paul emerged last June 19, from the excavations that are underway in a catacomb named after St. Thecla, along the Via Ostiense leading from Rome to the sea, a short distance from the basilica of the apostle.

Using laser beams to clean the vault of a niche, the archaeologists saw a rich fresco decoration reemerge. At the center of the vault appeared the image of the Good Shepherd, surrounded, in four arches, by the figures of Paul - the best preserved of the four - of Peter, and probably of two other apostles.

( Read more... )

Google Earth has turned into a fun toy for me the last few years, as someone who loves geography and its intimate tie to history. It's fascinating to be able to access a reasonable facsimile of any part of the planet at will, and with the Google Earth program, as opposed to just using the maps on Google's website, being able to mark everything up. I supplemented my journal with those for the first time after my 2006 Geneva/Venice/Florence tour with Erik, making sure that I would remember where my wanderings took me.

The other day, using such satellite imagery on their home computer, I showed my nieces where their house was and where my home was in relation to it, zooming in on my building to show them where my journey was taking me that afternoon. And I noticed something odd. Google regularly updates it satellite imagery, naturally, but one of the annoying things about this is that often the new images are a little "off" from the previous ones, making all the markers I put down on Google Earth now off by several meters, having me walking through buildings instead of down a sidewalk, for example. A bit of a pain. In the image I pulled up of my building, I saw that this, too, had just been changed. But it was changed in a particularly interesting way.


The first image here is the one I had originally marked, where in fact my "pushpin" is so precisely placed as to be pointing to the very window that is next to me now as I type. The second image is the new one that came up when I went to show the nieces where I lived. Notice the oddity? Apparently, in the second image, it is right along the street outside my window where two images were merged. I'm pleased to see that there doesn't seem to be the problem of location "drift" that I've experienced before. (My pushpin looks to still be in relatively the correct spot, whereas the afternoon path I have marked of where I went wandering through Geneva now makes no sense on Google Earth, and I've not had the gumption to try to move each individual marker to correct that problem.) What's interesting here is that they merged two images taken from very different angles, giving the impression of some of the craziest, leaning architecture one could imagine. I had a kind of "M.C. Escher" experience for a moment, while my eyes tried to make sense of the photograph.

Just thought that that was kind of interesting.

Heh. I just opened an email from earlier this evening from my friend Kevin, who lives out in Jackson, Wyoming. Jackson, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is one of the most ridiculously gorgeous locations in the United States, and the wider valley under the Grand Teton Mountains – Jackson Hole – has become a favourite location for secluded houses for celebrities of various sorts. Warren Beatty idly waved to me in a "just between neighbours" sort of way out there the other year. That sort of thing. So I just got this note from Kev:

Too funny.

Just saw Harrison Ford at the cashier at Kmart ....

So it goes.

I got to spend Monday with Langers in Chicago, after some schedule-juggling. It turned out that he was having a weekend mini-reunion with his Notre Dame M.Div. classmates in Milwaukee, just as I was going to be out of town staying at my sister's. A few semi-frantic phone calls later, we figured out that I could come down to the Loop on the commuter train and meet him, as he was going to be taking the train back from Milwaukee to South Bend, where he had left his car. So, even though Mark missed his first train and arrived an hour late, he decided to stay an extra two hours in town and take the last South Shore Line train back to the Bend, giving us somewhere between four-and-a-half and five hours to spend together.

We hadn't actually seen one another since J.P.'s wedding in August of 2007, so I had my first surprise when I discovered that he had chopped off his massive pony-tail. Mark's hair has been long for almost forever. I used a shot of him and that hair for part of the interior art of Life and Other Impossibilities back in 2004. When I met Mark at Notre Dame in December 1994, he had that sort of medieval-ish "bowl" haircut one sees occasionally. This was even shorter. This hearkened back to a Mark I'd only heard about: the football player Mark, back in Pittsburg. I had seen this Mark only once: on a videotape of the Freeks on their world tour, eyes closed and dancing the midst of a village in India, oblivious to the perplexed stares of the villagers standing around watching him. I'd never met a Mark who looked like this before. It was that big a deal. He bust out laughing, being in truth the same Mark, as soon as he saw my face, and told me that he had been hiding the fact that he cut his hair (for job interviews over a year ago) in our phone conversations, just so that he could see that look on my face.

We walked down Madison Avenue toward Millennium Park, as the panhandlers around the bridge over the Chicago River provoked Mark into recalling the outrageously persistent panhandler who stalked us while we were having dinner outside at the Water Street Brewery, when Mark visited me in Milwaukee in July 2003. We got to talking a bit about what little we knew and liked of Chicago architecture, with me talking about how much had been lost or destroyed, as I had learned about in reading in Lost Chicago. This conversation featured great visual aids as we walked by the classic Chicago Building, the elegant base curves of the Chase Tower (which reminds me of the fictional S.T.A.R. Labs), and this afternoon in particular, we were both struck by the façade of St. Peter's Church as we came up under it. Mark noted approvingly that it was run by the Franciscans, and we ducked in briefly to see the interior as people were coming out from a weekday Mass. That sort of thing got us talking Ecclesiology for a brief but intense stretch, as I quickly outlined for him where my dissertation research had taken me. In the time that I've known him, Mark has grown into an able theological thinker, and I was gratified to hear him respond as strongly as he did to what I was doing.

Arriving at Millennium Park itself, I was curious to have a look-around. I had never actually been there, despite having been downtown on any number of occasions since the Park was completed about five years ago. We walked in straight to the Jay Pritzker Music Pavilion, where some percussionists were soundchecking, and I marveled at the sound quality from where we ended up standing, out in the center of the law. Mark was equally marveling when I tolk him that our mutual Notre Dame friend Jeanine was playing there during the summers with the Grant Park Symphony – information which had somehow eluded him. So we fondly talked about her – our co-conspirator back in April 1997 for "The Francis Sessions" – and what she had accomplished musically. Had we more time, we would have immediately tried to track her down or summon her.

We eyeballed Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, like all good tourists, as we sat down in the plaza for a while, and so that Mark could scarf down a few hot dogs. This actually got us going in earnest for a bit on public art. The sculpture's ability to pull in a vision of much of the city (as well as the viewers) in its outer, convex surface really emphasized the nature of the piece as public art: as commentary on the city itself, or at least as pointing toward the city. The fact that it does so without metaphor or abstraction, but simply reflects the city itself, makes its functioning as public art perhaps as simple and direct as such a piece could theoretically be: all you see in it is the very city that you see all around you at that moment. This got us onto questions of Post-Modernity in art. I was initially dazzled when I was introduced in college to the idea of approaching a text not as a piece representing purely the author's intent, but with whatever you as the reader brought to it, to recognize that there is no single restraining, authoritarian narrative, but that a fabulous variety of narratives can be discovered in any piece. This excitement of mine lasted about five minutes. As with a lot of ideas, it has its point, but that if you absolutize it, it pretty much consumes all other possibilities. (Becoming a single restraining, authoritarian narrative, as it were.) I realized that this kind of perspectivism – of refusing even the possibility of narratives or meanings that transcend ourselves – had nowhere to go, although that ride to nowhere might seem fun in its capacity for self-indulgence. At the time, as an undergraduate, I just instinctively realized that I already knew everything that I already knew: what I was interested in was art that actually challenged me with some possibility, some insight into truths which I had not yet perceived. Art, physics, philosophy: all of them were only worthwhile if that possibility was out there. So, looking at Cloud Gate with Mark, I raised the possibility that perhaps it sucked as public art: was it just looking into a mirror? Was it perhaps the ultimate artistic, postmodern joke: that everyone looking at Cloud Gate simply, and literally, "saw what they wanted to see?" Possibly, but I opted away from quite such a cynical stance: the visual of the sculpture still was concrete and specific, even if it was grand in scale – it was still the city and the community, with one's self inevitably and necessarily in the midst of it.

We retired over to a Michigan Avenue coffeehouse for some liquid fuel for Mark and for a switch into chairs, people-watching with great pleasure and talking about the current states of our lives. I got to hear more (and to see his facial expressiveness, which I don't get in our occasional long phone calls) about his relationship with Shannon, his decision to put to rest his full-time musical work so that he could pursue that relationship, and his return to teaching Theology. He spoke of her artistic career, and her move from an internationally-prominent career to one more regional and settled, and happy to set outside of the New York-London gallery hustle. I talked about my vision of my time in Milwaukee, now that I am beginning to have a vision of it as a whole, seeing it as a distinct period in my life as it moves toward its close. When we got up again to walk back across the street and continue our stroll through the park, I got a bit of a surprise. Standing on the corner of Michigan and Washington, I was saying something to Mark when, somehow, in the midst of all the sound of the city, I thought I heard faintly behind me, "...ster Novak?" I turned around and hey! presto! There was Bryan Haney, bearded and years older than when I had last seen him, when he was a student of mine in Saint Joe's class of 2003. So we exchanged a bit of news, and he said something absurdly complimentary about my teaching. He talked about his work as a videographer and editor briefly, and I was so stunned by the randomness of it all that I completely forgot to ask about Long Distance Affair, his band whose gig invitations I've had to turn down for years because of, well, long distance. So a few stunned moments of lame conversation on my part later, Bryan merged back into the crowd, leaving Mark laughing at me for how easily I could be surprised.

We went strolling through the middle of The Taste of Chicago, and ended up in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Fountain, where we continued the conversation along the previous lines for about an hour, first looking at the Fountain itself, which had been barricaded off the last time we had each been in Grant Park, and then later over on the plaza stairs looking out over Lake Michigan. At that point I guided Mark over to the South Shore station, and we spent the last half-hour talking on those old wooden benches, which always give me an old-time train station feel whenever I see them. We found ourselves both pleased to note the wonderful gift we've found about these Notre Dame friendship: that in them we experience no loss of trust, intimacy or even familiarity, despite the gaps in time between our actual gatherings or encounters. I've had less occasion to see Mark than I have Erik, for example, but we can pick up just as we left off, and that's a treasure in this world.

I'm back in Milwaukee after an extended stay at my sister and brother-in-law's place, where I visited for the dual birthday celebration of Grace and Haley, who turned 7 and 5 in June, respectively. I returned just in time, apparently, as I'm completely achey today. Either they battered me into my current state by jumping and climbing all over me for the last several days, or I'm perhaps catching some kind of flu or something. I hate to say it, but this is the kind of ache that usually gets followed by chills and such. If that's the case, all I can say is that man, I really drew the short straw for the last few years. Of course, that would be more-or-less my own fault, since I knew perfectly well that the girls had all run fevers for a few days just before I came down. Hopefully, it just means that there's some kind of massive cold front going through: I'm getting sailor bones of that sort, I think.

I arrived on Saturday before dinner, which ended up being out at the girls' favourite Japanese place, out in some suburb southeast of their home. Despite being enormously picky eaters, Japanese is something for which they have a profound and inexplicable appreciation. I hadn't eaten Japanese since South Bend, I think, so I was very much out of my depth, opting for some sort of tempura sampler after hearing Leslie describe my options. Mostly, I just enjoyed the food and watched the action as the girls made enormously loud spectacles of themselves, much to the mortification of their parents.

Sunday, the day of the party, which was for family (the girls having already had parties with their school friends), started with Mass and then just some play before everyone arrived in the afternoon. I watched the girls while their folks got things organized, sitting on the front porch while they biked back up and down the sidewalk with their neighbour, a classmate of Grace's named Lisa. It was fabulously windy and just the perfect temperature, and little Sophie (now 2 years old) kept coming over to me to talk with me, with us mostly marveling about the wind and agreeing how good it felt when it blew through our hair and clothes. (This sensation and sensitivity is the root of my wearing longer hair for most of my adult years: the pure hedonism of it all.)

