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

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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."

Keeping with my own little tradition:

MICHAELMAS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER

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

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

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

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A lot of people would probably pick Michelangelo's David as the perfect male form, if asked. I cannot think of any more classic and universal image of the male body, unless it were Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. I had so been saturated with pictures of the David growing up and in studying art that I really wasn't too concerned with seeing it when I was in Florence, and I was therefore unprepared for how different and overwhelming the experience was in person, as I've related elsewhere. I'm a big Michelangelo fan, and I cannot fault anyone who would feel that the David is the greatest representation of the male form. But if that perfect form could then perfectly move....

Tonight as I sat down to a dinner of a chicken breast and some veggies in a light sesame sauce, I flipped on Turner Classic Movies to see if there was something there that would distract me while I ate, and I discovered that they were showing Summer Stock, which I had never seen. For my money, there is no greater representation of the beauty of the male form than Gene Kelly doing some utterly casual-looking and seemingly-improvisational piece of dance....

A CNS story on the maintenance of the Christian catacombs around Rome that caught my eye as I just got back in. I enjoyed a long evening tonight with Dan, Amy, and Pat, Amy's mother, turning the conversation away from dissertating and just playing a recent incarnation of Trivial Pursuit, after enjoying a fashion show of Amy's dress purchases from Macy's for her upcoming business trip, and Dan's surf and turf experiments of bacon-wrapped fillets, pan-seared scallops, spinach, risotto, zucchini and Pinot Noir. (Followed by a Chianti, followed by a Sprecher's Root Beer, followed by the sherry Dan got for their anniversary....)

Indiana Jones and the Christian catacombs? Not quite
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Sometimes a job is just a job, even when from the outside it looks like it involves the stuff of an Indiana Jones movie.

Fabrizio Bisconti is the newly named archaeological superintendent of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which oversees the upkeep and preservation of 140 Christian catacombs from the third and fourth centuries scattered all over Italy.

Most of the time, he said, the job is just work and study.

Staff members can spend a full month with surgical tools and cotton balls cleaning a third-century sarcophagus, but then there are those stunning, shocking, awe-inspiring moments of discovery.

Mid-June brought one of those "wow" moments when restorers cleaning a ceiling in the Catacombs of St. Thecla found what turned out to be the oldest known image of the apostle Paul. The fresco was hidden under a limestone crust.

Bisconti said treasure hunting and exploring were not his passions as a youth; he was into literature. But as a university literature student, he took an archaeology course "and fell in love."

"Certainly, there is great emotion when you find something new, but for us archaeology is our job, the subject of our studies," he said.

Bisconti said most of what he and his fellow archaeologists do all day involves very slow, painstaking precision care of the oldest intact Christian monuments and artwork.

Very little remains of any Christian church built before the fifth century, but the 140 catacombs in Italy offer clear evidence of how early Christians worshipped, how they lived and, especially, what they hoped and believed about death.

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Friday ended up being a pleasant distraction from the current state of my days. My work on the fourth chapter of the dissertation is right now in more of what I'd call a "reading and mumbling to myself" stage, prior to what I think is going to be an explosive bit of writing. I have moved from what my director calls the "what Sullivan thinks" stage (Francis A. Sullivan, S.J. being my main conversation-partner or subject in the dissertation) to the "what Novak thinks" stage. As such, I think I'm going to alter my writing habit from a slow and point-by-point, heavily-annotated style of writing, to actually writing a fast, almost stream-of-consciousness first draft of this chapter. After that, I can go back and "fortify" it with closer attention and referencing of my reading in this direction, but I have a particularly "original" argument to make in this chapter, and I think that it might be interesting or useful to just get all that's stewing in my brain out in one great effort this time, and then move to order it into a greater academic format.

But, as I said, Friday proved to be an agreeable shift from that line of meditation. My former student and current friend Jessica and I had been playing tag for a few weeks about trying to set some time together to catch up at greater length. That's been complicated by her summer school and work schedule, and my frequent absences of late in going down to visit family. When we decided to meet for lunch, postponing from Thursday to Friday in order to accommodate a particularly heavy bit of reading for her work in philosophy of crime and punishment, we ended up opting for the classic Milwaukee venue of lunch outside down at Alterra on the Lake. There was a bit of lunch rush when we got there, a little after noon, but we manage to grab some outdoor seating looking over the marina, and settled in to enjoy the food, light, air and company. So we talked about some of the expected topics: her and Nathan's upcoming wedding, their marriage prep and the state of marriage prep in the Catholic Church in general, what she was doing in her current course, Fahey's reaction to my most recent dissertation chapter – that sort of thing. We talked a bit about our current re-reading of The Lord of the Rings (I had just finished re-reading it the other week, she was in the midst of it, when she could get past her school reading), and about the re-reading of books in general, as I also mentioned re-reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince prior to the movie adaptation of the book coming out this week. I peppered my end of the conversation with an old story or two that came to mind that I thought were funny.

We had also gotten onto a bit of a run about Milwaukee architecture, as we came walking down to Alterra after going past the new hi-rise condominiums and a few of the grand old houses on E. Lafayette. We got back onto this as we climbed the hillside back up to Lafayette, after Jessica expressed interest in walking over to Villa Terrace, which she had never seen before, or heard of for that matter. I was particularly interested in her take on the "Italian-ness" of the Villa, given that Jess is a native of northern Italy, despite her American citizenship, as her Mom teaches at a school on an American military base about 90 minutes north of Venice, which is where Jessica lived from when she was four until she started at Marquette. So we talked about the features of the houses we were looking at, and I particularly enthused about some of the large porches on them – being a big fan of porches: my undergraduate mentor Marvin A. Powell and I once identified the screened porch as the high point of human civilization – and I compared what we were looking at to the architecture of the houses I saw in Tunisia, designed as they were with balconies and deck spaces to be open to the movement of the wind along the Sahara frontier.

