As usual, being a teacher of undergraduate Theology, I was curious to read an article that dealt with the conversations of an introductory sort to questions of the rationality of faith. A sort of conference or public event held in Rome on the topic brought together thinkers from a number of different fields, who presented some classic thoughts on the subjects. More importantly, for our times, they looked to dispel a number of the sorts of intellectual assumptions or bigotries against such thoughts, which are often repeated and clung to in such a way as to prevent such conversations from even beginning. I don't know if I would have followed Sandro Magister in entitling this article as "All the Evidence for God," because I certainly can think of a variety of other approaches to the question that I will toss out to students, but it is interesting to see here some of the variety of approaches that were being gathered and discussed in one event.

All the Evidence for God. An Inquiry

A selected guide to the international event on "God today. With him or without him, that changes everything." Cardinal Ruini the philosopher resurfaced. And joining him in the discussion were Spaemann, Scruton, Van Inwagen. And natural scientists Nowak and Coyne. And experts in music, art, cinema...

by Sandro Magister

ROME, December 13, 2009 – The objective was to "dispel the shadow that makes access to God precarious and frightening for the man of our time."

Benedict XVI said so in the message on December 10 that inaugurated the international event in Rome on "God today. With him or without him, that changes everything," conceived and organized by the committee for the cultural project of the Italian Church, headed by Cardinal Camillo Ruini.

Two days later, at the end of the event, Ruini was beaming. The topic was tough, and listening a challenge, with philosophers and scientists using arduous language. And yet the hall was always full, in an extremely attentive silence. 2500 people went to the grand auditorium on the Via della Conciliazione, a short walk from Saint Peter's Square, to hear about God. Much of the audience was new, and young. Visibly proud of the richness and seriousness of the things said, in a disoriented world that is thirsty for precisely this.

( Read more... )

I opened my mailbox to find this today. My sister did particularly well with this year's Christmas card. They're outrageously cute. Even Haley's "I haven't figured out yet how to smile on command" smile came out fairly cute. And while I love Grace's enthusiasm, I have to give the Squee Award to little Sophie grinning in her outfit with matching cap.

Up at 5am this morning, and now the sky over Lake Michigan is starting to lighten, with bands of deepest maroon, dusky rose, and even hints of dark green, foreshadowing the rising of the Sun.

I have to say, there's something I really dig about sunrises that is entirely different from what I dig about sunsets. Sunsets (the best ones ever were the ones over Saint Mary's Lake at Notre Dame, looking westward over the lake, with the effects probably heightened by the air pollution from Gary, Indiana) are like watching a fireworks display: all dazzling sky art. Sunrises, with the slow build-up that I'm watching now, especially with how much of the horizon I can glimpse from being up on this 6th floor apartment I call "The Ledge," are more like a symphony beginning to tune and warm up, with a sudden explosion into music. Both great, but different.

Just back in from talking the Second Vatican Council with my Intro students, and a walk back with Erynn, who I ran into outside of LaLumiere Hall, to hear her news of showing her photographs to a director at Vogue in New York in a few weeks. All good news, despite the setting. It's snowy. Windy. Cold. Miserable outside and so it's so good to be inside where it's warm.

I'm right back to listening to what was my chosen music of the morning: Bill Evan's Alone, solo piano that sounds so good with this mood of weather.

But it's time to make the seasonal shift: iTunes is now set up: Bill Evans directly into the Vince Guaraldi Trio's A Charlie Brown Christmas, which is the singlemost indispensable Christmas album, ever.

Feeling better this morning. I had thought that by Friday, I had shaken off the slightly sore throat and the general achy feeling I had had in the middle of last week. We gathered at Dan and Amy's for a Kopp's dinner, and talk that lasted so long, bouncing from one topic to another (its randomness made complete by a thorough examination of the latest in female eyebrow fashion, and by my revisiting my high school Public Speaking final by explaining the basics of constructing a nuclear bomb in response to a question from Amy), that we almost had to pass on our intention to watch the newly-released DVD of Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. But we did end up knocking off the film, and thus completing our long group BSG journey that had begun in 2004. Mike and Donna dropped me off at my place around 1:30 in the morning, coming in to a roaring party going on down the hall. I let that slide, despite living in an officially "quiet lifestyle" building, in hopes that it would pass shortly and with less fuss than if I called any building authorities or campus police. I began to second-guess that charity when I had to listen to a pile of guys standing around in the hall, bellowing at one another and at some lagging friend while they waited for the elevator, and then heard one of the young women whose apartment the party was in loudly agree with one of them that maybe they should be quieter, "because all my neighbours are assholes." I wasn't sure if she was the one I hadn't met, or the one whose misplaced package I delivered to her last month, but either way I thought that that line had earned a smackdown.