Although it was the birthday celebration of the two older girls, I found myself doting a bit more on Sophie than the other two. Part of that was simply due to the fact that Grace and Haley often want to play a little more independently at this point. Added to this is the fact that Sophie, when she's not in a temper, currently is doting right back on me, and I'm powerless before her charm. Of course, this is true for me with regard to all my nieces. Grace can be just plain beautiful at times, and Haley has one of the best smiles in the world, if she chooses to share it, although that's slightly obscured right now by the loss of a tooth a few years ago from a tussle with Grace. But Sophie has a kind of explosive smile of her own, which, we all laugh and admit, has the power to overwhelm us with sheer cuteness. She's a bit more socially open than her two sisters, not possessing nearly their degree of shyness, and she seems to instinctively know how to use it, which I hope won't lead to trouble for her in the future.

Present-giving went over as well as it usually does, with Sophie happy with her stuffed-animal sea turtle (long-overdue from missing her birthday party by being sick and saved to give her something on this day so she didn't feel left out). Haley looked reasonably satisfied with her new pink pajamas, which is her colour of obsession, although I completely struck out with Grace, I think. She's shown a fondness for guidebooks, even when much of them is beyond her understanding, because she has just such a raw passion for, and delight in, sheer information-acquisition, which I of course find enormously exciting as a teacher. During my previous visit, she got quite excited, and Haley following her, when we talked about types of trees on our way home from playing in the park, where I pointed out some of the basics that I know: oaks and maples. So I grabbed her a copy of the Audobon field guide to Eastern U.S. trees, not expecting to be as huge as birds were for her last year, but still assuming that I was on safe ground. But Leslie's recommendation that I go for "dogs" instead, which I received after I had ordered the book, proved to be dead-on: right now it's all about dogs for her and Haley. Mostly this is manifest in their devotion to a computer game called Nintendogs and not the real thing, but it's still the current subject of choice. I suppose it's part of a common fault with me: I have always found it hard not to be impatient to talk to High School or College Student Grace.

Family time was as interesting and entertaining as ever, with plenty of time to talk with everyone. I was mostly surprised to discover during the present-opening (provoked by Sophie's horrifically-loud blowing on a plastic recorder, which she kept calling "my trombone") that Leslie knew nothing about Grandpa Novak's career as a musician in his twenties, when he played saxophone and clarinet in the Chicago speak-easies, often for the Capone gang. This is easy not imagine, as we never once in our lives saw him play, and since we knew him as one of the world's most straight-laced human beings, rarely to be seen outside of a three-piece suit, even while gardening in the heat of the summer, except in his last few years. I had discovered this bizarre fact of his past in my undergraduate days. So Dad related the story to Leslie, punctuated by Sophie's "trombone"-blasts, while I recorded it, thinking it would prove an interesting piece of family oral history for the girls later on.

Grandpa had been asked to join Red Nichols and His Five Pennies back at the time, but turned it down, which is kind of amazing when you think of them hitting the #1 slot on the pop charts. He simply played as a way of providing income for his family, but once he started working a real job, as a banker for a few years before the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and started a family of his own, he told me that he simply put his instruments away and never played again. I cannot fathom so thoroughly giving music up, myself, especially since the family still stayed a musical family, with my Dad and uncles all being jazzmen, and taking lessons from the father of the late, great Louie Bellson, who no less a light than Duke Ellington called not only the world's greatest drummer, but the world's greatest musician. (Looking at my uncles playing drums and piano, and my Dad singing, and knowing of Grandpa's past, I always felt bad that I'd never gotten more into jazz, much less blown most of my own childhood instrumental music education; still, I developed a strong and independent high school love of the RnB combination of Joe Williams and Count Basie, which turned out to be my Dad's youthful favourite, too, and so I felt like I inherited something.)

So the afternoon passed into evening, with us telling and hearing stories, including more stories of our grandfathers engaged in such practices as letting their young or unlicensed children drive on the nation's highways. The girls played, we ate fine steaks from a fabulous and serious butcher that Jim and Leslie had just discovered, and life was good for another day.

One of the great lines: Yesterday, watching the girls at play among giant plastic alligators and hippopotomuses (hippopotomi?), I saw Sophie, who just turned two this past April, introducing herself and her sisters to a few of the other little kids playing there, pointing around to her sisters and then to herself:

"That's Gracie! And that's Haley! And that's me!"

Haley turned five today. Her excitement has been kind of hysterical. Last night Leslie and I were talking a bit while she worked on packing presents and decorating for today's family dual birthday party for her and Grace, who turned seven a few weeks ago. At 10:45pm, Haley came tearing down the stairs and asked with breathless intensity whether it was tomorrow yet. Leslie was trying not to laugh too much (as well as trying to keep her from seeing everything) and explained to her that "tomorrow" was still some eight hours away. So back to bed Haley went, slightly baffled that it somehow wasn't morning yet. Half an hour later, thump thump thump: down the stairs again and asking if it was tomorrow now. Too cute.

When Leslie made it to bed by around 1am, Haley was [still?] up, asking if it was time to get up, while Leslie wearily told her that she was just going to bed. At 6:40am this morning, down in the new basement guest room, I heard again: thump thump thump. This time she'd rallied Grace and Sophie with her. Since I'd already woken up, I went up and tried to relieve Leslie, offering to watch the girls in these early hours so she could get a touch more sleep, but no such luck: the girls insisted on her company....

Usually, I find that I'm a bit suspicious of pieces of writing that speak a little too easily or universally about cultural symbols of a generation. I tend to favour complexity over simplicity in any kind of analysis, just as a matter of course, and of trying to be realistic about anything in a given moment in history. If I'm being quick in that way, myself, I am usually painfully aware of it, although it is inevitable, especially in teaching, that one has to simplify, especially the more basic the student. One of my earliest lessons in the power of the press was a Chicago Sun-Times writer doing such an article about me and my friends my freshman year in college, which turned out to be a set-up and hatchet job, using us to fill-in-the-blanks of an essay he wanted to write about the Decline and Fall of things since his own college days.

That said, I still had to acknowledge that this writer was dead-on about the ubiquitous nature of these two symbols of my childhood. My family's copy of Thriller was one of the most-played LPs in our collection, and I can remember the central role that the poster of Farrah Fawcett took in my friend Teddy's game room, displayed like an icon for the liturgy of adolescent sexuality. These things were everywhere, and unparalleled among their kind: nothing was as big as either of them, or has been since, that I'm aware of. So as far as that goes, this article struck a nerve, although I'm not so sure that I'm ready to acknowledge some of his other sweeping statements about Generation X.

2 lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day
Jun 26, 4:30 AM (ET)

By TED ANTHONY

A record-shattering vinyl album and its moonwalking maestro. A paper poster of a golden-haired beauty in a one-piece swimsuit that was gossamer and clingy in all the right places.

It all seems so quaint now, the fragmented dream memories of a fleeting micro-era that began with words like "bicentennial" and "pet rock" and ended with MTV, Atari and absurdly thin cans of super-hold mousse.

The man-child named Michael Jackson and the luminous girl known as Farrah Fawcett-Majors jumped into our consciousness at a plastic moment in American culture - a time when the celebrity juggernaut we know today was still in diapers. When they departed Thursday, just a few hours and a few miles apart, they left an entire generation - a very strange generation indeed - without two of its defining figures.

"These people were on our lunchboxes," said Gary Giovannetti, 38, a manager at HBO who grew up on Long Island awash in Farrah and MJ iconography. "This," he said, "is the moment when Generation X realizes they're grown up."

( Read more... )

The King of Pop is dead.

I have just been reading and note-taking since finishing the most recent chapter, setting up the dash for the next chapter of the dissertation, where I start to turn my attention more toward the possibility of a corporate idea of a spiritual gift. That's something that's been popping up in the language of the Church in the last generation, but never has had any kind of formal theological justification that I can find. Examining and providing such a justification, if it is truly warranted, seems like an interesting project, and one that I can likely also use as a separate article. I finished up a pretty tight draft of a chapter outline last night, and I might even launch into some full-on writing of the draft today. Or maybe not. More reading and note-taking might end up being all that I can do. It feels a little more rawly artistic right now, and so I'll have to see where inspiration takes me.

Summer temperatures arrived with the solstice. It's been good to return to sunset reading by the fountain in front of the Chapel of Joan of Arc. The roses are in full bloom, and so the breezes are sweetly-scented, and there is no place of greater peace and sense of proportion on campus. As always, I find it a small miracle to have a place in the middle of America where I can have a sense of a medieval depth of time. The artifacts and architecture of America – the pure sculpting of our space – is all so historically new, and usually minimally utilitarian, that compared to Europe – from whence comes much of our heritage – America tends to feel like a vast strip-mall. Rarely are we around any architecture that tells us that human beings are meant to be anything other those economic cogs called "consumers." Most of that is so subliminal that it's as refreshing as a sea breeze to be in a space that so clearly declares something different.

I ran into a student from a few years ago the other day, someone I remembered as a squirmy or wired freshman (or maybe sophomore) who is now a rather self-assured senior getting ready for law school. We talked a bit at the counter of the post office while I was addressing my chapter to my director, and I was gratified when he somewhat awkwardly went out of his way to allude to a few things from my course and to say that he thought I had been a really cool teacher. As I am getting ready to teach again after a year's break, that was reassuring for me to hear, in a way. As I was saying to Erik the other day during a phone conversation, you remember so much more strongly the biting comments of students who didn't care for you as an instructor, outweighing at probably more than a 10-to-1 ratio the positive comments of any who did like you and said so. Given that there seems to be a certain small population of students who you will never make happy, and who see teaching evaluations as simply a chance for "revenge" rather than for any constructive comments (not that these students ever showed up for office hours or made appointments to try to work on whatever was bothering them), well, those comments can be harsh. The only thing that tends to save them from being devastating is how frequently silly they are. But they do tend to numerically outweigh those of students who actually do make thoughtful criticisms and suggestions of the sort that you can use. So, anyway, this student's words were a bit of Teaching Fuel that I was happy to receive.

This bloody, bloody chapter: finished. (And only two-pages over my limit.)

Toughest theological writing I've ever done, I think; and I thought this would be the no-brainer chapter in my dissertation. I still have no idea if I accomplished much. Just gotta let it sit for a while, send it off to Fahey and let him rain down directorial wrath upon it.

Time for bed.

Now that, Ladies and Gentlemen, was a full-scale, classic, crack-and-boom Midwestern Thunderstorm! The heart of it crawled over the city and has now drifted south over Lake Michigan. At least four strikes within a block of my place! And maybe more still to come....

Today, I have decided, is Everwood day. The mail today brought me my long pre-ordered copy of the second season DVDs of Everwood from Amazon, and so that was Happy Mail.

Okay, so I'm a big geek.

Why am I touting a WB teen show? (From when there was a WB?) I try to watch as little television as possible. During Everwood's fourth and tragically final season (due to last minute mismanagement from the new CW network), I repeatedly saw a commercial for an upcoming episode of Everwood while watching my comic-geek fav Smallville. The commercial in question both quoted an impressive number of sources raving about the quality of the show, naming it the best family drama in years. (Sources I had heard of, which is always the clincher: I always check to see if the best movie or television review that could be found, usually saying something vague like "Great!', comes from a review from KRXB in Beeville, TX, or some other place similarly obscure.) The episode being advertised also seemed to be dealing with an ethical question and bringing one of the character's religious perspectives into play, and that sort of thing is something I always find professionally interesting as a teacher, just to "see what the kids are watching today," as though I were 97 years old. So I tuned in to just watch this one episode. And in the way drama seeks to do, I was hooked.