We found one house, old, stern, and battered-looking, set amid an overgrown yard on the corner of Lafayette and North Terrace Avenue that we decided looked fabulous for the traditional haunted house I loved in spooky stories from grade school. There were still some "improvements" that needed to be made, we decided: the house next door's wrought-iron fence should be placed around this house and made two or three times as high, and it needed to be set further back from the street. Jess thought it definitely needed a broken window or two. I was about to go up to the porch, and maybe peer into a window or two when we discovered a Mercedes parked in the driveway around the side of the house, which surprised me, given the state of the lawn. I would have thought the neighbours in such grand old mansions would have raised a ruckus about keeping things more uniformly trim. We then wandered into Back Bay Park, which I never had done, stopping to look out at a bench set in a good spot giving an overview of all of Milwaukee Bay, watching the boats and discussing the virtues of my new camera and digital cameras in general. When we wandered on to look at the houses along the park, an elderly man who owned the one right on the bluff overlooking the Lake, which we were most interested in, stepped out not to yell at us, as we feared, but to give us an architectural history of the place from its initial construction in 1896 and the alterations made to it in the 1920s. He got most excited raving about the view of the moonrises over the waters that he had been enjoying the last few nights, and I was pleased to discover that such a place belonged to someone who so enjoyed it. He then discovered that he had apparently locked himself out of his house, and while Jess and I tried to coach him on where we thought we were hearing the jingle of keys – he was rather hard of hearing and never understood any of our suggestions – he continued his running commentary on the development of the house, finally finding his keys in the door, where he had left them as he unlocked the wrought-iron outer door when he stepped out to speak with us. It was priceless in a sort of kindly, polite, "Mr. Magoo" kind of way.

When we got to Villa Terrace, Jessica seemed quite struck by it, which of course pleased me in the "I'm glad I didn't waste your time" sort of way. The woman selling admission to the museum gave us the quick overview of the history of the place, and we decided to step outside into the gardens before taking in the current exhibition. Now we got to talking a bit more about what Jessica might do with Theology after graduation and after the wedding. Nathan, her fiancé, is an Army engineer who just finished his ROTC training along with his education at Marquette, and who is working in the Veterans Administration hospital system. This year, conveniently for them as Jessica goes into her senior year, he is stationed in Madison, and next year they will head out to Portland, Oregon. That opens up the possibility of doing something at the University of Portland, which is a CSC school, like Notre Dame: founded by the Congregation of Holy Cross (Congregatio a Sancta Cruce). I met a lot of guys from Portland when I lived at Holy Cross House at Notre Dame, and so I talked about my general feel of the community and what possibilities might be there (as I don't actually know anything about a Master's program there). My classmates Brett and Theresa are also living there now, and actively involved in local ministry, and having mentioned that I could make an introduction to such good people, I told Jess a bit about their story, which was one of the epics of our time at Notre Dame. Jessica talked about a Bioethics program that she was considering being able to do long-distance, which she described as being "as practical as she could stand."

So we leaned on the rails of the terrace and talked "shop" for a while, although I took time to tell her the story of taking aristotle2002 her when he visited and his creating a minor stir among LJ friends by describing the Villa in the pictures he posted as "Mike's place." Most interesting for me to hear was her realization that Theology simply excited her much more than Philosophy did (she's doing a double-major), and that that seemed to provide a certain clarity for what she might want to go on to do. I don't think that everyone who becomes literate in Theology ought to become a theologian: what good would that be? But I got big points in the Department for "discovering" Jessica her freshman year in my Introduction to Theology class, which she was taking as part of her standard Marquette undergraduate requirements during her first semester at the University, without knowing at all that she had been blessed with a profound talent for the reflective sciences. I can remember how odd, and sort of thrilling, it was for me as a sophomore, when Albert Resis became the first of the History faculty to talk to me about doing a doctorate. It's an odd thing, to see a beginner and to realize that they have that sort of talent in them. So, even moreso now that Jessica has become a good friend, I'm quite interested in seeing whether she might go the distance in the field, although I understand perfectly well that it's also a Good Thing if she simply becomes a "civilian" in some other discipline or life-plan who just happens to be exceptionally talented and literate in theology, because certainly a field like ours that has been so popularly marginalized by the Enlightenment over the last 200 years, also just needs such people as part of re-creating a popular literacy and competence. (I'll forego here my general spiel about how the Enlightenment's attempt to "free" people from Theology has simply resulted in a theologically and philosophically naive population instead: people far more likely to be taken in by bad theology or anti-theology than to be sound and free thinkers.)

Ach. This is getting longer than I expected: perhaps I'll come back and do another entry to talk about the later conversation, our look through the Jon Michael Route exhibition, "For the Love of Metal," and then my evening over at the Lloyds, catching up with them for the first time since I'd gone to visit family (other than talking with Dan at the library last week) and enjoying the presence of Barnes, who was in town to see his granddaughter and harass Mike and Dan for drafts of the first chapters of their dissertations on second century Name Christology and the Trinitarian theology of Novatian, respectively. Or maybe not: I'm still being pretty distracted by my own reading (and mumbling).

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

The Pauline Chapel Reopened for Worship. With Two New Features

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

by Sandro Magister


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

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

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

But at least two new developments must be noted.

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

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

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

by Sandro Magister

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Too funny.