But when I woke up on Saturday, the ick was back. I spent the rest of the weekend grading and such, and just feeling crummy. My wrecked knee began to ache furiously, with the cold, I suppose, as has happened before when the weather turns colder in the autumn, making me feel like a 90 year-old sailor in a story, complaining of the changing weather that I feel in my bones. For a few years I haven't had to pull out the old cane I used when my knee went out, but I was thinking I might have to if this kept up. I capped off the weekend's joy with a summons for jury duty in the mail on Saturday. I couldn't focus very well, and so the grading went slowly.

What I did enjoy was the prep work that I was doing for the lesson I taught yesterday, which was on Ignatius of Loyola. I had the students read selections from Ignatius's Autobiography and from The Spiritual Exercises. Myself, I decided that I wanted a refresher in some of the backstory, and so I re-read parts of Jean Lacouture's Jesuits: A Multibiography (an old gift from Fr. Michael Heintz) and John W. O'Malley's masterful The First Jesuits, which I think I first picked up at the library while a student at Notre Dame. In storytelling fashion, I tried to convey some of the over-all drama of the origins of the Jesuits and their spirituality to the students in class, pointing out the connection between those events in the 1520s and 1530s and their own lives now at Marquette: without Iñigo López de Loyola going into his cave at Manresa and hammering out the spiritual experiences he underwent there into the notes that became the Exercises, Marquette University never gets founded and they never come. They never make the friends they make here, some of them never meet their spouses they meet here, never have the children they have. (I love noticing these cause-and-effect chains in history.)

So, from my backstory, we went into a new lesson, different from the way I have taught Ignatius to my Introduction To Theology students before, where we went back and contrasted Luther's spirituality (our previous lesson was on Martin Luther, reading a selection from his 1522 Preface to Paul's Letter to the Romans, which neatly summarizes his main insights) to Ignatius's spirituality, figuring out whether there were underlying compatibilities despite Luther's seeming rejection of any "work" or human activity as a precursor to the action of God's grace. The students picked up on the common focus both had to inner experience, especially: in Luther's search for authenticity beyond the illusions and self-deception that come with sin, and in Ignatius's use of imagination as a vehicle for gaining insight in mediation and prayer. I was pretty pleased with both discussions, though still wiped out when I got home. And delighted to feel better now.

One piece of wisdom that I have come to appreciate more and more through the years has been a point C.S. Lewis made toward the end of the first book of his Mere Christianity. In this passage, he was dealing with one of the major hurdles to Christian belief in the 20th century. This was the generally held idea by a number of people that Christianity had been "tried out" in history, and had been found wanting, or even had been disproved. The power of this idea was that it functioned as an assumption, rather than as an argument that required proof itself. In fact, its chief attraction is that it even excuses one from having to work through any history, data, argument or proofs.

The idea was then re-enforced through the power of being fashionable. For those embracing this increasingly-secular vision of reality, the rejection of "religion," in terms influenced by Marx or Freud, was seen as progress. For those who understood themselves as "Progressives," and want to understand themselves this way, to question anything that had been defined as progress is particularly difficult.

Realizing that the power of the intellectual cultural assumption against Christianity lay not in data and argument, but in the more psychological and sociological attraction of being "progressive" for people, Lewis centered this particular argument on that notion itself.

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

This insight is applicable far beyond the question Lewis was dealing with, regarding whether there is actually grounds to believe in the truth of Christianity. In my case, in the last week, it has been to come to the realization that the work I was doing in my current section of the dissertation has really taken me into a tangent, and a tangent ending in a quagmire, at that.