But, as I said, this turned out to be in the spring of 2006, the surprisingly final season of the show, though it was one of the WB's steadiest draws. Bad time to get into a series like that. Fortunately for me, I had learned these ways of the internet and was able to get access to all of the episodes of the series from the beginning, and watch them through, as a sort of 100-hour movie. (Not in one sitting.) And I was delighted in what seemed to me to be the best family drama I'd ever seen. No other show, other than the late great re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica had ever had me so impressed, or occasionally even floored, with the quality of the writing that I immediately found myself heading to the Internet Movie Database to find out who had written the episode I had just watched. Thus I became a fan of the writing of Michael Green and of John E. Pogue, as well as the work of creator and producer Greg Berlanti, all of whom gave us passages of great literary quality. What I found so attractive about the show along with the quality of the writing was that this was a show that followed three generations of characters with equal sensitivity and depth: teens, parents, and grandparents (or four generations if you separate the fourth-grader from the teens). It was not the standard WB teen drama, focused on sexy teens and their sexy lives. The adults were adults, the grandparents cool and interesting characters, and not because they were made "just like the teenagers." The opportunities and struggles of each of the characters were appropriate to their age and life circumstances, and were dealt with by the writers with distinct imagination, not fearing to set up ethical dilemmas that were both contemporary and not "solved" with easy or politically-popular answers. If anything, there was a consistent – and attractive! – emphasis on integrity that was welcome on a television drama. And for someone like me, growing up in Oregon, Illinois, I also found an attraction to a small-town setting treated well, without a hint of coastal condescension in the writers.

Those apologetic comments aside, having tried to justify my geekiness, I have to say that I'm kind of disappointed by the quality of the second season DVD set. Everwood has had a troubled history with its DVDs. The first season DVD set, out in the timely way we expect with television shows these days, apparently failed to meet financial expectations for Warner Brothers, and so it has been five years until today's release of the second season set. The reason repeatedly given had to do with the admittedly wonderful contemporary soundtrack of Everwood, which in particular had the conceit of frequently having contemporary artists covering classic tracks of the 1960s and 70s, as well as a generous selection of originals. The licensing costs were prohibitive, fans were told, and the only way that this DVD set was apparently able to be produced was by replacing almost all the music (even cell phone rings!) with unknown tracks by unknown artists, losing those associations of familiarity. In the first few episodes, for example, now notably absent are:

"One Fine Day" by Robbie Williams
"The Things We Do For Love" by 10cc
"California Girls" by The Beach Boys
"Get Together" by The Youngbloods
"September" by Earth, Wind and Fire
"At Last" by Etta James

You can't help but notice the change, if you are at all familiar with the originals. Although there is serious marketing of music going on, there is also more to these soundtrack choices than simply sound or style, which seems to have been the chief criterion used in replacing the music. The replacement of Counting Crows' "Anna Begins" at the end of episode 14, with its lyrical uncertainty by a straight love song lyric really changes the mood and the foreshadowing of the story's conclusion. There's an integrity to the original work, that I hate to see messed with for such reasons. Myself, I cannot believe that those licensing the music would make such further demands: I would rather simply have my music in the episode as "free advertisement."

Whereas the first season had all the sorts of extras one hopes for with a TV season DVD set – deleted scenes, director, writer and actor commentary tracks, behind-the-scenes features – the second season set lacks all of that except for the addition of deleted scenes. Even the menus are the sort of static bare pictures that you associate with the cheapest of DVDs, and that just about everyone could construct on their own computer. Even the packaging seems too generic in that the most significant additions to the cast – Sarah Lancaster as Madison Kellner and Marcia Cross in a pre-Desperate Housewives turn in a wonderfully real and adult role as Linda Abbott – are absent. These two dominate the storylines of the season, but the packaging stays with "standard" photos of the core cast. But for a DVD collection I am particularly disappointed by the loss of the commentaries. They are such a relatively easy feature to create – again, practically something that could just be recorded on a home computer – and they add so much depth to a collection of this sort. Most season sets skimp on this feature, I think, after having witnessed the wonder of the Freaks and Geeks DVD set, where just about every episode features multiple commentary tracks. That is a far cry from the two or three episodes that usually receive a single commentary track in most TV DVD sets. Given the exceptional standard of work by the writers, directors and actors on Everwood, those features were what I was most looking forward to, as otherwise one could still just watch the episodes off of the internet in their original form.

It is enjoyable to see the episodes on my television instead of my computer screen, of course, and the second season story arc is as solid as that of the first season, and continues in dealing with the consequences of those earlier events in a paced and realistic way, not indulging in the Hollywood tendency of having earlier events neatly resolved by the end of an episode or story arc. (Only in the fourth season did I find that the show started to slide a bit toward that WB Network emphasis of "sexy teens and their sexy lives," but even then was only slippage and not yet a disaster. The show easily had a few more years before it would have come to a timely conclusion.) In particular, I have great fondness and sympathy for this season's Madison storyline, having also begun my dating life a girlfriend who was a few years older than me, and significantly more mature than I was. I can wince in sympathy to watching Ephram flounder about in an all too teen tendency to muck up a relationship by conjuring up far too much unnecessary drama. I also very much enjoyed James Earl Jones making a wonderful "character actor's" part of Will Cleveland in a recurring role that justly earned him an Emmy nomination.

So it's wonderful to have gotten something after all this time, but I can scarcely believe that the last year's work on producing these DVD sets resulted in something so minimal. Warner Brothers seems oblivious to the quality of what they produced here, as you see happen occasionally with some classic movie or show that takes years or decades to get serious treatment by its owners. I can only hope that even the diluted versions of seasons 3 and 4 will be made available, in hopes of future viewers getting a chance to enjoy what this group produced over four years. I feel like I need to find out which executive to get in touch with in order to volunteer my time to make the final collections: and I am so not a person who spends their life obsessing about television. So I feel like that impulse, too, just testifies to how highly I think of what these writers and other artists achieved.

I had a chance to catch up with a few friends early in the week. On Sunday, Erynn had a photo assignment for her magazine internship that she needed to take care of, and asked me to come along. I quickly discovered that she had other, nefarious motives for bringing me along, besides just getting a chance to hang out and catch up. It turned out that she had what she freely admitted was kind of a dorky assignment: to shoot a collection of toys or figurines in some kind of Milwaukee setting. These turned out to be odd little things, like figures out of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, and so the image of someone intently shooting photographs of these things ended up drawing a lot of smiles.

This, of course, was easier to endure when you were with someone else, than if you just looked like you were being dorky with your toys by yourself.

So I grabbed my own camera for whatever fun I might find with it, and came along for the ride. Bradford Beach, the main beach on Milwaukee's lakefront, was completely swamped with people, and Erynn had wanted to try out shooting these toys on a beach. So I suggested the beach at Atwater Park, in Shorewood, which my family always walks to from my Aunt and Uncle's house on Thanksgiving, as a way of stretching the legs after the feast. So we drove up to that beautiful neighbourhood, while I looked out at all the sailboats on the water, taking advantage of such a summery day. That so made me want to go sailing again, which I haven't done in years. Erynn pretty much hates sailing, I discovered, so I told her about the reckless racing of the Sunfish I did with Richard on the lake at Rock Cut State Park the summer I learned to sail, just to give her the heebie-jeebies. Once we were up in the Shorewood area, I began looking more at the lovely houses high on the bluff above Lake Michigan and we got to talking a bit of architecture, and then walking down the bluff to the beach.

So Erynn worked on shooting the collectibles while I apologized for suggesting the Atwater Beach after I discovered that we couldn't actually see the cityscape from there. Erynn didn't seem to care, though, and just worked on while we talked. Occasionally we looked at and shot other things, too, or talked about what it was about such things that we thought were good to try to capture in a photograph. Erynn and I both noticed this cute couple taking pics together on the beach. As we were getting ready to walk back up the bluff, the girl had been leaning on the guy's shoulder, looking at what he had already shot, and I couldn't quite get my camera back out of its case and ready to shoot before they moved out of that spontaneous, all-too-cute pose. Halfway up the staircase to the beach, I saw them again in a pose that struck me, as he was shooting her, and we both tried to capture something from that angle. When I spotted a red-winged blackbird perched nearby and cussing everyone out, I made a point of shooting that for my bird-crazy nieces, who last summer told me lots about the fearsome red-winged blackbirds that were attacking pedestrians in Chicago. Aunt Helen and Uncle Bill had told be of being hit by the ones down here by the lake. So we finished climbing back up the bluff while Erynn told me complaining stories of workouts for the Marquette Track Team that she had done here on the beach and running up and down the stairs, which made me razz her about being the wussiest athlete I'd ever met.

We headed downtown, to take advantage of the views of the city from the area around the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is wildly photogenic itself. We had a number of occasions to laugh about how dorky we looked staring and shooting these toys. It got to be kind of funny to see people looking at us oddly, but only a few made teasing comments as they passed by. Eventually, we worked our way past the Art Museum and down to the Lake itself. I had mentioned to Erynn that I liked a few of the shots she'd taken of me on New Year's Eve behind Discovery World with the Hoan Bridge in the background, and so we went over there to take advantage of that possibility, since being in this area gave you lots of classic Milwaukee backdrop opportunities. The gorgeous wind coming off the Lake ("gorgeous" because it was the perfect coolness matched to the heat of the day) was so brisk, though, that the toys kept blowing over, so I worked to keep them up, setting them up repeatedly, so that Erynn could shoot in the second or two when they were all still standing. And people walked by and laughed....

While we were down there I saw that the Denis Sullivan, a fully-functional sailing vessel modeled after a 19th century Great Lakes schooner, was also out on the water. Something like that, of course, was an absolutely irresistible shot, and so I started playing with my telephoto lens. I was surprised to discover, when I was looking at this camera during my search for a new one, that this had a 10x telephoto, which seemed quite strong for a point-and-shoot. The digital telephoto takes that power up to 40x, but that, of course, sacrifices detail in pixelation. The Denis Sullivan is based at Milwaukee's Discovery World, and does Great Lakes scientific/environmental work and education, as well as functioning as an attraction and social venue. I've never taken a cruise on it, but now, having finally eyeballed it underway, I'm determined to stop just thinking about it and try it out! I really wanted to catch the Denis Sullivan as it went past the old Milwaukee Breakwater Lighthouse, but the timing was complicated by the other boats passing in and out of the frame. I did what I could, but I might go back another day just to try again.

On Monday night, I went out for dessert, drinks and talk with Diane, with whom I'd been playing schedule-tag for a few weeks. Her newish job as a union recruiter/representative runs into the evenings, so she grabbed me on the way home at around 9:30pm. We went down to our traditional late-night talk haunt of the bar at the Hotel Metro, which was predictably deserted as Monday night isn't much of a clubbing night downtown. (The Metro being a favourite stop of clubbers who want to sit down, eat, drink and converse.) I was explaining a bit about my current run on the dissertation on the way down, since we hadn't actually laid eyes on one another since I had dinner with her and Tim back in March. As we were getting out of the car, she said, "Well, since you're about to see and figure it out, anyway, I'll tell you that my big news is that I'm pregnant!"

Conversation contest: she wins.

That pretty much (obviously) dominated our conversation the rest of the night. She hadn't wanted to tell me over the phone, so she'd been sitting on the surprise for months while we played tag and while I hid underground with the dissertation. She couldn't have our usual choice of a port, of course, and instead tucked in on the Metro's great apple pie, which we ended up splitting. So it was a surprise for everyone, but a good and welcome one, with her getting about halfway through already and expecting in early November. She speculated that while a girl made perfect sense to her, she had no idea about how to be a Mom to a boy. I opined that since she was a comic book geek, her pop-culture instincts were very boy-compatible and that she'd find it pretty easy going. She seemed to think that was reasonable, so that felt good to say something that seemed sensible. I mostly kept coming back to just my sheer surprise, so I don't know that my converstaion amounted to much more than random exclamations of "Zounds!" "Zoinks!" "Jinkies!" and the like.

A few CNS articles I wanted to jot down, two brief ones on the continuing reactions to the awful report on the amount of abuse that was carried on in Ireland under institutions sponsored by the Church, and an article touching on the ongoing collaboration of the Church and the scientific establishment.

Child abuse was part of a prevalent church culture, Irish bishops say
Pope visibly upset to hear of child abuse, Dublin archbishop says
Vatican visit to CERN opens new channel of dialogue for science, faith

( Read more... )

An interesting little article about a book by a friend of John Paul II's. I'm not sure why there's any particular "controversy" here, or if that's being created or amplified by the writers in order to make their story more "news-worthy." I cannot imagine that anyone would too strongly want to say "they weren't really good friends" if she was invited to be at his deathbed. But whatever. Either way, any book that helps humanize a man like Karol Wojtyla and saves him from being turned into either a plastic version of a saint or just an ideological figurehead is, in my mind, a good thing.