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

So it goes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, at long last, I finally caved into the reality that my digital camera has given up the ghost and so I bought a new one. I followed the advice I spew out at everyone else and headed over to Imaging Resource to check out the current options. I very much liked my experience with my Canon PowerShot A70 from 2003, and so I went with the Canon PowerShot SX110 IS, and I am very excited to especially take advantage of the image stabilization technology that has developed since my last camera, as well as the increase in memory capacities. I just spent quite a bit less for two 16GB cards than I did for the two 2GB cards I bought for the last camera. I should have everything before Sophie's second birthday party on the 19th, so I can get back into the habit of capturing all the cuteness of the nieces.

Thinking cameras reminded me of a conversation I had with Erynn at the Art Museum last week that I didn't recall as I was typing up my account of the show. As we were looking at Lievens's Still Life With Books, we got to talking about photography as an art, getting towards something like an idea of what distinguished those photographs that were art and those that were more simply "snapshots," or visual records or mementos. It got to be a question of whether black and white photography was often more artistic – not in the sense that black and white is more affected or "artsy-fartsy," but that black and white photography might lend itself to a greater intrinsic artistic capacity – because it is less realistic. In looking at the Still Life With Books, as we were, and trying to understand why it appealed to us so greatly, we were considering the sheer capturing of an image as art. In painting, there is an artistic task or interpretation in capturing and creating colour, even in trying to achieve a pure realism. In photography, with good colour photography, there is perhaps too much a capturing of the pure realism: so much so that only the capturing itself – the framing and the moment – is what is available for artistic creativity. With black and white photography, we wondered whether perhaps it was the that very lack of realism (in that reality is anything but colourless) that gave a greater potential for the artist to actually achieve something with photography.

I don't know that I'd take a bullet for all that, but it had me thinking. And still does.

Also worth noting from this weekend was my answering the phone yesterday and hearing nothing but sustained gabbling and gurgling on the other end: Nathaniel. Joe and I had been playing phone tag for a few days, since I had tried to catch him on the phone for his birthday, and now he was getting back to me successfully, but letting Nate have the first go because he was vocalizing so much. Too cute. Apparently the young titan is cutting more teeth and is drooling like crazy, but is still very chatty despite the discomfort. So we caught up on such news, as well as other details like Nate's continuing fascination with nibbling at his toes, which is a kind of flexibility I can only dream of.

Sunday at the Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum with Erynn was rather spectacular. It wasn't that either of us found him or even his period or style to be a new top-flight favourite, but simply that Erynn turned out to be a fabulous museum partner: that is, we moved at about the same speed through the exhibit and the conversation was just the right mix of really paying attention to the art and then tying it back to Everything Else. My theory is that you tend to have Fast Museum People who want to zoom through everything, eyeball it, and just get a sense of the whole, and that you have Slow Museum People, who want to look at everything, read the captions, stop and think about it as you go along, and even double back for second looks and comparisons. I knew that I was the latter, and that when I've been with the former that they find Slow Museum People to be excruciating. Erynn turned out to have pretty much the same pace and have as much to say, which makes for good company in something like this.

We headed down to the Museum in the early afternoon as she kept me alternately laughing and cringing with the story of her telling off Persistent Drunk Guy when she was out dancing the night before with friends, which, I suppose, sounded extra horrific to me just because guys generally don't have to deal with that kind of being hit-on. We stashed our coats and such in the locker room and took a few minutes to start merging into the crowd at the exhibition, with me probably being too worried about watching out whether she was going to be Fast Museum Person and get impatient with me. Once that became a non-issue, we found ourselves just getting into the paintings themselves, although I took a minute to enthuse when she mentioned that she would be taking an Art History course next semester. I mentioned both about how much that study had added to my own work, and also speculated that that more specific familiarity with the sweep of art history would give her a different eye behind the camera, empowering her in being attentive to aspects of people that you just cannot see unless you're more sensitive to how other people, elsewhere and elsewhen, have pictured people.

There seemed to be a mix of roughly chronological and thematic organizations to the whole exhibit, and it was some of his youthful stuff that got us first talking a little more intensely, where there was a bit of bawdy or moral themes. Allegory of the Five Senses got us picking up where our conversation had ended last week, on just starting to notice the different concepts of beauty in different cultures or times. Although the comments by the picture noted that this was a common motif for a moral lesson about indulging the senses, this particular painting didn't seem to be engaging in quite so stark or obvious a moralizing task. Similarly, Youth Embracing A Young Woman, with Lievens's young painter friend Rembrandt apparently acting as the male model for the work, also presented us with a similar picture of beauty and here, also, without any overt moral statement in the text. In fact, I thought there was a real tenderness in the Young Woman's hand-holding with the Youth that didn't make the picture necessarily seem one about the temptations of 17th century Dutch clubbing. We were also struck by how un-youthful these "youths" seemed to us, and that got us murmuring back and forth a bit about what might have been considered youth at the time, in contrast to our own time and culture's tendency to try to perpetuate youth, both for something useful like extended educational opportunities, but also for less attractive reasons, like the inevitably-doomed-to-fail cult of youth we have today.

Up until that point, it had been more the technical stuff that had been grabbing our attention: the way he captured like on metal, gems or buttons, or on the brocade of a rich piece of clothing, or perhaps the authentically diaphanous look to a woman's headscarf. We both got taken right back into that sort of thing and away from the question of youth or beauty by a large Still Life With Books that we both found oddly electrifying, with the both of us staring at the same corner and commenting on the same details: the light on the winecup, on the golden paten holding the bread, with its eucharistic themes. This was one of several Lievens paintings in the show that had formerly been attributed to Rembrandt, and it was strangely compelling for such an ordinary subject.