I was intending to use some of Sullivan's work on the controversial question of the meaning in Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church as an illustration for my chapter on the concept of corporate charisms. In the Dogmatic Constitution, there is a section where a new terminology is introduced, describing the Church of Christ as "subsisting in" the Roman Catholic Church. The import of these words has been debated and developed for over forty years now, with Sullivan being one of the key proponents of a particular take on the matter. It is simply just too much of a disputed question in current ecclesiology, and I cannot keep this material from growing to an unwieldy size for my chapter. It might be something I could revisit as a stand-alone article later, but I've just had to admit that it's too big and too much in a state of flux to use in the dissertation.

And so Lewis's point of wisdom on progress sometimes requiring one to turn back came to mind, and I finally summoned up the will or humility to simply flush the entire section. I hate to "lose" a month or six week's worth of work, but it had begun to grow into a tumor on the side of the chapter. Progress, I finally realized, meant turning back and taking another route.

If you've ever had the slightest temptation to read one of the professional articles I copy into my journal for my own later use, this is the one not to miss.

One of the most exciting and interesting parts of being an historian is not just learning something new about the human adventure, but in learning something new that corrects a story that you already had firmly in place in your mind. At times in these pages I have let loose against idiotic portrayals of history, such as in movies or television shows that market themselves as historical. (I remain wickedly proud of my blow-by-blow review of 2004's King Arthur.)

Of especial importance now, given its use since the September 11th attacks, is the invocation of the history of the Crusades. Like pretty much everyone else, I've had certain pictures of the Crusades drummed into my head from movies or high school world history courses that speak of them in terms of nothing but corruption. So, in that way that it's amazing as a student of history to hear the real historians overturn the stereotypes or bigotry of the popular opinions already firmly in place, it was eye-opening to read this book review by an historian of the Crusades, an to learn something not so much of the events of the Crusades themselves, but of the history of how the Crusades have been remembered, which is something else.

Most sobering to read is how, with everyone now looking for a quote from the real historians of the Crusades, no one wants to hear something that alters what they "already know". I mentioned a few points from this review to a student who asked a related question, and was quite struck by the vehemence of the student's rejection of any alternative possibilities to what he already knew, despite the fact that he is very much aware that I've done a great deal more historical research than he has. So it brought this review to mind, as I had meant to preserve it here for my own later reference.

Inventing the Crusades
Thomas F. Madden
Chair, Department of History, Saint Louis University

Review of: The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam
by Jonathan Riley-Smith
Columbia University Press, 136 pages, $24.50

Within a month of the attacks of September 11, 2001, former president Bill Clinton gave a speech to the students of Georgetown University. As the world tried to make sense of the senseless, Clinton offered his own explanation: “Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless,” he declared. “Indeed, in the First Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with three hundred Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees.

“I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it,” he concluded, and there is good reason to believe he was right. Osama bin Laden and other Islamists regularly refer to Americans as “Crusaders.” Indeed, bin Laden directed his fatwa authorizing the September 11 attacks against the “Crusaders and Jews.” He later preached that “for the first time the Crusaders have managed to achieve their historic ambitions and dreams against our Islamic umma, gaining control over Islamic holy places and Holy Sanctuaries. . . . Their defeat in Iraq will mean defeat in all their wars and a beginning of the receding of their Zionist Crusader tide against us.”

Most people in the West do not believe that they have been prosecuting a continuous Crusade against Islam since the Middle Ages. But most do believe that the Crusades started the problems that plague and endanger us today. Westerners in general (and Catholics in particular) find the Crusades a deeply embarrassing episode in their history. As the Ridley Scott movie Kingdom of Heaven graphically proclaimed, the Crusades were unprovoked campaigns of intolerance preached by deranged churchmen and fought by religious zealots against a sophisticated and peaceful Muslim world. According to the Hollywood version, the blind violence of the Crusades gave birth to jihad, as the Muslims fought to defend themselves and their world. And for what? The city of Jerusalem, which was both “nothing and everything,” a place filled with religion that “drives men mad.”

On September 11, 2001, there were only a few professional historians of the Crusades in America. I was the one who was not retired. As a result, my phone began ringing and didn’t stop for years. In the hundreds of interviews I have given since that terrible day, the most common question has been, “How did the Crusades lead to the terrorist attacks against the West today?” I always answered: “They did not. The Crusades were a medieval phenomenon with no connection to modern Islamist terrorism.”