Woman defends book on friendship with John Paul II
Jun 12, 7:56 AM (ET)

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA and NICOLE WINFIELD

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - To him, she was "My Dear Dusia" and he signed his letters "Br" - short for brother.

She was one of a handful of people by his bedside when he died, and visited him in the hospital when he survived an assassination attempt.

In the cloistered universe of the Vatican, Pope John Paul II had a woman friend with whom he shared spiritual thoughts in a series of letters that spanned the decades. Now she is defending her recent book of correspondence with the pope against criticism from church officials that she "exaggerated" her friendship with the late pontiff and could delay his beatification.

Wanda Poltawska, 87, said her book - a collection of her religious meditations and John Paul's letters of spiritual guidance - was harmless to his saint-making process and she dismissed those who sought to minimize her friendship with the Polish-born John Paul.

( Read more... )

An interesting piece of analysis from John Allen. I'm not sure if he's right, but it's interesting nevertheless.

From Italy to Iran, voters hand the church a mandate on Islam
By John L Allen Jr
Created Jun 12, 2009

Early summer is campaign season in various corners of the world, including parliamentary races last week in the European Union and in Lebanon and today's hotly contested presidential race in Iran. Taking stock of it all, a grand irony emerges: While moderates appear to be gaining ground in the Islamic world, hardliners are on the march across the Old Continent.

Obviously the Catholic church wasn't a party to these contests, but voters from Italy to Iran may have unwittingly handed Catholicism a mandate anyway: To prevent new hostility in Europe from derailing the long-awaited rise of the Islamic center.

In news-ticker fashion, here's the rundown. The pro-Western "March 14 coalition" scored a decisive victory in Lebanon's parliamentary vote last Sunday. While it wasn't yet clear at press time how things would shake out in Iran, reform-minded challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi was giving President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a run for his money. Meanwhile in Europe, traditional center-right parties got the most votes, but the biggest gains came on the far right. In the Netherlands, the anti-Islamic Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, who once called the Qur'an "fascist," finished a strong second. Like-minded parties did well in Britain, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Finland and Denmark, blending skepticism about the EU with an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim message.

( Read more... )

An interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter about the restoration of an urban Jersey parish. I guess this really strikes me because it plugs into much of the vision of the Church that I'm working on in my dissertation. That work has got me quite curious and concerned about how local priest are (or are not?) being trained in their seminary education to cultivate the spiritual gifts of the laity, and not just being made to focus on cultivating their own spiritual gifts. In other words, are they being made simply into leaders, or are they being made into those who will cultivate and raise up the leadership potential in those they lead, leadership potential of other sorts that the ministerial priesthood?

Rebuilding a parish, pastor comes to love people more
Jersey City, N.J.

Our Lady of Czestochowa Church was packed for the 12:30 Mass on Mother's Day. Four families waited at the rear of the church with their infants who were to be baptized. In the congregation, there were dozens of young families with young children and scores of young singles.

Fr. Tom Iwanowski looked out familiarly on a congregation whose primary membership is made up of people between the ages of 25 and 50, a demographic that most religious leaders would covet. In little more than a month he would be moving on from this community where he had arrived 14 years ago, at the request of the previous archbishop of Newark, with the simple mandate to "go and change the direction of the parish."

Change it he did.

The story of the transformation of OLC, or Our Lady of the Waterfront, both tags now popularly used to refer to the Jersey City parish, is a tale simultaneously of how disruptive change can be, of the ease with which the Vatican's attention can be turned toward relatively unimportant local matters by a vocal minority, of the professional skills and enormous work it takes to be a successful pastor today and of the arbitrary nature of Catholic existence where the character and work of a community can be undone in an instant.

That latter point was perhaps the most compelling matter the day of my visit. It hung over everything. What will happen, was the prevailing question, when Fr. Tom leaves?

The question was probably much the same for the few Poles who still inhabited the parish 14 years ago: What will happen when we get the new guy?

( Read more... )

Huh. So they finally did it. I think this was originally scheduled for 2006, if I recall correctly, as it had just been announced when I was buying an old-style TV set in 1997, making me consider that I was investing in technology scheduled for obsolescence. But, given that I have cable, which I use almost exclusively for movies and perhaps three television shows I'll keep an eye on, I would have been Joe Clueless over this date, and not gotten around to getting a conversion box – I hadn't seen any advertisement indicating that this was about to happen. But I do find it simply kind of fascinating purely with regard to the history of technology to see a whole technology retired in such an organized way. Thus the jotting-down of this article here.

Friday marks final signoff for analog TV service
Jun 12, 10:59 AM (ET)

By PETER SVENSSON

NEW YORK (AP) - TV stations across the U.S. started cutting their analog signals Friday morning, ending a 60-year run for the technology and likely stranding more than 1 million unprepared homes without TV service.

The Federal Communications Commission put 4,000 operators on standby for calls from confused viewers, and set up demonstration centers in several cities. Volunteer groups and local government agencies were helping elderly viewers set up digital converter boxes that keep older TVs functioning. Any set hooked up to cable or a satellite dish is unaffected.

"When you're alone like me, that's my partner," Patricia Bruchalski, 82, said about her TV.

Bruchalski, a pianist and former opera singer who lives in Brooklyn Park, Md., got assistance Thursday from Anne Arundel County's Department of Aging and Disabilities and a community organization called Partners in Care. After her converter box was installed, Bruchalski marveled that digital broadcasts seemed clearer and gave her more channels - about 15 instead of the three she was used to.

"You're going to be up all night watching TV now," volunteer installer Rick Ebling told her.

Around 15 percent of U.S. households don't have satellite or cable, and they tend to be poorer. Nielsen Co. said minority households were less likely to be prepared for Friday's analog shutdown, as were households consisting of people under age 35.

A survey sponsored by broadcasters showed that Americans are well aware of the switch, thanks to two years of advertising about it. But many people simply procrastinated.

( Read more... )

Back from a long-overdue visit to my sister and brother-in-law's where I got to see the nieces and my Mom, and to enjoy everyone's company at some length. Now I'm settling back into the writing routine, finishing out the final section of this chapter, although I find that the thoughts I'm working out as I come to my conclusion are making me go back and tweak a lot that I wrote earlier, including bits in other chapters.

I got down on Friday afternoon, which Jim takes off in the summer, and so I had a pleasant and fashionable ride from O'Hare to their place in Jim's convertible, with the day just warm enough to make that very comfortable and enjoyable. Grace was still at school when I arrived, and so I stowed my things in the guest room in their newly-finished downstairs, which I now saw and admired for the first time, and I joined Sophie and Haley in their new basement arts and crafts room. Both of them instantly went to work, showing me new and challenging works: Sophia is still in her Abstract Scribble Phase and gave me a wide variety of interpretations of her colors and smears. Haley, on the other hand, was in a very definite Subversive Representational stage caught up in portraying the potential for corruption in the world around her, and thus showed me a series of objects identified as "Rotten Stuff," featuring in series: "Rotten Tomato, Rotten Ice Cube, Rotten Potato, Rotten Apple, Rotten Chicken Fry, and a Rotten Piece of Salami." When asked why she was so interested in rotten stuff, she simply burst into laughter and tried to feed me to a plastic killer whale, reactions not uncommon to the artist whose vision is so directly questioned. They later almost managed to show me how to play their Wii system for the first time on the beautiful new basement entertainment system, but Grace and Haley got so competitive over designing my avatar or "Mii," that that whole thing ended in near-disaster with the two girls being banished from the machine.

Over a generous steak dinner that evening, I caught up a bit more with Leslie and Jim directly, hearing a bit of the details of shifting to summer schedules with work and with the girls, while marveling over the girls' overly-focused eating-habits, which, if left to themselves, would seem to have Grace eating only grated cheese on pasta, Haley eating only bread, and two year-old Sophie eating only steak. After dinner, while Jim and Leslie struggled to put Sophie down for the night (beginning what seemed to possibly be a pattern of her not wanting to go down if I was still apparently about and having fun with the others), I took Grace and Haley out to the park for a little impromptu bird-watching and climbing. (We saw a Common Grackle, which the girls were actually unfamiliar with, Haley's fav, the American Robin, and failed to discover the source of another bird who taunted us with its mysterious call.) We spent pretty much the whole walk back on the subject of trees, and how to tell different kinds apart, almost all of which I have forgotten, although my ability to identify several trees simply as "maples" left them inordinately dazzled and excited.

Saturday morning had us up and out quickly for both Grace and Haley's final soccer matches of the spring season. These were, inconveniently enough, on opposite ends of the town, which Grace's starting about 40 minutes earlier, so I went to that one with Leslie and Sophie, while Jim took Haley to hers. This way, I figured, I could see both of them play, as we would catch the end of Haley's as well, and since I figured (rightly) that the 7 year-olds would be more exciting to watch than the 5 year-olds. In fact, it was interesting to see the differences since I had last watched Grace play: now there was more energy, aggressive pursuit and play of the ball, and even the beginnings of teamwork or strategy, although all this was definitely punctuated by periods of zoning-out and slack watching of other teammates doing the work until a player was yelled awake by coach or parent.

I was continuing to experiment with my new camera and finally figured out why many of my shots up until this point were blurring, even with movement that wasn't terribly fast. The Image Stabilization features were new to me and I discovered that, once I switched the option from "Auto" to "High," I began to get the crisp sort of photographs I had been expecting and desiring, which led to shooting a number of fun, sporty, action photographs of Grace on the soccer field. We got to Haley's game in time for the fourth quarter, and so I was able to grab a number of shots of her as well, although the game was definitely much more cutely "beginners" than Grace's game had been. The girls posed with their medals for the season's work (although the best part of those pics are Sophie marching in to be included with her sisters, glowering as she sucked on her juice straw and looking for all the world as though she were possessed by Winston Churchill), and then that was pretty much it for the day, with no more obligations on anyone's part.

( Cuteness condensed, in a rare moment of LJ etiquette-awareness )

I have a thing for Freedom. I'm not talking about a desire for freedom, or a fixation upon it. I simply mean that freedom – as a subject, an intellectual concept – is a topic to which I find myself returning frequently.

For years this interest has grown, once I had come to understand that Freedom was the central idea of Modernity: that notion that stands at the center of all Modern philosophy and culture, as the crown jewel of the philosophical movement called The Enlightenment. Raised in the United States of America, a country began as an experiment in Enlightenment political philosophy, I was indoctrinated with everyone else in my generation in this particular philosophy, assuming with everyone else in my country that this take on freedom was unquestionably true, a matter of undoubted fact: there is no greater, unqualified good than Freedom. In my generation, this belief was the case even moreso than ever before, with the culture of the 1960s and 1970s having elevated notions of individual freedom to the highest status in all of the history of human thinking.

So, when I began to get into my undergraduate education in the History of Ideas, it was quite a shock to realize that this way of looking at things hadn't always been around, that it was one more idea about the Way Things Are in a world full of ideas about the Way Things Are. I was stunned to think, for the first time, that this vision of Freedom wasn't necessarily true, and that perhaps I needed to find out more about where this idea came from, and what arguments there were for it, before I decided to go ahead and just sign off on it and agree.

And that was a stunning thought, too: I cannot think of a more forbidden idea for our culture.

The question, of course, is not so much of whether freedom is a good. The question is whether it is an unqualified good: that Freedom cannot accept any restraint, any qualifications, or any limits. For then, the argument goes, it would not be freedom at all! Freedom is only freedom, we are told, in the absence of restraint or limits.

So I had long assumed that the opposite of Freedom was Non-Freedom, or perhaps we could better call that Slavery. Now, that is an opposite, and an obvious one. Today on the bus down to Dan and Amy's to babysit the kids, however, as I was re-reading Francis Sullivan's book chapter "The Ecclesiological Context of the Charismatic Renewal" as part of my current dissertation work, I realized that there was a different way of conceiving the notion of Freedom and its opposite.