This was the best scan of the painting that I could find online, but most of these copies of the paintings don't do the delicate and precise uses of colour justice at all. In fact, in reading an Amazon review of the show's catalogue, that was one reviewer's complaint about the text: that the quality of the shots left much to be desired. This is particularly unfortunate in a show whose principle task is supposed to be the revival of the reputation of a painter who was unfairly diminished next to that of his friend and collaborator, Rembrandt. So we stood there peering at the detail work on this particular painting for a bit, while I kept an eye out for the attendants, who were awfully skittish about anyone who was getting too close to the paintings.

Another painting that caused us to pause and talk for a time was Samson and Delilah, which was near another Old Testament femme fatale in a painting of Bathsheba Receiving David's Letter, and which brought us back to the cultural concept of beauty. Too look at a 17th Century blonde, Dutch Bathsheba, well-fed and well-off in the vision of that culture was to reimagine the story in a way that I never had. This got us talking a bit, too, about re-conceiving the stories of the Bible in your own ethnic and cultural vision. You sometimes hear people giving paintings like this a lot of flack nowadays, reading back 20th century racism into older art at the sight of a blonde, blue-eyed Jesus, while at the same time glowing with approval should they observe a red-cloaked Masai warrior Jesus. The first is racism, the second, cultural appropriation. I find this more than a bit irritating in that it's simply bad history to export more recent history and to superimpose it upon the past, although I would be the first one to raise an eyebrow at that blonde, blue-eyed Jesus in a piece of art from our post-20th Century context. Now, particularly with contemporary concern to portray Jesus's historical and Jewish context accurately, and in light of Modern racism, such a European cultural appropriation of the Incarnation just simply has too many political hurdles to overcome, and would likely lose whatever honest artistic attempt might be being made into suspicion. So to look at this 17th Century Dutch appropriation and adaptation of an Old Testament story, innocent of at least our later Modern issues, was a bit of a mind-stretching moment. Erynn got to talking here about working on both sides of the camera, both in trying to take advantage of certain particular characteristics in someone, and having capitalized on her own look, which has been taken for virtually everything on the planet. I finally conceded some of the last, not having seen earlier how she could be taken to be Asian, for example, but seeing how, in presentation or context, she really had a distinct ability to look like our whole world. In light of Rembrandt posing for a number of paintings thus far, we got to talking about how a conscientious model can really be a collaborative artist working with a painter or a photographer, although she admitted that that was probably a minority concept among models in our contemporary modeling industry. I hadn't really thought of it in that way before. Knowing my own experiences in the recording studio, and what a creative process making a recording of a song is, and how it's an experience shared with the writer, the band, and the engineers and even the crew, gave me a window into imagining how much of the art we were surrounded by – and all the rest I'd ever seen – might have a creative part of so many other people's stories, beyond whoever's name was on the work.

We stepped into the next room and I was flabbergasted. This section was devoted to portraiture, and I could scarcely believe that these pieces were done by the same man whose work I had been examining up to this point. As we went on, we found in the commentary that this was something that had been noted about Lievens's work, and maybe even been a complaint: that there did not seem to be one particular style that was his. Instead, he adopted a variety of styles, depending upon his intent. The living realism of his portraits took me by surprise.



As we looked at these, Erynn and I talked some of the differences between "raw" photography and the ability to "Photoshop" pictures, debating quietly which of these two that the art of painting was more like, even with the obvious and more Photoshop-like control that a painter exercises over the execution of their image. Nevertheless, despite that control, there was still the need in painting to "capture" the person, to somehow bring together that combination of technique and vision that in some way makes the difference between a great portrait and just an ordinary picture of someone. She was just as much at a loss to try to explain that difference as I was, though I certainly can tell when I've captured something of that sort: more rare, precise and exciting as it is.

The next section of the exhibition had more pictures of a sacred or moral sort, illustrative instead of portraiture. Nothing here much grabbed my attention or imagination. The Lamentation of Christ was more interesting to me in simply layout and execution than really grabbing me for its ability to capture the mood after the crucifixion of Jesus. It nowhere near affected me as much as Michelangelo's Florentine Pietà that I saw with Erik in Florence in 2006, or as much as Michelangelo's St. Peter's Pietà. Somewhat more interesting was Lievens's Christ on the Cross, painted, if I recall correctly, in competition with a similar piece by Rembrandt for a commission. Erynn picked up on something Lievens was doing with the light in this piece that I hadn't noticed, drawing my attention to the light in the upper left of the painting. She speculated on this for a moment before asking me what I thought it might mean. Once she got my attention on it, I thought that it was more likely that this was a fairly standard convention for such a scene – that this was Lievens's attempt at symbolizing the presence of God The Father in the crucifixion: a light "from above" that was mirrored by the light around Jesus's head, as sort of a more naturalistic "halo" in the scene, where this light in both locations indicated the shared divinity of Father and Son. I compared it to that striking shot in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ where, after Jesus's death, the camera suddenly shifts to an angle unprecedented and surprising in the film, that "God's eye" view looking downward upon the scene of the crucifixion, where a first drop of rain falls, tear-like, from that viewpoint onto the scene below.

With this painting, as with many others throughout the exhibition, there was next to the Lievens piece a small print of a similar Rembrandt piece, often done in competition with one another over commissions, or simply just riffing off of one another's ideas. Unlike this Lievens crucifixion scene, where Jesus has already died and been stabbed in the side, Rembrandt's painting shows Jesus still with his eyes open, and his face animated by the pains of the Passion. Erynn put her finger on a commonality running through all these comparisons which I hadn't noticed: the Rembrandt pieces were all more animated. Their emotions and actions were all more overt, which might be a better way of saying what she was noticing than just to call them more "animated." Once they were placed side-by-side, she consistently found the Rembrandts less appealing because of their comparative lack of subtlety. There was a greater sense of "playing to the crowd" in them, of a drama slipping toward melodrama, and I found myself agreeing with her. I made the comparison to the difference between Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's novel itself (which, to my dismay, she had never read). Wherever Tolkien is subtle and builds tension or meaning slowly or delicately, Jackson is content to shout BOO! Some of those adaptation decisions might have to do with the limits and pacing of film compared to that of a novel, but oftentimes it's just a cheapening. I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say that Rembrandt was consciously "pandering to the crowd," but once Erynn made her case, it became harder not to make such comparisons in favour of Lievens as we went along.