That answer has never gone over well. It seems counterintuitive. If the West sent Crusaders to attack Muslims throughout the Middle Ages, haven’t they a right to be upset? If the Crusades spawned anti-Western jihads, isn’t it reasonable to see them as the root cause of the current jihads? The answer is no, but to understand it requires more than the scant minutes journalists are usually willing to spare. It requires a grasp not only of the Crusades but of the ways those wars have been exploited and distorted for modern agendas.

That answer is now contained in a book, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, written by the most distinguished historian of the Crusades, the Cambridge University scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith. A transcription of the Bampton Lectures he delivered in October 2007 at Columbia University, it is a thin book, brimming with insights, approachable by anyone interested in the subject.

It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. As such, the Crusades betrayed Christianity itself. They transformed “turn the other cheek” into “kill them all; God will know his own.”

Every word of this is wrong. Historians of the Crusades have long known that it is wrong, but they find it extraordinarily difficult to be heard across a chasm of entrenched preconceptions. ( Read more... )

G etting my feet back under me after a few days of yucky throat and achey back. I got my H1N1 shot last week, and it seems that half the time I get a flu shot, I seem to get flu-ey symptoms in the next week, in a mild way. The medical folks tell me that there's no causal connection of that sort, but there you go.

I remember toting around a copy of Professor Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in the spring of 1991, during my senior year of college, walking up Normal Road reading it on my way back to the Buennagel's house on High Terrace, where I was house-sitting with David, Chris and Mark for the semester. I was struck by the observations regarding the broad impact of relativist philosophies in education, and the damage these were causing under the banner of such positive impulses, such as human freedom. Even at that time, I wasn't particularly Right or Left in my politics, which remain more Augustinian or Adamsian in just a sheer suspicion of power. But I was becoming sensitive to university politics, and aware that this tended to be univocally Left, and so my critical eye started turning in that direction. At the same time, I can also remember wondering whether what I understood to be Bloom's inclination toward returning to the Classical tradition was by itself enough to hold back the tide of such self-deconstruction in Western culture. The Jewish-Christian component of Western culture seemed to me to very much played down in contrast to the pagan Greek and Roman components.

I also at this time was becoming more sensitive to the cultural politics regarding ideas such as that of "Western culture" and especially the hostility toward Western culture by what was now the center of power in the academic and cultural elite Left. I also couldn't help but notice the irony that those who most strongly opposed "Western culture" as the evil domain of "dead white males" were themselves the most Western of people. Although they saw themselves as in reaction to Western culture, and were increasingly ignorant of the actual heritage of the West, they were now pushing their own white European secularist notions onto the rest of the world in the name of Freedom, in what they – also ironically – failed to notice was probably the most pervasive cultural imperialism ever attempted. It wasn't that I didn't think there were good aspects mixed into what the Left was pushing at the rest of the world – democracy, equality for women, and so forth – but it was such a mixed bag with the dogmatic moral relativism, hyper individualism, consumerism, or the self-absorption of the sexual revolution that I didn't think that the Left's approach to "marketing" was a very useful one. It seemed to me that there had to be a better cultural alternative than that as a "moderate" position between the world-conquering hyper-Left and hyper-Right of Communism and Fascism.

So, reading Bloom was in some ways one of my earliest engagements with a "contemporary" text at the heart of current conversation, after four years of spending my time immersed in the history of Western culture, more likely than not spending my time more than a millennium back in the past. That was necessary, of course, as a kind of retreat from what I've often called "the Tyranny of the Immediate" in order to come to understand the wider context of my history and culture (or cultures, really). Therefore it was interesting to see seeker101 point out this recent essay revisiting Bloom. This gets into the ongoing question of the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges and universities, which has been an interest of mine for some time. I'm not ready to sign off on everything the Catholic Neo-Cons have to say about such things (my political suspicions working against the conservative minority, too) but I do find it more than dismaying to have students at Catholic universities leaving without ever having even gotten a sense of what the Catholic tradition in general even is. I also find it bizarre that the more we speak of valuing "diversity," the more Catholic schools feel under a pressure to philosophically conform to secular school models, as though there were only one way to be "diverse!" It would be a much more interesting (and truly diverse) educational world if America had a plethora of schools of clearly diverse worldviews and philosophies. So the article made for interesting reading, as well as a bit of a reminder to me about how many years I've put in to knowing my way around the cultural map. It's starting to add up!