Slavery is the non-real or evil opposite of Freedom. If you know your basics of Catholic philosophy, you know that evil is not a reality. There is nothing that exists that is evil as such. Evil is not found in nature. You've never stepped in a big pile of evil. You never have to walk around an evil daffodil, and even if you're eaten by a shark or a goldfish, they were not evil sharks or goldfish. Evil is something found only in behavior or will. Evil is not a thing in itself, it is a lack of a thing: a lack of goodness. It is like a vacuum: it is powerful only because of its non-existence. Evil is the mis-use or mis-application of a good.

In always conceiving of Freedom in relation to its evil opposite of Slavery, I think we have reinforced the Modern notion of Freedom as a good only when it is absolute and unrestrained. The problem is, of course, that we use our claim to absolute freedom to do great harm to other people, trampling them in our relationships in the name of our personal freedom. Something wasn't working in that equation.

But there is a good and real opposite of Freedom as well, and this is Communion. Communion is a social expression or instantiation of what Christians recognize as the ultimate aspect of reality: Love, eternal and living in the three interpenetrating Persons of the Trinity. Relationship in love, or "Communion," equally restrains and limits Freedom, but does so without violating the goodness of Freedom. Freedom is not an absolute good: when it tramples on the good of relationship we see this most clearly.

Of course, I'm sure everyone pretty much knew this or intuited it, but I hadn't ever put it quite so clearly or succinctly in my head, and so I was kind of struck by the idea, and the way that it could help me better articulate the goodness of Freedom, and what Freedom truly is, by being able to describe it in terms of its real and good opposite.

Great. I just discovered that none of my outgoing mail since late last week, when I updated my operating system has gone out. I thought I re-sent a bunch of it Monday or Tuesday, when I first got a glimpse of the problem, but that was just me, still living under the prior illusion that things were going out. Fortunately I can still send stuff by using the AOL account through my web browser, but until this bug is fixed, my actual program is shot.

I just managed to re-send the stuff I'd written tonight, which was still in the AOL program when I tried to shut it down, popping up to ask, "What about these letters?" So if you're wondering why I've not written you back about such-and-such in the last few days, well, actually I did....

Just watched a meteor break into pieces above the old science building as I walked home from the library. I always find seeing a "shooting star" kind of thrilling, taking me back to when I was an avid amateur astronomer as a kid. I'm always surprised when I can see one in the heart of the city as I am on Marquette's campus. Lots of little things to note for the last week. It's been a very productive last few days, with me setting a record of four or five well done pages in a single day two days ago. I'm in the home stretch on this chapter of the dissertation, now doing the final section. On the flipside, I had a minor disaster of a note from Fr. Sullivan, who I'm writing on, who responded to a question of mine about the material I was currently writing with, essentially, "Oh yeah, that's all wrong: I wish I'd gotten around to printing a retraction." Scratch three pages of my five-page sprint.

Not so little is the fact that my brother Joe is finally doing better, after the doctors figured out his mysterious fever. He's home now, resting and working out the kinks of the last two weeks, which is great to hear. Not so great is that my cousin Ben here in town is sick with the flu, when he and his family were planning to take off for a wedding in North Carolina this weekend. I volunteered to watch him if need be, which would sink plans to finally visit my sister's this weekend. I haven't seen the nieces since February, and I missed Sophie's second birthday party in April. I hear her gabbling away in the background of my phone calls now, and I'm dying to be missing so much of this cute talky stage.

Dad finished his second year of volunteering at a local grade school. He helps out with first-graders as part of a statewide "class grandparents" program of some sort, mostly working on their reading with them one-on-one while the classroom teacher manages the lot. He loves the work and I've been thrilled to see him both enjoy it and to make such an impact in his retirement years.

Niyatee was so delighted by an annoyed semi-rant I left in response to a question on her journal that she asked me to marry her. This led to further conversation on the telephone, spinning out from the topic being discussed on her journal to lots of other topics from bioethics to the current state of Grey's Anatomy. No date has yet been set.

I gave Kelly a last-minute hand with her moving out last week, helping her abscond with a dishwasher for which she had unusual affection. I heard more of her and Mark's story and plans for being Los Angeles over the next year while she does her medical dental residency and he does his pastoral internship. I had a hard time imagining that Southern California even had any Lutherans, but I guess I've heard stranger things. It was just kind of cool to hear the enthusiasm of being on the cusp of such big adventures. But she was the last grad student I knew in the building and now the only person I know is an undergrad former student who is enthusiastically stoned half the time I run into him.

Lots of student in the department are taking part in a "dissertation boot camp" program going on for a few weeks here: living together in the doors with a few faculty advising the process and writing each day from 8am to 8pm. My carrel-mate Michael Mattosian is doing that as a last burst of activity before taking up a pastorate in Delaware, and I know that Tony and Pam are doing it as well. I'm kind of on the night-shift version of that, although the library doesn't keep such grad student-friendly hours durinig the summer.

And most startling of all: J.P. returned a note I sent him within a week. Freakishly un-Freekish of him.

I meant to jot this down last month when I saw it in Sandro Magister's column on Anselm's 900th birthday, but forgot until now. I was just saying to Dan the other week that one thing I've noted over the last few years is that I have an increasing fondness for Anselm of Canterbury (or, less famously, "of Aosta" or "of Bec," as below). When I was doing my Master's degree, I repeatedly heard Anselm blamed for making his Christology too "legal" in its conception, borrowing too much from medieval ideas of law, and thus (I was told) propelling theology of Christ down a path that increased bad, legalistic understandings of the faith.

Like most easy ideas that excuse you from having to actually work through details, that's garbage, I've since discovered.

Like an awful lot of other myths, someone once summed up an idea in a catchy way, that probably had the useful benefit of "explaining everything," and likely also offered the bonus feature of making us feel smug in our superiority for having risen above such tawdry ideas. Augustine of Hippo gets that all the time, usually getting the blame for every dysfunction in the history of Western sexuality and psychology because he had issues with his own sexuality. This gets repeated endlessly among professors of numerous fields, I've found, none of whom have ever read a word of Augustine. After all, why mess up a good punchline with complicated facts and details? That's boring.

So it is with poor Anselm, too, I've found. But as I've been reading him – and more importantly, teaching him – over the last few years, I've found a thinker who is subtle, exciting, human, and complicated; not in the way of "over-complication," of multiplying difficulties, but complicated in the way that anyone trying to describe reality and to avoid "sound bite thinking" has to be complicated. I noticed that my students in engineering and the physical sciences seemed to especially like his passion for logic, and that's no surprise in the writer known as the "Father of Scholasticism." ("Scholasticism" is that medieval movement – the thinking "of the schools" – that gave rise to today's university system.) His thought is rich, urging a wonderful and useful consistency of universal scope, and that's been fun to discover. So I thought it worth while to jot down this more popular note and recognition of one of those long-gone thinkers whose words still challenge and provoke our own thinking today. (Hmm. Even all this is probably too vague and cluttered of me: I need to eat some food. So here's the cartoon version someone made, in case that's more accessible.)

Anselm of Aosta: a "formidable thinker" among the modern prophets of nothing
Nine hundred years later, his "intelligence of faith" is still the main way through "our age of the proliferation of doubts." The blistering homily with which Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, in the name of the pope, opened the celebrations for the great doctor of the Church.
by Sandro Magister

ROME, April 23, 2009 – To celebrate the "doctor magnificus" Anselm at the ninth centenary of his death, Benedict XVI sent as his delegate a bishop theologian like himself, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi. And the cardinal carried out his task in his own way. In the cathedral of Aosta, the birthplace of the saint, in the homily for his liturgical feast on April 21, he defended the extraordinary relevance of the great Anselm: "a formidable thinker" and a man of faith among the many false teachers of doubt, absolutely faithful to the successor of Peter among the many, including bishops, who left him alone. Cardinal Biffi's homily is presented in its entirety further below.

For the occasion, pope Joseph Ratzinger sent two messages: the first, to the abbot primate of the Benedictine Confederation, Notker Wolf, and the second to Cardinal Biffi, his special envoy for the celebrations. The second of these messages was read at the cathedral of Aosta on April 21, immediately after Biffi's homily. A link to the complete text can be found at the bottom of this page.

One of Anselm's savings has become famous: "Non quæro intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam"; I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand.

But even more famous in the history of thought is his way of asserting the existence of God: as the evident, undeniable equivalence of "that than which no greater can be thought" and the being that cannot be thought of as not existing. This argument was criticized and rejected by Thomas Aquinas and by Kant, but considered valid by Duns Scotus, Descartes, Leibniz, and Hegel. But properly speaking, the reformulation that Descartes and others after him made of this "ontological argument" does not correspond to Anselm's authentic thought.

According to the most attentive students of his work, for Anselm the existence of God is not something that must be "demonstrated." The evident "proof" instead concerns the denial of his existence: those who deny the existence of "that than which no greater can be thought" trap themselves in an insurmountable contradiction, cutting off the possibility of all thought.

( Read more... )

Had some fun this weekend with the first group cookout of the year at Dan and Amy's with the Harrrises as a sort of celebration for Bob being in town. Bob commuted all through coursework from Rochester, Minnesota while his wife Carmen was doing a surgical residency at Mayo Clinic, and has been more rarely able to make it to campus since they moved to Ann Arbor after they had Logan and Carmen switched her speciality to emergency medicine. He was trying to squeeze as much reading as he could into this time, since he very rarely has uninterrupted study time now that Logan has been joined by Renée as a little sister, but he made time for this evening off so that we could all get some extended visiting in together.

He and I went over to the Metro Market to grab some supplies for dinner. For a year now I have been eager to share my yummy yummy experience from last May with bison burgers, and Dan had agreed that this was the time. So I bought three pounds of ground bison from the butcher there while Bob went slightly crazy running around trying to eat every free sample in the building, of which there were many as it apparently happened to be Run Around Crazy Eating Free Samples Day. But I hadn't taken part in the preparation of the burgers in Wyoming last year, and so I think they were augmented in some way. Dan asked me if I wanted him to give these burgers some treatment and I declined, thinking that the wonderfully rich taste I remembered was bison's un-enhanced natural flavour. This was not the case. They weren't bad, they just weren't as richly flavourful as I remembered, so I was a bit disappointed, especially after having built it up for so long. (Not unlike when I showed this gang Napolean Dynamite, now that I think of it, which they didn't think lived up to my hype. Maybe I should just be more understated about my enthusiasms here.) After his running amok in the grocery, Bob settled into trying to figure out a dessert combo to bring. I remember he gave me a fabulously bland look after I suggested something so dumb that I can no longer remember it, apparently from blocking out the memory lest I shamelessly share it on an online journal. Eventually, after much consultation, he went with an Irish Creme cake and coffee and vanilla ice creams, which tastes covered everyone's particulars.

The kids were playing in the backyard when we arrived and kept a bit more to themselves, I think, than usual, not seeming to need to "check in" with the adults as often as usual, and just amusing themselves for longer stretches. Perhaps the funniest thing I saw out of all of that was when they played "fishing" for a stretch, with the little fishing rods the Lloyds have for the kids. I've been amazed before at just how long casting these things around the yard can keep them entertained (with plastic pieces at the end, like a Spiderman sticker on a plastic diamond, and not hooks, of course). This time, though, Zeke bellowed out in annoyance that Owen had "eaten my Spiderman," outraged that the pretend fish should have effrontery to eat the pretend bait!

There was a certain amount of family talk, of course, news-catching-up, and especially hearing about Bob's kids. We were also interested to hear more about Carmen's life post-residency, like her schedule, which is running the Emergency Room for 10 night shifts a month, about half of which are 12-hour shifts and half 8 or 10 – I suddenly can't remember. Ten shifts a month didn't sound that bad, but of course the shift itself is a tough one, as she then also has to try to live her days off with a family on a daytime schedule, as well as the phenomenal amounts of paperwork she has to bring home. We were all excited to hear that the whole family might come out with Bob in the later summer, as we haven't seen her in a few years, now, and I don't think any of us have met the kids.