A little later we found ourselves sitting for some time in front of the nearly eight-foot high canvas of The Sacrifice of Issac. I think that this was another fairly recent discovery or identification as Lievens's work. I believe it sold in 1996 for just under $22,000, so it is strange to think of an Old Master that I could have conceivably purchased, though I have to wonder how I would arrange my living room around it had I done so. This small copy of the painting is the only online image that I could find that reasonably came close to the colours as we saw them sitting there, and to the crispness of the image. Larger images online were strangely dull, amounting to a horrible distortion of the painting. The first thing that we found ourselves commenting upon or drawn to was simply the colour of Abraham's robe: a rich burgundy that we both found attractive.

I razzed her briefly when she asked for a reminder of the story – "That was in one of the first lessons in my class!" – forgetting, for the moment, that that was true of my Intro course and not of the Theology Through The Centuries course she took with me last spring. Mercifully, however, she didn't pick up on that, either, as I moved on to the story itself, or otherwise I would have been very thoroughly double-razzed in retaliation. But once I refreshed her memory about the story of the so-called sacrifice of Isaac, since it never actually happened, we spun off from the story itself, getting all intertextual. I talked about the symmetry that Christians get from the story, of how Abraham's faith and willingness to even offer on the Mountains of Moriah his only son to the mysterious God who spoke to him would be answered in turn by God's offering of Jesus for humanity on those same mountains centuries later when the city of Jerusalem now occupied them. I also mentioned the seeming barbarousness of the Jewish story, of how that had been highlighted for me when I was an undergraduate, reading a short story included with Goodbye, Columbus in a collection by Phillip Roth, and the impact this vision of Abraham through secularizing Jewish-American eyes had on me, in the way that it brought to the fore the need to read the biblical text with sympathetic, historically-informed eyes, and not to subject it to my own contemporary prejudices. We stared into the painting, finding ourselves taken with the sharp, dynamic character of his face, and the surprising – virtually unprecedented, from what we had seen – splash of colour in this one, with rare blues as part of a rainbow sunset or sunrise on the horizon in the background, wondering if this could be an allusion to the covenant with Noah. Again we looked at a print of a parallel Rembrandt text, and Erynn firmed up her thesis in comparing the two.

We began to speed up a bit toward the end. My Mom and aunts and uncle had warned me the night before that the exhibition was a long one, and it was even longer than I had thought from looking ahead, as there was more rooms to it than I had been able to see from earlier vantage points. As we got toward the end, I asked her what had been the piece that had stood out or grabbed her the most. She got a thoughtful, weighing sort of look on her face and lead me back through the exhibit, musing on The Sacrifice of Isaac and Samson and Delilah briefly, but pretty quickly settling on, and leading me straight to the Still Life With Books. I was surprised, in seeing that her choice was such a technical-seeming one, while we were mostly surrounded by narrative and portraiture, but I certainly sympathized insofar as something in the work had leapt out at me, too. Naturally, she turned the question or challenge right back at me, as I knew she would, though I slightly dreaded it, because I wasn't sure how I was going to answer. As I said, I too had loved something about the Still Life With Books, but I went back deeper into the show, eyeballing some of the portraits, and thinking through a few of the ones we had especially talked about, but I settled on The Penitent Magdalene as my choice, though in way I'm not even sure if I chose correctly. But that one had had us stop for a while, as I was so struck by such a different take on Magdalene. With the long history of how Mary Magdalene had been conflated with other figures in the New Testament, particularly the unnamed penitent woman who anointed Jesus or the woman caught in adultery, Magdalene has gained an importance in the history of Christian art – and presumably in Christian devotion – that is quite distinct from her historical significance. I mentioned this to Erynn when we had originally looked at the painting, for which I could only find this tiny copy online, and spoke of the way she is usually portrayed in art, with something of the flamboyance of one flaunting her beauty, so as to identify the character with this conflated/fictional past. Oftentimes she's stunning (as she is in The Lamentation of Christ, which we saw just a little farther on, presuming that the dazzling blonde woman is supposed to be her), and I first brought up Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in this context, with its full use of this tradition of so treating Mary Magdalene, with Monica Bellucci cast in the role. What so struck me here was to see such a different version of this Magdalene: elderly, weathered, worn and poor – a sort of vision of her as one living a monastic discipline in later life. Here she is, as an image, unaffected and lacking the usual accoutrements of the temptress, utterly human, with a life no visibly different than anyone else's, other than that which we know to be hers by virtue of her story. It was a new vision of her, making me look at the story – both historical and otherwise – with new eyes and imagination, and that, I figured, made it in some ways the work that had hit me the hardest. It might be technically or visually one of the more unremarkable, but it certainly grabbed me as an exercise of the painter's spiritual imagination.

One thing we noticed in the last few rooms, even though we were moving at a faster pace was this portrait, identified as another self-portrait of Lievens, but here showing him in his 40s, less fleshy and youthful than the striking self-portrait that, in my set of portraits above, is the middle one in the bottom row of three, in glowing browns. Here is where Erynn and I made our significant contribution to art history, should anyone ever know of it: comparing this self-portrait to the one above (which we had in the brochures in our hands), we noticed that in this mid-life self-portrait, not only has Lievens lost some of the youthful roundness to his face, but he has also lost the deep brown of his eyes in his 20s, as in this portrait they were now a deep blue. So, the experts may have identified these two paintings as self-portraits by the painter, but Erynn and I spotted this oddity, exchanged a wry glance, and quietly concluded that something in that story has got to give.