The Closing of the American Mind Revisited
R.R. Reno
Feb 27, 2007, First Things

The most recent number of The Intercollegiate Review, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, features a symposium marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Has it really been that long?

Bloom's book was a real sensation and a surprise bestseller. Looking back, I can see why. The Closing was more than a highbrow attack on contemporary academic careerism (a la Jacques Barzun), a middlebrow defense of great books (a la E. D. Hirsch), or a populist exposé of tenured radicals and puerile campus ideologues (a la David Horowitz). The gist of Bloom's polemic—and the book was nothing if not a long, erudite, and hyperbolic polemic—was a brief against the cultural revolution of the 1960s. He said out loud what liberal elite culture could only regard as heresy: The supposed idealism of the 1960s was, in fact, a new barbarism. Whatever moral and spiritual seriousness the long tradition of American pragmatism had left intact in university life, the anti-culture of the left destroyed.

The result? Higher education has become, argued Bloom, the professional training of clever and sybaritic animals, who drink, vomit, and fornicate in the dorms by night while they posture critically and ironically by day. Bloom identified moral relativism as dogma that blessed what he called "the civilized reanimalization of man." He saw a troubling, dangerous, and soulless apathy that pleasured itself prudently with passing satisfactions ("Always use condoms!" says the sign by the dispenser in the bathroom) but was moved by no desire to know good or evil, truth or falsehood, beauty or ugliness.

I remember reading Bloom in 1987, feeling as though he was describing what I was experiencing as a young graduate teaching assistant. Bright, energetic, ambitious Yale students could master material with amazing speed. They could discuss brilliantly. They could write effective, well-researched papers. But they possessed an amazing ability to understand without being moved, to experience without judging, to self-consciously put forward their own convictions as mere opinions. On the whole, they seemed to have interior lives of Jell-O.

I have since learned that students are often not as they appear. Quite a number have steely souls and passionate convictions, but they have learned that the proper posture of higher education is either soft diffidence or its counter-image, snarky critical superiority. At times, a cultivated moral passion is OK, even desirable, especially if it is sincerely felt, unconventional, and asserted as an imperative of personality. An urgent vegetarianism expressed with a vehemence bordering on taboo, for example, can be quite acceptable. What is positively discouraged, however, are reasoned, principled commitments. So students who have real and serious moral or religious convictions hide them and cordon them off from their educational experience.

The need to hide convictions, and the tendency to separate conviction from education is especially true for students who have traditional beliefs. Nearly all faculty stand at the ready to critique and correct. The guillotine of professorial intervention need fall only once or twice before students realize that all truths are relative, and some are more relative than others. Usually, this has already happened in secondary school, and students come to college wise to the logic of multicultural "inclusion."

Bloom helps us see that, whether students lack convictions or disguise them, the educational effect is pretty much the same. The most important question in peoples lives—that is to say, the question of how they should live—remains largely unconnected to the sophisticated intellectual training that continues to take place in the classroom. I can often get students to "share" their moral "opinions," and often with a certain warmth of conviction. I can also get students to analyze classical arguments for or against various accounts of the good life. But I find it difficult to induce students to take a passionate and rational interest in fundamental questions. Students are either soulless creatures, or they recuse their souls from any contact with reason and argument. This phenomenon was what troubled Allan Bloom, and this is why he wrote The Closing of the American Mind.

Leaders in Catholic education should revisit Bloom's spiritual diagnosis. To a large extent, a similar worry about passionless, commitment-free inquiry dominates John Paul II's teaching on education, philosophy, and the dignity of reason. In Fides et Ratio, the late pope expressed a great concern that contemporary intellectual culture has lost touch with "the search for ultimate truth," and as does Bloom, John Paul II evokes the danger of relativism. We should beware "an undifferentiated pluralism," he writes, for an easy celebration of "difference" undermines our desire for truth and reduces everything to mere opinion.