The rest of the conversation, as usual, went all around:
• I asked around if anyone had heard of the novel my sister had just recommended to me, with its incorporation of Trinitarian spirituality in an accessible way into the plot of a thriller. Only Bob had heard of it, and wasn't sure what to make of what he had heard. That got us into a bit of talk about the distinction between the bad "Christian fiction" that's become such a pulp phenomenon and the serious and successful incorporation of Christian vision into literature, like in Chesterton, Waugh, Lewis, L'Engle, Williams, Dante, or even Tolkien.
• Bob started some talk when he claimed to be able to remember tastes very clearly, which is utterly foreign to me. I can remember what I thought of how something tasted, and the extent of how much I enjoyed the taste (or not). But to pull up the taste in memory in the way I can pull up a general image and "picture it" in my head again? No way. That could be kind of cool, of course, but if I bothered with that, I'd want a completely eidetic memory: total recall.
• Bob and Dan had fun telling their story of having walked obliviously into a gay bar during a night out when they were at the Midwest American Academy of Religion conference last month, and how they were trying to figure out why everyone in the place was staring at them and sending telepathic messages to just leave.
• Somehow we found ourselves talking at some length about the comparative oddities and disgusting realities of male and female public restrooms. In my only blatant break with Catholic social justice ethics, I confessed that I privately favoured the summary execution of those guys who pee all over public toilets as part of their lame dominance displays. On a happier note, I recalled my favourite bathroom stall on the second floor of the College of Education in DeKalb, the walls of which were entirely filled inside with amusing and interesting philosophical and literary quotations. At this point people started to get a "why are we talking about this?" look on their faces.
• Looking at a children's book Dan had brought home from the library with him (his study carrel is in the children's literature section, so Anna and Owen have come to demand a new book per visit to the university), we found ourselves sort of amused by how many century-old children's rhymes now sound kind of obscene to our ears because of changes in language, and wondering whether they could be read to the kids/if the kids could still hear them as they were meant to be heard.

Last fall, I noted in an entry that the last survivor of the Titanic was selling some mementos, trying to pay nursing home costs. I think this was the start of me getting "Titanic on the brain" in recent months, doing a bit of reading in that direction and culminating in me taking in "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition" twice in the last two months, with both Angie and Erynn. Now, I see, that last survivor of the April 14, 1912 disaster has died, drawing the borderline of lived history that much closer to our present.

Titanic Society says last survivor dies at 97
May 31, 3:40 PM (ET)

LONDON (AP) - The Titanic International Society says Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the sinking of the Titanic, has died.

The society's president, Charles Haas, tells The Associated Press that Dean died Sunday at age 97. He said she was suffering from pneumonia and her companion, Bruno Nordmanis, had called the Swiss branch of the society to say she had passed away.

Dean was just over two months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, sinking less than three hours later.

She was cared for at a nursing home in southern England. A staff nurse said no one could comment until administrators came on duty Monday.

"Titanic" stars Leonardo diCaprio and Kate Winslet donated money this month to help pay Dean's nursing home fees.


Millvina Dean, Titanic’s Last Survivor, Dies at 97
By JOHN F. BURNS for The New York Times
Published: May 31, 2009

LONDON — Millvina Dean, who as an infant passenger aboard the Titanic was lowered into a lifeboat in a canvas mail sack and lived to become the ship’s last survivor, died Sunday at a nursing home in Southampton, the English port from which the Titanic embarked on its fateful voyage, according to staff at the home.

She was 97 and had been in poor health for several weeks.

The youngest of the ship’s 705 survivors, Ms. Dean was only 9 weeks old when the Titanic hit an iceberg in waters off Newfoundland on the night of April 14, 1912, setting off what was then considered the greatest maritime disaster in history.

( Read more... )

Bob just stopped me a while ago, while I was walking over to the Gesu for Pentecost Mass, hopping out of his car by the Jesuit Residence on Wisconsin Avenue to speak a few words and to say good-bye. Bob had been in town from Ann Arbor over the last week, doing dissertation research on Paul, and was supposed to be here for another week, with us having dinner plans for Friday and probably a chess-and-wine sunset series behind Joan of Arc, as we've now done a few times. But his young son Logan was getting a new bike, he said, and he just couldn't stand being away from his kids another week. He freely admitted, with a laugh, that this was the case in spite of how much he wants to get away from them in order to work on his dissertation when they're distracting him. So at least we had a good night on Saturday hanging out at the Lloyds', which I'll journal about later, since I need to get back to my own dissertation. We also had a few shorter "study break" sorts of conversations in the Library, too, and so at least I don't feel that I completely missed him. And he might come back late this summer with the whole family, which would be great: we haven't seen Carmen in maybe three years, certainly not since she completed her residency and became an attending physician, and I don't think any of us have met Logan or Renée, their still newish little girl.

On a much lesser note, I finally had to give up hope after two months of denial, that the last of three boxes of Thomas Merton books I bought on eBay would ever show up. So I deleted the following from my Library Thing account and will have to add them to the collection some other way. I can't be too annoyed, because I really got the other two boxes of books for a song, even if I average the money for these into the equation. But it still would have been cool to round out some parts of my library with such ease. The Literary Essays are usually harder to find at a cheaper used price, and I think Langers or some high school student of mine long since have added Thoughts on the East to their own library.

The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton
Introductions East and West: Foreign Prefaces of Thomas Merton
Thoughts on the East
The Springs of Contemplation: A Retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani
The New Man
Seasons of Celebration
The Living Bread
Seeds of Destruction
The Silent Life

Holy Moses! Miguel Díaz has been named Ambassador to the Vatican! I used to hang a bit with him and his wife Marian when they ran my graduate housing at Notre Dame when I was doing my Master's degree. Just the kind of talk-in-the-halls kinds of conversations and up to their apartment once or twice. Good people. And how cool is it that Obama actually named an American theologian to the post? I've not always gotten the impression that US ambassadors there were the most informed people in the world. (Which led to my applying for the position from the Bush Administration in 2000: I never heard back from them.)

US ambassador to Vatican named
by Michael Sean Winters on May. 27, 2009 NCR Today

A dark horse emerged in the race to become U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. (See press release below.) Miguel Diaz, a professor of theology at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University, was named today by President Obama to represent the United States at the Holy See.

The immediate takeaway is this. Diaz is a pro-life Democrat so his mere presence at the Vatican will disprove the contention of some conservatives that there is no such thing as a pro-life Catholic. If he can articulate the President’s commitment to reducing the abortion rate, those in the Vatican who appear disposed to like the President will have more ammunition when Deal Hudson, George Weigel and Co. attack L’Osservatore Romano for their pro-Obama line.

When tipped off to the appointment, I ran to the library and am just beginning his book "On Being Human: U.S. Hispanic and Rahnerian Perspectives." It is a serious scholarly work, that’s for sure. Very detailed, methodical analysis, zillions of footnotes, and a wide range of sources. It is certainly not my cup of tea; it is a little too generous in its citations of liberation theologians for my more conservative theological tastes but I have to say that he does not stray into some of the sillinesses of his forebears. I think he is not quite right on the relationship of nature and grace, but I am wrestling with it.

Appointing a theologian to the diplomatic spot is certainly rolling the dice. Any Pope but especially this Pope cares a lot about theology and it won’t take GOP operatives long to find any passages that might offend. (Sonia Sotomayor is not the only one whose writings will be gleaned with a fine tooth comb!) I will point out that Pope Benedict XVI has never described himself as a Rahnerian. 'Nuff said.

+++

Dr. Miguel Díaz is a Professor of Theology at St. John's University and the College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota. He is the co-editor of the book "From the Heart of Our People: Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology" and author of "On Being Human: U.S. Hispanic and Rahnerian Perspectives", named "Best Book of the Year" by the Hispanic Theological Initiative at Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Díaz taught Religious Studies and Theology at Barry University, the University of Dayton and the University of Notre Dame. From 2001 to 2003, he taught and served as Academic Dean at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is a Board Member of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) and Past President of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS). Dr. Díaz holds a B.A. from St. Thomas University and a M.A. and PhD in Theology from the University of Notre Dame.

EDIT: ( John Allen's analysis of the nomination )

Life continues to be virtually all about the dissertation this last week. Still, the rest of the world snuck in, here and there. The hardest part has been that my brother Joe has been hospitalized since Monday with a fever of indeterminate origin that he has been unable to shake, even with the medical staff's help. Spiking up to 104ºF at times, the pain and discomfort from it has been keeping him from sleeping for very long, with a 3-4 hour stretch Sunday being the best he's done for days. That's hard going after a while. When I talked with him the other afternoon, he apologized right up front for the fact that he was sounding rather "surly." Or was it "sullen?" Daniele's managing alright, with her Dad and an aunt in the area able to help her with Nate, but of course she's concerned and distracted for Joe.

Last Tuesday Erynn and I hit the Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition at the Milwaukee Public Museum before it closed. It was again quite moving, even having already seen it once with Angie and her family back in April. But in the same way that teaching the same lesson is an entirely fresh experience with a different group of students, it was a different experience to see the exhibit with Erynn, as we inevitably noticed different things, reacted to one another's comments differently, and pointed out new observations to one another. For some reason, we kept coming back to the cumulative weight of the ironies involved in different people's stories with the Titanic, or rather all of them together as the one outrageous story of the doomed ship. We seemed to spend a little extra time on the photographs and portraits of the passengers, getting drawn a little more than I had the first time I saw the exhibit into the drama of identifying with the passengers, which is something that the exhibition tries to do right off, as they assign you a "ticket" with a name and brief biography of a passenger of your sex. You do not find out whether your person lived or died until the end of the exhibit, information that they specifically withheld through all the display until the end. This time, instead of First Class passenger Samuel L. Goldenberg, who survived, I was given Third Class passenger Frederick Goodwin, who perished along with his wife and six children. We came across a very large portrait of that family early on in the descriptions of the variety of people aboard, and you couldn't help but start to feel the personal weight of the tragedy as you looked into all their faces. You realize after a while that the exhibition is as much a memorial as anything else.

Later we wandered through the Native American, bird, Streets of Old Milwaukee, and then the insect displays, including the Butterfly Room. We spent a considerable amount of time really looking at the details of the "European Village" connected to the Streets of Old Milwaukee, and the cottages with their representations of the arts, crafts, furnishings and fashion of the places from which came the bulk of Milwaukee immigrants. We particularly loitered around the Norwegian display, while Erynn entertained and sickened me with descriptions of the gross fish products of the Norwegian side of her family, and the various things she had been tricked into eating by relatives. I was surprised that she had never been there, for all the years she had lived in the Milwaukee suburbs, so I got to have that cool feeling of having successfully showed someone something interesting about the town. There was more that looked interesting, but we had to be heading out so that Erynn could meet her coach for her afternoon training as she prepared for the NCAA Regional meet. The temperature had spiked up to 82ªF, and we had both conspicuously dressed for cooler weather, which I think drew us some funny looks as we walked passed everyone wearing shorts and t-shirts.