We headed out the door as they were shutting the place down, laughing about some story one of us had told the other, and decided as we crossed the footbridge over to Wisconsin Avenue to go ahead and grab dinner. I made a few suggestions, and she opted for Hotel Metro, seeming to be most intrigued by my enthusiastic descriptions of the apple pie and cinnamon ice cream dessert I favour there, though neither of us ended up opting for that. I had never seen the place so quiet as it was, though I was usually there when there was a lot of resting there by the clubbing crowd on late nights and not at a little after 5pm on a Sunday. She grabbed some kind of gumbo they were offering with alligator, apparently, and slipped me a bite of that so that I could add another strange and odd item on my list of things eaten. I settled into a pork tenderloin, and took my time through that, declining dessert while she grabbed their tiramisu.

And so we just had a lot of random dinner conversation, starting with the discovery that she had no idea where we were. I have pretty much concluded that there's two kinds of people: people who get directions and always know where they are, and people who do not. My Mom is the former, and my Dad the latter, and mercifully I inherited my Mom's talent here. Erynn was the other sort, and so I was amazed by the fact that she was completely lost after we had walked all of one block of north of Wisconsin Avenue, which is the straight drag directly from campus to the Art Museum. That got us talking about personality traits, I think, about things like Meiers-Briggs exams in the such, and we discovered when she was talking about how much she had enjoyed some down time when her roommates were out of the apartment that we were both extroverts who needed a lot of time to themselves, and how it had been a bit of a surprise to even discover that that was a category that made sense. I had always thought of myself as an introvert until I first took the MB for a class and had my results explained to me. Her upcoming competition at the Duke Invitational got us talking about a variety of schools and the huge choice of picking just one: I think Duke had been one of the schools that had sent her recruitment letters for undergrad – along with Harvard, Notre Dame and other impressive names – and I talked about how I'd almost gone to Duke for my Master's, and then opted for Notre Dame, and why I wish she could have experienced what makes ND distinct, although I had to say I was happy to have met her at Marquette. It's utterly unpredictable, the chain of consequences, of meetings and friendships and opportunities that come from picking one school instead of another. And it's really almost beside the point to worry about that decision in that all of those particulars are utterly beyond our foresight and calculation. My sibs wouldn't have met their spouses had they not gone to the University of Illinois, either meeting there like Leslie and Jim, or having their lives start on a particular course, like Joe then meeting Daniele. All the kids – their sheer existence and chance for it – are consequent to that. So that sort of conversation is always a bit head-spinning. But that was the kind of thing that made the whole afternoon fun: the combination in conversation of her offering comments that completely made sense for her to say, from what I knew of her, and the completely surprising insights that took me unprepared and made me look at the art, or at a story, differently than I would have on my own. Good times.

A few of the last minutes of conversation over at Dan and Amy's has been rattling around in my head for the last few days. I don't remember how either point came up, whether they actually flowed from the conversation at that point, or whether they were the sort of things that came from some new thought or free association that popped into someone's head. Amy mentioned praying the office to me, which surprised me as I didn't know that she or Dan had ever done, or even heard of, the Liturgy of the Hours. I was probably thinking of it a lot more of late just from my reading in Thomas Merton, which very well might have been how the subject came up. Praying that liturgy throughout the day is a context to all of Merton's thinking that a number of people fail to recognize, or at least give sufficient weight to its effect, which is easy if you've never sunk into that rhythm at a monastery.

Lent this year has, for me, been an occasion of some meager recollection of that spirituality, with a greater recognition – or admission – of how much better I do with that kind of structure. I would once have bristled about a lack of spontaneity in such a format, but that is starting to look more and more to me like a function of age, of a certain sort of youthful enthusiasm, like that which would see "self-expression" as a key part of art, but which is coming to appear more and more like a substitution of mere energy for real vision. Prayer seems more like art in that way to me, I think, where there is certainly something to be said for sincerity, of course, but where that is revealed to be pretty thin beer the longer you sit with it.

Then somewhere near the end of the evening Mike said something to me about being weak in art history, particularly as regards its tie to theology and theological history: a thought that he had expressed earlier in the evening's conversation. Something recently had gotten me thinking about how I started picking up that interest, myself, back in the summer of 1991 in Madison. Perhaps that had come up in the "spirituality and autobiography" conversation with Meg last week, as we also talked about her work in, and thoughts about, theatre. So I found myself making a bit a strange recommendation to Mike in suggesting that he might want to start reading in that direction the same way that I did: through the Protestant Fundamentalist theologian Francis Schaeffer. I call this a bit of a strange recommendation in that quite disagree with Schaeffer on a great many things, now, finding him guilty of trying to squeeze too much into the formula he was describing as he attempted to diagnose the shift of Western culture from its Christian philosophical, theological and spiritual roots to a new Secularist paradigm, basing far too much of the latter on Existentialism. The phenomenon he is trying to describe is a real one, it was just that he oversimplified the mechanism of how that shift was occurring, resulting in a number of problematic descriptions and assessments in support of his overall argument.