( Read more... )

Just got off the phone from talking with Leslie, Grace, and Sophie, with Haley making her standard refusal to talk on the phone. The nieces had their cousins – the daughters of Jim's brother John and his wife Natalie – visiting over the weekend after having Thanksgiving with us up in Milwaukee. Along with remaking their beds into boats and sailing to China for a look-around (with a stopover in Hawaii), they also played hide-n-seek with the innovation of code names. I think the cousins found some use for their piano lessons, as the code names were:

Grace: Tchaikovsky
Haley: Rachmaninoff
Sophie: John Williams
Julia: Bach the Second
Kayla: Faber
Olivia: they couldn't remember

I wish I could have actually heard them addressing one another by these names. Awesomeness.

Thanksgiving went off quite well. I was pleased that Joe and Daniele were actually staying in town, over at my Aunt and Uncle's (which was the upside of her brother Chuck and his wife Patsy not being able to attend this year) and so, with a dinner invitation for Wednesday evening, I got to see more of them and of baby Nate than I would have with just the Thanksgiving feast alone. My cousin Becca, now a senior at Wisconsin, picked me up and we settled in for a pretty long, quiet and fun evening. Nathaniel is perhaps the most congenial human being ever created, and we had fun with him start to walk around a little bit (more of the "clutch, balance, and move" school of walking at this point) and play with his blocks while we all talked. Even with all the travel, and with staying up late, he didn't seem too put out by all the changed. Joe had a bit of fun with that, such as hearing Nate make three crying sounds or sobs when being put down Wednesday night, before quieting down. So Joe got up from the dinner table, quipping, "Uh-oh: meltdown!"

Uncle Bill had just retired, after giving some thirty years of service to some of the poorest of the neighbourhood to the west of the Marquette campus, which is the epicenter of the drug trade and violent crime in Milwaukee. He still has a sense of the habit of needing to work around him, and so I think Helen is being really smart in insisting that he really take some time off – a bit of an extended break – before he commits himself to some more volunteer-oriented work in the area, and to take time to really look at the variety of options before him without any self-imposed "deadline" of his own hanging above him. Seeing how much my Dad has loved getting involved in reading education with a program with elementary school kids in his retirement, I'm excited to see Bill finding something of his own that he'll enjoy through and through.

The Feastday itself seemed wonderfully full and unrushed. The nieces were a bit shy when I first arrived, more like they used to be, even the usually gregarious Sophie, hiding out from everyone with their faces in their Nintendo DS games. But before too long they warmed up. Haley was still the most shy of the lot, but still made a point of sliding up every once in a while to speak her mind or say something funny before pulling back away. Everyone later remarked at how much more talkative Grace was, given how used to her being shy they all were, and so that was cool to see that they noticed. And Sophie continued to be pretty social, once she warmed up. When it came my turn to be passed the laptop and to have a Skype conversation with cousin Ben, who was spending his second year teaching English to grade school students in Spain, all of the girls slid over to watch Ben talk when I invited them to say Hi, although none of them joined in on the conversation. Given that only Grace, and maybe Haley, even knew who he was, I figured that that wasn't too unusual. Sophie was especially interested in the boy I was talking to on the computer, though I am not sure she even entirely understood that he was a real person. So she just sat on my knee and watched, occasionally smiling when Ben waved at her or tried to coax her into speaking. Too cute.

Lots of other little details. I missed the annual post-feast walk down to Atwater Park, which I was really looking forward to, given the mild weather, because I was still talking with Ben when everyone left. By the time we were done and I had passed the computer to Bill, it was getting dark outside and I doubted anyone else would be interested in taking off in a later walking shift. For the second year in a row, Becca's UW friend Nadia from Malaysia joined us for the Feast. I ended up being able to talk with her more this time around, and so there was a lot of interesting cross-cultural kind of chat, as she answered our questions about what holiday feasts were like in her home, as well as just the ordinary get-to-know-you kinds of conversation about what she was studying, what she found interesting about the States, and the like. First-timer Jessica won the annual Euchre tournament, with Helen crowing with excitement to have come in second, which she said was the first time she had "placed" in the history of the event. It was much closer this year than in many years, with half of the family within three or five points of winning the thing. After most everyone had left, the bulk of the remainder stood around in the kitchen, talking for some time. Somehow the topic of baptism or godparents had come up in one wing of the conversation, and I was called upon to explain how this worked to Nadia. The odd story of my own baptism came up. That Bill was supposed to be my Godfather, and was still sort of counted as such, despite neither he nor my Godmother actually showing up for my baptism (him because he was sequestered with radical Jesuits at that moment, plotting to burn Vietnam draft notices, and her because of car trouble on the way) left Bill roaring with laughter as the story came out and we came to the image of infant me being left in the socially awkward position of none of my spiritual mentors even showing up. Just lots of funny family moments like that. Good holiday.