Wednesday I had to drop $120 on getting my upper permanent retainer fixed, which I suspect I pulled loose on a carrot. So I failed to hold my end of the conversation with an Irish orthodontist-in-training from Kilkenny who had his instruments in my mouth while asking me questions. On the way in I had run into Carol, a former student of mine who was now in the Dental program, and so I heard some of that adventure from her, and on the way out I ran into my neighbour Kelly, who was just leaving the building and walking back to the Ardmore. We hadn't run into one another for some time, and so I caught up on the news of her graduation and acceptance of a residency at UCLA where she would be doing medical dentistry for a year, with an eye toward helping people in trauma cases, which sounded very exciting and worthy. We also talked of some of the modeling she had been doing on the side for fun, which actually gave me a chance to get some recommendations for area photographers doing fashion work, as Erynn had expressed an interest in finding such people to shadow, professionally. Having done an absurd amount of musical production work while doing my doctoral coursework, it was interesting to hear Kelly's language for talking about taking up modeling over the last two years while she was doing her dental degree. I had always just tended to look at modeling as a purely economic endeavour – supermodels selling washer/dryers. Kelly spoke of it in a more artistic way: I could see that for the photographers, but I hadn't considered it from the model's perspective: that one could see the work as an artistic outlet for themselves, collaborating with a photographer in creating an image. While all of Kelly's work was lovely, I was particularly struck by one photographer who had done work with her that looked to me to be very much of a Pre-Raphelite style – but photography. I had never even conceived, really, of recreating formal painting styles in the photographic medium, and so that was particularly eye-opening and provocative, giving me all sorts of ideas of potential ways to play with photography that had never occurred to me before. Not that I have the skill or time to do such things, but that it would be interesting to see if more of that was going on in photography than I'd been aware of before.

Thursday was Francis Sullivan's 87th birthday, and so my morning was taken up with writing him a letter of congratulations as well as a bit of a report on the current state of the dissertation. In particular, I wanted to share with him how personally compelling some of his work on a theology of charisms has become for me in the last few weeks, as I have not only had to do formal work in theological writing, but also to consider the significance of related experiences in my own past. It's one thing to simply accept and recognize your past. It's another thing to have to truly assess it with academic rigour. That is, some questions in life you don't necessarily have to answer: you can simply accept something as a complex or ambiguous situation, perhaps a very meaningful one, even personally meaningful, but never actually feel compelled to sit down and work out exactly how or why it is meaningful. I had never put myself to the work of considering some of my own spiritual experiences in this way: I felt no need to. I know I'm being a bit vague, here. I'm not sure that I feel the need to go into some of these experiences in a public way, here in the journal. But in really coming to terms with what Sullivan had written in Charisms and Charismatic Renewal, I could no longer write about such things without really deciding what I thought, personally. And so I wrote to him of some of this, because when I did have to write this material, it became far more clear to me than it had simply by several readings, which is not unusual in the academic or writing life. And I felt I owed it to him to let him know that this work was having a wider impact on me than just the writing of a disinterested academic exercise. I look forward to visiting him at Boston College when this chapter is – at long last! – finished.

Saturday featured a dinner invitation from the Lloyds to help them consume a lovely piece of grilled salmon with some yummy mystery glaze that Amy and Dan had conjured up out of seven different cookbooks and an ancient Coptic papyrus Dan discovered as part of his dissertation research. The best salmon I'd ever had: not too "salmon-y," but also not overwhelmed by the glaze. A perfect balance.

Not so balanced were the kids, with whom I hung out and played while Dan was grilling. Owen got particularly goofy in pulling off the round white clumps of blossoms from the "snowball tree" in the backyard and throwing those at me, eventually going so far as to dig into the quite attractive centerpiece of a bowl filled with the blossoms that had been left on the patio table and throwing those all over me, laughing with increasing madness as he got further into his work. Anna cautioned me that if he got to be laughing too much that he might throw up, which is alarming on two levels: first that it's true, and second that I always forget this fact, and so get Owen dangerously worked up when I'm playing with him. Anna got in on a bit of the fun with the "snowball fight," but also spent some time informing me that she was almost a grown up now, since she was turning five next month. I distinctly remember considering myself a grown-up from about sixth grade onward, but this had me blinking for a moment as I tried to put myself back in my head at that age and remember how the world looked to me then.

Conversation was pretty low-key and comfortable around dinner, more on the slight news of what one another had been doing over the last week or two, and the small doings of the kids than anything else. We were hoping to all go and catch Terminator: Salvation in the evening, which Dan was hyped to see, but that depended on getting a sitter for the kids, and that was up in the air. So I accompanied Amy to the local Walgreens on a candy run for Dan, who likes to go into a theatre well-stocked with Mike and Ikes, and we talked about oddities like our personal histories of candy favourites and consumption. As Amy doesn't much care for sweets, her version was more complicated and subtle, but I'd already profited from it before when she turned me on to putting Hershey's Dark Chocolate syrup instead of the regular stuff on vanilla ice cream, so I listened closely while continuing my own futile search for BottleCaps, which seem no longer to exist in drugstores. But no babysitter was forthcoming, so Amy went ahead and sent us to the film without her, which felt rude to me, but she apparently was not nearly so invested in witnessing the mayhem as Dan was. So he gave me the low-down on his experience at the North American Patristics Society meeting the day before as we drove over, making me have to hard-shift from the subtleties of ancient theology to the non-subtleties of evil cyborg destruction in merest seconds. The Lemonheads helped, but I made a point of not eating the whole thing this time....

Art Harvey is dead. In fact, he's been dead for over a year, but I just found out when I received an email yesterday from the attorney handling his estate, because I was a witness to his Last Will and Testament. Although I scan Notre Dame Magazine for such news whenever I get an issue, I somehow missed this, and just the other day I found myself wondering how he was doing, amazed that he was still, I thought, alive, as he would now be 98.

In fact, Professor Rev. Arthur S. Harvey, C.S.C. of the University of Notre Dame, the "Father of Notre Dame Theatre," died February 4th, 2008, as I just discovered by doing a Google search. The year that I did extra Ph.D. prep at Notre Dame, extending my Master's residency, my roommate Bob and I had the extraordinary luck to land a pair of live-in jobs at Holy Cross House, the retirement and nursing facility for the priests and brothers of Holy Cross, the order that founded Notre Dame. There, in exchange for trading off nights manning the doors in the evening, we were given room and board. But it was the experience of living with these men, the youngest of whom had just turned 62, that was the real gift. In a culture that so values youth over age, it was a wonderful counter-cultural experience to live with this group, the bulk of whom had gone to school in the 1930s. And so, for an entire year, I had dinner almost every night with Art Harvey, who was one of the regulars at the table of the House Superior, Fr. Joseph F. O'Donnell, C.S.C., the man who hired us and whose table I ate at as well, and who became a particularly good friend. Fr. Art was on the quieter side, but that year, and then in the following year when I decided to take a break from higher education, I had the privilege of helping to take care of him, and so I found that I spent two years in regular conversation with him.

I felt a bit blank after hearing the news, and took a late-night walk around campus, thinking of the time I had spent in his company. Not surprisingly, we talked theatre and movies a great deal, and I caught some of the adamant feeling others have described of his determination as to what constituted great drama. What struck me perhaps the most, though, were not the anecdotes about his friend Helen Hayes and the like, but the sense that I think I fail to hear among my students and others I talk to: that drama points us toward recognizing the significance of all the moments of our lives, even those we think insignificant. Instead, I think most people see drama as "over there," as that stuff, on the television, movie screen, or stage. Maybe that's why so many people imitate movies and characters, thinking that in this way they "import" something of real drama into their lives. I've seen people pattern even their adulteries off of something that they liked in a film, little realizing that they were robbing their lives of their true drama and significance and replacing them with something even less real than a story they had watched. Even in the last, hard years of his life, when reminiscing was naturally far more common than at earlier times in his life, Art Harvey still gave off a stronger sense of being present in a given moment than most anyone I've met.

( Copies of notices and recollections I found of Fr. Harvey online )

What hit me hardest about this particular quotation was especially the last sentence, and how many people in our own country might agree with it. When I see the way in which our news media quality is going down – with newspapers folding, cutting serious staff sections like foreign correspondents in favour of infotainment or columnists whose primary skill is infotainment snarking, or with the last presidential administration planting news stories and television channels failing to check and report those sources – well, I get worried. When this last sentence sounds like current affairs, Left or Right, just as long as the right side "wins," then I get very worried.

I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war – never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.

– Adolf Hitler, secret military conference, August 22, 1939.
Quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, pp. 530, 593.

Oof. Too burned out to write out replies to comments and mail tonight. So, I jot for my memory a list of the last few days' recent notables:

Just got in from dinner over at the famed Miss Katie's Diner with Barnes after hours and hours of theology. Good talk on my dissertation, on the impact our lives of people suffering from severe mental retardation, and the theology we had heard today. Anthony Briggman's dissertation defense was this afternoon on "The Theology of the Holy Spirit According to Irenaeus of Lyons," which was entirely first-rate. That was an outgrowth of our fabulous seminar on the Holy Spirit From Second Temple Judaism to Augustine. So that was exciting to see one of my friends become "Doctor Briggman." That was followed by a further two-and-a-half hours of papers being read as a dry run for this weekend's annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society in Chicago. I didn't pay my dues this year, so I'll have to sneak in if I go down with Dan and Mike.

I had the most wonderful, long talk on the phone with Grace later last week. No prompting needed on my part, and no "yes" or "no" answers for questions. She talked about books she wanted to read from the library, birds, graduating from Daisy Scouts to being a Brownie, how long a year was and how the extra quarter-day in a year added up to leap year, and a bit about her current soccer and softball, among other subjects. Too cool. Haley was, as usual, uninterested in talking on the phone, but I heard from Leslie that Haley had been praised in her "report card" from her preschool as the only one in her class who already knew how to read. So that was kind of interesting. As I understand it, and as I think I've seen, she's shy about reading aloud, perhaps because in this – for all that she and Grace are taken for and act like "twins" – she is naturally her two years behind Grace in this skill. Grace is so flamboyant and excited about reading aloud that I wouldn't be surprised if Haley is shy about it until she can "catch up." Leslie also told me how increasingly fond Haley is of Sophie, who replaced her as "the baby," and who Haley therefore seemed more ambivalent about for a while, and so Leslie is sad in that respect to see Haley going off to kindergarten next year, as Sophie will miss her as a playmate, and likely be disappointed when both Haley and Grace return from school next year too tired to play with her right off the bat. We'll have to hope that that doesn't blunt any of the sweetness of Sophie's disposition.

A cool Friday evening spent talking and catching up with Erynn at Starbucks. As she has a strong interest in photography, I showed her my new camera, which had finally arrived that afternoon. (After the month's delay from Dell, they then emailed me to tell me it would be some more weeks before the camera would arrive. I then cancelled my order with them, repented of having anything to do with them just because they were the cheapest, and paid a bit extra to order it from Amazon, who had it in stock.) I hadn't yet taken a photograph with it, since over the years I've kind of developed this thing about baptizing a new camera with taking a particular intentional photograph to celebrate the moment. Erynn then accidentally took a photograph of my elbow before I could explain my little ritual or superstition to her. I panicked and immediately took a more "intended" picture of her that was rushed and pretty crummy. So now I hope my camera isn't jinxed.

Got distracted the other night by a long bout with Dalí, after I got contacted by a mathematics professor from Boston College, who had read (and liked!) my paper on Dalí's The Sacrament of the Last Supper and who wanted to draw my attention to a detail I'd not mentioned, which is what appears to be a hidden dove composed out of other elements in the picture, and perched, as it were, on Jesus's left shoulder. In other words, a hidden Holy Spirit image. That left me boggled, once I managed to see it, and got me thinking about that paper some more, and some of the work I'd done on Dalí's Christian art. This lead into the previously-mentioned long mental bout with Dalí as I worked through a goodly portion of the massive volume Dalí: The Paintings that I picked up the other year. Dalí's persona and hucksterism can drive me bonkers after a while, but it was so all-encompassing that I've no choice but to wade through it. Some of the obscenity seems affected that way, too, in just a Madonna, attention-gathering way, but some of it seems more important than that, a fetishism worked into surrealism, but it's hard to sort it all out. So there I was juxtaposing the spirituality of his The Sacrament of the Last Supper with the contemporaneous drawing of Hitler Masturbating. Dalí had come back into the Catholic Church about five years earlier, but that didn't stop him from being very Dalí. Toward the end of this night working on him, though, I began to be overwhelmed by the extent to which I felt he was consciously identifying with Michelangelo, and maybe even casting himself as Michelangelo's heir in the 20th century, for however much people would see a disconnect between the 16th century Italian Renaissance artist and the 20th century Spanish Surrealist. More for me to do there, later.