But nevertheless, like Merton said about Tertullian, "he's worth reading even when he's wrong." The genius of Schaeffer was that he tried to do a very necessary work that it us utter anathema in today's academic culture: he tried to be a generalist. The generalist tries to master a great many fields so that their interaction can be described. For all the noise we make today about being "interdisciplinary," it's all too easy to find fault with someone who tries to do this, because no one today can possibly master all major fields of human knowledge. I just found fault with him, above, although I might argue that I was speaking as a specialist somewhat closer to the heart of his program. But it's not his ambition or his intention with which I am finding fault, nor am I trying simply to be an academic nit-picker. I think that those attempts at speaking in a more "generalist" way are important, and that is a work that particularly falls to theology among the sciences. (See the "definition" of theology I have on my profile page, to see more of that idea.)

So, why the recommendation to Mike? Schaeffer seriously attempts to incorporate art history into his survey of the shape of how our culture is and has been shifting, integrating it into his philosophical, theological, historical and political argument as a serious voice and influence in the cultural conversation. So: music, art, film – all these were major fields for a Christian to know, which was a rather novel position in American fundamentalism in the 1960s or 70s. As a model, or a starting-point in trying to get a sketch of an integrated view of art and the history of ideas, Schaeffer still strikes me as a useful starting point, in just the way a lot of theological educators might use Justo Gonzalez's survey histories of theology for undergraduate or Master's students who are trying to learn their way "around the map" of history, even though you will tell them later on to toss out a lot of the generalizations that Gonzalez makes as they grow more competent. Mike is more than competent enough in the general history of thought, and in Christian thought in particular, that he could read Schaeffer without swallowing it all whole, as I did as a beginner in such things, where I had to continue to work just to see how much more there was to learn than his direct summations. So for the first time in 15 years I find myself hefting the one-volume work How Should We Then Live? The Decline of Western Thought and Culture, which became Schaeffer's major entry into public conversation on the cultural impact of the anti-Christian shift in Secularism, both as a book and even more as a documentary series. (Which is an interesting story in itself, given that this documentary series was produced in many ways as an answer to the more-or-less uniform Secularist vision given in many PBS documentaries of the time, with PBS protesting – in all sincerity – that they couldn't show something that was so one-sided in its perspective.)

It'll be interesting to revisit this just for intellectual autobiographical reasons in seeing whether it does indeed work for Mike in the way I suspect. I figured that the Protestant orientation would be familiar, and that its direct and popular nature would make for a far easier starting-point than something like the vast (and very Catholic) theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar, however much better Von Balthasar's work might be in a more final sense. Bob Foster is going to be in town tomorrow and we're gathering to enjoy his company – "Thursday is the new Friday," quipped Amy – and it'll be interesting to see whether he agrees with my thought that this could still be a useful starting-point for Mike in trying to integrate art history into his theological work.

There have been a number of good moments with friends over the last several days. Thursday night I headed up to the Oriental Theatre with Barnes to see Watchmen after we finished up a session of the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Christian Mysticism where Fr. Golitzin winged his way through a review of a text I had never heard of before, in a presentation called "The Vision of Dorotheos: An Early Chrisitan Example of Heavenly Journey." That isn't me being critical: he was explicit that he was moving fast and loose on this one, having apparently been volunteered without his knowledge for a talk on the text at SBL by Bogdan, which was really funny to hear. (Of late, Professor Golitzin so frequently publicly gives me crap for not doing a Patristics doctorate that I've become terribly regretful of never having had him for an actual course: everybody speaks highly of the work done in his classes.) I wasn't sure that the text wasn't meant to be fictional in antiquity, it seemed so silly on some levels, like the bad novels of the saints from the 3rd or 4th century. Looking around a bit, I found that Chrysogonus Waddell had actually written an introduction to an edition of the text that Cistercian Publications put out, so that's now on the to-buy/to-read list.

So Watchmen seemed a pretty fabulous adaptation of the text. I'd never seen a direct adaptation before (I've never read or seen the graphic novels and movie adaptations of 300 or Sin City) but this seemed about as good as could be imagined in a single short movie. Barnes and I headed over to Pizza Man after the movie let out, talking about the changes for the movie – which we both thought worked and were sensible – and in one major case, even tightened up the plot considerably. From there the conversation moved on to matters theological, where I augmented a comment from some weeks earlier that he had noted and talked with his wife about, when I had called Thomas Merton somewhat "dated" over dinner at the Lloyds. I certainly didn't mean that to be dismissive. While there are a few areas or moments in which there is that sort of cultural, historical or technological datedness to Merton's work, mostly he's "dated" in the same sense that Augustine is: he is clearly a man fully engaged in his moment in history. This says nothing about his ability to be adapted to another set of circumstances: in fact, I find that much of what he says that is specific to his immediate time has that ability to be extrapolated-from which is necessary to guarantee a writer's long-term usefulness. I think this is particularly so for a spiritual writer like Merton. That got me talking some more about my own recent conversations and thoughts about the topic of "religion and autobiography," which led to some questions on his part for some more detailed explanation of how it was I ended up doing a Systematics doctorate instead of a Patristics one, and I went into some detail explaining the story of that shift, from early comments from Catherine LaCugna and Brian Daley, through my changing perspectives as I taught high school Theology, and then some of the shifts occurring after I actually began at Marquette. Barnes's own influence in being a Patristics scholar trained as a Systematician also featured in the conversation, given the way he has challenged me over these years regarding some of the ways in which Systematic Theology is taught today, as well as giving me a springboard for using historical figures like Augustine as dialogue-partners for contemporary Systematics. I heard more, too, about the development of his own doctoral work and of his historical project with Lewis Ayres, and how it was that he pulled together this particular education of his own. Good stuff.