I got so busy today, I didn't realize it was the first anniversary of Chrysogonus's death until now. Lifting one up for you, Chrysogonus.


Chrysogonus Waddell, OCSO
1 March 1930 – 23 November 2008

I had a bit of pure geek fanboy fun with the preview at the end of this week's episode of Smallville. I've long been a fan of the mystical character Doctor Fate, points of theological accuracy notwithstanding. So I've been thrilled to hear that the premiere DC Comics author Geoff Johns, who wrote last year's Smallville episode that featured the live action debut of 31st century DC characters from The Legion of Super-Heroes, was going to return this year to pen an episode featuring the Justice Society of America, DC's classic (and still very popular) heroes from the 1940s. Thrilled, that is, because this includes the first live-action version of Doctor Fate.

Johns just stepped down from a ten-year run on writing JSA, during which it was consistently among DC's best titles. So, like all the fans, I was quite geeked when I heard that there was going to be some sort of Smallville-adapted version of the Justice Society appearing later in this season, and featuring characters Doctor Fate, Hawkman, and Johns' own Stargirl. This eventually turned into a two-parter, and that has in turn apparently become a first-ever Smallville two-hour movie coming in February. A first glimpse at a photograph of Hawkman from the story got on the internet this week, and added to fan excitement and speculation, given that the Hawkman pictured was one of the most faithful representations of a DC character to have yet appeared on Smallville. (Although the wings were not really big enough, I thought.)

So I was jazzed when I saw the preview aired with Friday's episode, featuring a glimpse of the mysteriously-helmeted Fate, but also a glimpse of the classic Alan Scott Green Lantern's ring, and the gas-masked visage of the Sandman, neither of whom had been mentioned to this point. An oil-painting glimpsed at the end of the preview, which featured most of the classic characters, and hinting at perhaps even more appearances, just leaves me with an absurd fanish glow.

The only thing lacking at this point is that I've never gotten around to getting a Screen Actors Guild membership, leaving me unable to have auditioned for the role of Doctor Fate myself.

I had a pleasant evening out to eat with the gang tonight, which is a rarity for us, with the kids being as rambunctious as they are at this point, with the girls being 5 years old and the boys being 3. We went out to Maxie's Southern Comfort, as a follow-up to a conversation over dinner last week at the Lloyds', where Barnes was being instructed on the eastern North Carolina version of barbecue, the vinegar-based sort, which Maxie's follows. Barnes ended up not being able to attend, with preparing for a big Graduate Admissions and Financial Aid Committee meeting tomorrow, but that didn't stop us from setting out. Renée was very oddly worked up to see me, insisting on holding my hand as we walked into the restaurant, and making sure that I sat next to her. While I was talking with Donna and Mike at one point while we were waiting for our main courses, Renée all of a sudden sort of lunged over into me, with Donna asking her in surprise what she was doing, as she sort of squirmed into my armpit. "Snuggling with Uncle Mike!" "Ah." I said back to Mom and Dad in mock relief, "That's better. I was afraid for a second she was trying to breastfeed."

The kids were all hyper and loud enough that I really didn't get much chance to interact with Dan and Amy, who were at the far side of our long set of three tables put together. I did instruct them, however, to take this rare night out with everyone as a sort of trial run and further evidence in our ongoing debate about whether or not to bring the kids along for a summer villa rental in Tuscany some time in the next few years. Mike and Donna have long since opined that that would be a great opportunity for the grandparents to enjoy quality time with the kids, while Dan and Amy have been on the fence. So that got a good laugh. My hanger steak special was alright, better with the chutney it came with than by itself, as I didn't think the marinade was terribly distinctive. The corn and shrimp cowder I had beforehand was probably a more adventurous taste for the evening for me.

I've been kind of scattered this week, I suppose. I haven't been able to concentrate very easily, other than on going over my preps for teaching and re-reading the relevant material. I got a bit bogged down in some grading because many my students seemed to have gotten flighty while I was in Canada and decided to start interpreting their writing assignments as asking them solely about their personal thoughts on a subject and to ignore the relevant reading, and so that resulted in a lot of comment-writing of a sort I hadn't expected this late in the semester.