Otherwise, it's been a pretty steady run of dissertating, getting a lot of stuff this last week that I didn't have in my outline but suddenly realized I needed. It's been quite pleasurable, actually. I had no idea how lethargic I was with that lung/throat infection dragging out off and on from January 'til April. These last few weeks I've felt like me again, with the extra surprise of having not realized I hadn't been feeling like me for all that time. I'm just desperate to get this chapter finished now so that I can turn my attention to my two little test cases for finishing the thing. It'll feel equally refreshing, I imagine, to stop writing these huge "macro"-perspective chapters and to get to something much more precise and focused.

Just grabbed some late-night mac-n-cheese from the freezer when I untangled myself from my dissertation and realized I'd not yet eaten supper. I shut the door to the freezer and then heard what for all the world sounded like someone knocking on the door, from inside the refrigerator. My conscious mind said, "That's strange." My subconscious mind, to my amusement, had me waiting to hear "ZUUL..."

I checked. No one in there.

Good.

One of my best friends sent me an email about the Obama speech at Notre Dame, characterizing those cheering for the President – especially in cheering him after the graduation ceremony was disrupted by a Pro-Life protester – as supporting the President's position on abortion. I think that that is far too simple and reductionistic a reading of the incident, and I rejected it. I too might happily cheer as a Domer in that situation, where I – as a Pro-Life Catholic of what I will call unimpeachable orthodoxy (in a bout of Pauline foolishness and boasting) – would reject the weeks of attempts of outsiders to impose a narrative of faithlessness upon my willingness to welcome a leader, a stranger, or even an enemy into our midst and to therefore be guilty of "dining with a sinner."

My faith in the power of the gospel is such that I have no need to usurp God's prerogative for final and complete judgment of another human being, and to therefore help guarantee and confirm the intransigence of someone holding a position contrary to mine or the Church's. Such a position effectively says "no" to God's grace on behalf of someone else, which is not something for which I would want to answer to God, myself. That's not a dodge on my part. That's not me wanting to fit in with the Left culture of the American university. That's not me wanting to keep my thoughts on abortion as the ending of human life to myself. On the contrary, I feel every confidence both in the logic of that position as a far more consistent position on human rights than either the Republican or Democratic parties in America can conjure up. I just believe that, while it is my position and my duty to speak logic to my culture regarding the things of God – that is to say, to be a theologian of the Roman Catholic Church – it is not in my power to convince anyone of this crazy story (no matter that I think that the 20th century put the bulk of all the evidence in my favour). I can leave the power of convincing to God. I can think that I've figured out the truth about this question without thinking that I possess all truth. And so I can open my door to anyone, hear them out, and treat them as worthy human beings, created in the image of God. (And even argue with them, should the occasion be appropriate and should they be capable of honest argument.)

That's where I think that the sincere protestors, standing up for human rights in an authentic way, were nevertheless being short-sighted, or Christian in only a raw, beginner's way (where they weren't merely been played as part of partisan politics, which has also been a big factor here). For those at Notre Dame who welcomed the President, he had to answer to what he certainly recognized to be their Pro-Life differences from him on abortion, as the full transcript of his talk reveals. Those who would have eliminated his visit altogether would have therefore excused him from even considering his position or that of the Pro-Life community he was addressing. As I said above, they would have guaranteed and confirmed that position, forcing him into that stance. I see very little advantage in that, or for any possibility of grace or new perspectives. It is, however, a stand that can result in a satisfying amount of self-congratulation for having ably reaffirmed one's own position, to the cheers of the rest of the members of the choir. And what good is that? Even the Republicans and the Democrats can do that.

Obama calls for understanding in Notre Dame speech
Obama Receives Honorary Degree at Notre Dame, as Protests Build
Obama Confronts Abortion Debate, Urges Notre Dame Grads to Seek Common Ground
Transcript of Obama's Notre Dame Address

( Read more... )

It's been a week since my aunt Rita's funeral this past Thursday, the earliest that all the siblings could be gathered after she passed away in March. As I mentioned then, there was a certain tragedy in Rita's life as she had been a victim of PKU before the disease was understood and could be resisted. We gathered at Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Belleville, Wisconsin, where we were served admirably by the pastor, Fr. Ken Klink. Mom, Aunts Pat, Kay and Helen, and Uncle Bill were joined by my cousins Jane, Joel, Ann, her husband Scott, and me, on what was an ideal warm spring day. What was also especially cool was three women who took care of Rita at the state institution where she lived also attended. Rita was a toddler her whole life, and she was one that it was easy to dote on, in the way I've doted over my nieces in turn when they went through that stage of their lives. Even in the one time I met her, I could see she was prone to laugh, and knew some words – that she was willing to engage you, in contrast to my Uncle Tommy, whose development seems even more limited.

So there were stories and images that were new to me: Rita as a six year-old, still living on the family farm, and apparently loving nothing more than working open the gate on the yard – wired shut for her sake – and taking off laughing across the fields, with the family, completely alarmed, having to scatter to find her; that she liked to help the staff make beds on their morning rounds; that her favourite movie, for reasons no one will ever know, was Tyler Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which she would laugh her way through, over and over again. I've never seen it, but it's on my list now.

Given the kind of work I do, I also couldn't help but consider her life in other contexts, and in those ways to consider her life's meaning in our day. Despite the severe disability, I was struck by how much her life was still a good thing: worthwhile to her and of value to those who knew her. I just hear so much – particularly in that I'm around ethicists quite frequently and around people who take a strong interest in ethical issues – about people and governments arguing that it is an act of love and of mercy to euthanize or abort children whose lives "wouldn't be worth living." I suspect that it was more honest in the 1930s when it was cast in the language of Social Darwinism as getting rid of society's "undesirables." Rarely have human beings risen to heights of the doublespeak involved in using words like "love" and "mercy" instead of saying "I would find it painful, difficult or time-consuming to raise my child with Down's Syndrome." I know there were many ways in which Rita's life wasn't easy, nor was it easy for her family to have children who suffered from such disabilities. I sometimes wonder if I've been raised in an age where people expect ease of life to be a right of theirs, because it seems that that expectation drives so much of those particular ethical situations or debates. And I wonder, if it's true that we do have such expectations, why that's the case, because I don't know that anyone has ever actually had a life that was purely "easy." Certainly there have been lives free from some types of concerns, and lives extraordinarily blessed in some ways, and yet even those gifts seem to turn into burdens for all too many people: a pattern I saw all too frequently as a teacher. We don't have a right to happiness, even though I think happiness is what human life is directed toward. On this sunny hillside south of Belleville, on the family plot, we prayed for Rita's happiness. In spite of everything, those of us who are Catholics didn't think that those were empty words, or an empty hope. I just keep coming back to the one thought that this woman – whose life I found pitiable in so many ways, for all the things she never got to know or experience – in the one time that I met her, in spite of all my perspectives and thoughts, spent much of that visit laughing.

I was working today on a section of my dissertation on Francis Sullivan's theology of the charismatic movement that dealt with the phenomenon called glossolalia or "speaking in tongues." I had read my way through Sullivan's material I don't know how many times by this point, but, as is often the case, writing clarified my thinking, and I found that I was especially struck by one part of Sullivan's approach. The question at this point had to do with the fact that there tended to be an "either/or" in the writing about "speaking in tongues" done by both researchers in the scientific study of religious phenomena, and by researchers writing from a religious perspective: that "tongues" was supposed to be either an actual foreign language unknown to the speaker, or that it was ecstatic utterances, brought about by an extreme (and possibly disturbed mental state. Sullivan, I thought, pointed the way to a third option that was much more reasonable and satisfying:

Sullivan instead casts it as something more akin to daydreaming. This analogy has much to recommend it. The analogy fits comfortably with the first-person reporting and the scientific studies that agree that tongues is neither speaking previously-unknown and established foreign languages (technically distinguished from glossolalia as “xenoglossia”) nor are produced in a profoundly altered mental state. The analogy to daydreaming involves a sort of conscious relaxation into aspects of what might be the subconscious mind, with the sort of mental floating from one image or scenario to another that characterized daydreaming, but in this case is a sort of vocal “free association” directed in prayer. A specifically theological assessment of this analogy is equally satisfying, particularly from the perspective of Catholic theology, because a spiritual gift that involves the relaxation of the conscious mind into a more raw and subconscious flow of prayer would very much fulfill the Catholic axiom and expectation that “grace builds on nature.”

It is true that the factors I have thus far considered could all be described as human and natural ones. However, I am convinced that in many cases there is a genuine work of divine grace involved in a person’s beginning to speak in tongues. The act of “letting go,” of “yielding” to tongues, can be truly symbolic of a much deeper surrender to the Lord. It can be the “breakthrough” that was needed in order for the person to give his life fully to God. … I see a work of grace in the desire for such a transforming gift of the Spirit, and in the attitude of openness to the consequences which such a transformation could have in one’s life.

Tongues can still function as a significant sign of such a spiritual surrender to God, but without having to carry the burden of being the decisive “proof” that is has often been in Classical Pentecostalism. This is a necessary consequence of a world where grace builds on nature, giving the critical observer no scientific “control group” of the sort necessary in the experimentation of the physical sciences: there is no “purely natural” world to examine apart from the presence of grace.

The proof, of course, of whether a real “baptism in the Holy Spirit” has taken place will be the subsequent transformation of the person’s life, not his speaking in tongues when prayed over. The merely natural factors, I believe, can account adequately for a person’s speaking in tongues, but they cannot account for a deep spiritual renewal.

This approach to tongues that Sullivan proposes also possesses a significant catechetical potential in that it preserves an authentically spiritual reading of the phenomenon without putting the decisive weight upon it that Pentecostalism has. It is demystified in itself when it is understood in a way that describes it both as part of a normal psychology (the ability to daydream or free associate) and as part of a true spirituality that recognizes something in the spiritual realm beyond just the psychological.

An encouragement to the freedom of spontaneous prayer is something Sullivan marks as characteristic of a charismatic group. Such freedom is exemplified in this spiritual gift of tongues, but that is only a graced version of the authentic freedom being aspired to, and is not to be solely identified with such freedom and prayer.

It seems to me an elegant piece of description. It manages to both be comprehensive in dealing with the phenomenon and, to my mind, does not shortchange or dismiss either experiential or scientific descriptions or studies that have been done on the subject. And it makes it something that is easy to integrate into the variety of spiritualities and theologies in the Church without making it the "all or nothing" or "litmus test" affair that it has been in Classical Pentecostalism.

I read an interesting note from Dr. Lysaught a bit ago when I got in from dissertating downstairs at Starbucks, encouraging me to try to grab a newly-posted Systematic Theology position, and noting that:

New Zealand is supposed to be a very interesting place to live. They use the British system -- only teach theology students. That sounds dreamy. I'd say it's worth an application.

I looked at it, and briefly thought about it, but four objections came immediately to mind with astonishing power:


Not to mention everyone else I love. I was willing to consider work in the U.K., knowing that that's a seven-hour plane ride, and having had domestic travel that lasts longer, given delays and connections, but New Zealand is far enough that the trouble of the distance seemed too prohibitive.

While doing laundry, I was keeping half an eye on the BSG auction going on today of the set material on the Auction Network. I actually bid on the attractive chaise lounge that I'd admired in Baltar's house/"dream house" on Caprica. And, surprisingly, it seemed no one else was interested... except Matt Campagna, a filmmaker and host of a website called "BSGCast," who was a big Gaius Baltar fan, and was helping report on the auction on Auction Network. This was the one thing he wanted to step away from the camera for and bid on. It was surreal to hear them using my username, making fun of it and goading me to bid more. Being wretchedly poor, of course, I only could go up to $300, and so he got it for $400. And then came back to the camera freaking out that (and this was apparently something he knew from being around the props people) he had gotten a $10,000 designer lounge for $400.

Nice.

I say he owes me a speaking part in an upcoming film of his.