We are peaking in the course right now, with respect to my course intentions, as we are doing our most sustained examination of the Christian understanding of God. After they've gotten so much background data from Jewish and Christian scriptures, and a sizable variety of selections of later Christian theology and spirituality, now that we are (chronologically) in the Middle Ages, I figure they are ready for some sustained exploration of the Trinity. So, for my Introduction To Theology students, that means two days to read and discuss C.S. Lewis's Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity, which is still even chronologically appropriate as Lewis's text is a masterful cribbing and 20th century restatement of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on the Trinity. Much of that work is actually given over to a discussion of spirituality, as the idea of God being three eternal Persons in perfect Relationship – hence "God is Love" – is at the core of Christian understanding of humanity and the universe, as well. Then we move on to the experiential perspective on the Trinity with a selection from Julian of Norwich's Showings or Revelations of Divine Love, to be followed with an art history angle of examination on the Trinity, focused largely on Masaccio's fresco of the Trinity in Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

I don't know that it has anything to do with feeling scattered, but I've had the most astonishing run of very vivid dreams for several nights running, after what I suppose are months of not usually remembering much or being struck by much in my dreams. I'm back to having tons of action-adventure movie dreams, with one unlikely scenario after another taking me through post-apocalyptic struggle for survival, taking on the rogue soldiers holding me and several others hostage, rewiring common household appliances into sci-fi weapons in order to stop a superhuman threat bearing down on me and my people (think the original Star Trek pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before," with Mike turning pitchers of lemonade and toasters into molecular singularity bombs), and going up against a vampire-like cult of cultural elites bent on economic and world domination (Scientology meets the World Bank, I suppose). On Monday, I was on such an adrenaline rush upon waking up (about to rush a group of three during the hostage crisis dream) that I don't think the energy faded until about the time I was done with both my classes. If I was someone who just watched movies like this all the time, I could understand it, but there you go. Keeps me laughing, just to think of it.

Had some talk with Jessica the other night at Starbucks, hearing the latest on the coming-together of the wedding plans for January and talking some about graduate school. She wants to follow up on that in some more detail, as she is sketching out what seems to be to be a personally-broadening and sensible plan to do a Master's degree in Philosophy and then to do a doctorate in Theology. Since she and Nathan together require a VA hospital for him, as he's been assigned to the VA as an engineer for the Army, and a significant graduate program for her, Marquette and Duke are current contenders for being where there are both.

I do know that one distraction I have quite enjoyed has been checking in on Jessica Watson's blog, as the Australian 16 year-old seeks to become the youngest person to ever do a non-stop solo circumnavigation of the world. In a way, as I am looking ahead to the next lesson for my students, her blog and website strike me as similar to Julian of Norwich's text in giving us an eyewitness account of a most extra-ordinary experience. There's a very good chance I will never become any better sailor than I am, having only once helped sail anything more complicated than a Sunfish, and all of that on Midwestern lakes. But I recognize the attraction. And to read the earnest account by this young woman who clearly loves everything that she's doing in her adventure: that's still a notable experience for me, despite being entirely vicarious. She's one month into an eight or nine-month journey, having made it from Sydney to just crossing the equator yesterday, and I am quietly enthralled to be watching, thanks to the modern communications miracles of satellite internet uplinks.

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

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

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

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

( Read more... )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off to bed. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little space in between: preliminary notes on Before Sunrise

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


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

The answer must be in the attempt..."

-- Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise

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

( Read more... )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus entered the Freeks.

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

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

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

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

George and the Freeks: Greatest Live (FREE DOWNLOAD)

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

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

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

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

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

And so: The Great LOMC Prairie Fire of 1988.

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

This particular hot day, in July, I think, we were up on the roof of Hillside House, replacing shingles or something of that sort. It was late morning, if I recall correctly, with the day having not yet the fullness of its considerable heat. Northern Illinois had been suffering from the Drought of 1988, and everything was growing brown and dead, so much so that you were starting to get that horrible dead dust rising up as you crunched your way across the lawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By ROB GILLIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pope has become an Italian story

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

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

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

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

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

Two points probably help explain this lack of global interest.

( Read more... )

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

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

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

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

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