Battlestar Galactica concluded on Friday with a two-hour final episode, as many of you well know, as did the four years of Friday night dinner and viewing parties we've been having, mostly at the Lloyds's. (I'm sure the gatherings will continue, without the show, although they won't have that same strange flavour of us intensely jabbering away at the breaks and conclusions.) I've never before experienced a television show as such a social phenomenon before, gathering together to watch a 100-hour nail-biter of a movie. I know lots of others around the country have watched it socially as much as (or more than) privately, and I've never seen a show that so demanded to be discussed, argued and debated, both as drama and as a jumping-off point for its themes. It really gave a different sense of what television drama could be (and of the staggering amount that is produced to lesser effect).

Amy's Mom is staying with them for some time now, and I think was bouncing somewhere between amused and bemused so see us all discussing and arguing, both during the breaks and then for a good hour afterwards, trying to judge whether we thought the conclusion worthy of the whole (Dan and I on the positive of that, Mike on the negative). Complicating matters, she had never watched an episode of it before, so, rather like I said above, coming in on the last two hours of a hundred hour movie is certainly less than ideal. So I tried to explain a bit to her about why it was we were so invested in it. I wonder what kind of impression it would make of her daughter's and son-in-law's friends that they come over to fixate on the television and over-excitedly debate a piece of fiction.

There's not much else I can say here that isn't full of spoilers and there are people who may read this who I very much want to enjoy the thing on DVD. I has been great, though, that I could enjoy this thing (which I might dare to call the single greatest piece of television ever, with the possible exception – or tie – of the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited, although that's a very different kind of beastie) all with such a group of friends as this: some of them theologians, all thoughtful and passionate people fully invested in the art of living, and who then would take an epic drama of this sort as a jumping-off point into a few hundred hours of fabulous and real exchange with one another. I realize that, spread over the years though it was, this piece of drama will one day be one of the most significant artistic Events in my life as I look back over it, just because I could share so many hours of it with the same group of friends, as it became an occasion for drawing each of us out – both in talking about it and in leading to lots more talk beyond it once we had exhausted the night's episode. I suppose anything can serve for bringing friends together, even just the simple decision to gather for a regular meal. But I have to give this show kudos for being so frequently exciting and compelling in itself as to rile us up for lots of different sorts of thoughts, conversations and stories.

Last night I enjoyed relaxed talk over a late dessert at Starbucks with Erynn, after having to reschedule for a number of days due to her ever-changing school schedule. She came in kind of glowing over her first place finish at the weekend's meet at the University of Georgia where she qualified for NCAA regionals in the very first meet of the outdoor season. I actually hadn't seen her since she tied the school record in the high jump (5'9.25"/1.76m) the other week, although she was almost dismissive of that when I congratulated her on it. She had an air of being on the hunt: clearly not satisfied with sharing that title, she was stalking the record already – determined to beat that mark and hold the title alone. It was fun to see that quiet determination just instantly burn in her eyes. So I got caught up in talking technique with her for a while, since jumping is such a different kind of training than I did as a distance runner, and since I wasn't sure what it was, exactly, that one did in trying to improve one's heights, once you knew what you were doing. She explained to me that there were kind of two ways or styles of high jumping: those whose jumps were particularly powered by speed and by their approach to the jump, and those whose power came out of their spring itself. She was of this latter sort, she said, and so while she can improve that power through weight work and building muscle mass, for her there was perhaps greater growth to be found in working on the speed and technique of her approach to the jump, and that this was a lot of what she was doing.

Then it was my turn to try to catch her up on some of my news, suddenly recalling that I'd been holding back on the details of my news for a few weeks, until we could sit down face-to-face. Plenty of randomness through and after that: some of her internship/summer possibilities, bad break-ups and awkward first-dating-someone-older stories, high heels, the character of our anger when we get angry, with me talking about getting into fights as a kid and with her description of being "black angry," and that leading to comparisons between African-American and Irish-American styles of verbal abuse as affection; dealing with other people's ethnic perceptions and constructions – a roommate of hers who cannot be "Assyrian/Italian" but is just told that she is "white"; my classroom discoveries about my Irish upbringing and sense of humour, particularly as experienced by German-American students – and I think ending on the breadth of concepts of beauty around the world that are threatened with being overwhelmed by our media culture, at which point we were thrown out of the place because it had closed. Good talk. Not only is it fun to have a newish friend who is a track athlete and who can talk that sort of thing, but it's also cool that she has her art wing to her: so we're going to hit the Jan Lievens exhibition at the Art Museum on Sunday, as she has a rare meet-free weekend and for which I'm totally jazzed.

The music of choice today – yes, I'm actually just making a recommendation/advertisement – is Over The Rhine's first Christmas album, a dark and moody effort now over ten years old entitled The Darkest Night of the Year. Right now, this early morning, marks the moment of the Winter solstice, making this last night or tonight that "Darkest Night of the Year," at least in terms of sheer length. This album pairs nicely with their 2006 second Christmas release, Snow Angels which is sultry and romantic, and more classically "Christmas," while both being more original in composition than most Christmas albums. (Don't let any traditional song titles fool you on that point.)

The Darkest Night of the Year is perhaps more of an "Advent album" in mood: darkly anticipatory, more Christmas Eve than Christmas Day, and that anticipation for the gift of redemption in Christ that we remember in Advent, well, that might hint at Christmas Eve being more elementally "the darkest night of the year." As with pretty much anything by Over The Rhine, it represents the very best in contemporary American songwriting, as far as I'm concerned. However, you take it, you owe yourself the deliciousness of this music.

John Cavadini, the early church scholar who was my mentor at Notre Dame, once told me that my talent as an historian was that I made creative connections, seeing how people or events influenced one another in ways that others didn't pick up on. Monday, my last day in Chicago, it wasn't so hard to make such a connection as I went walking in Grant Park during the afternoon after the last of my job interviews. The preparations were underway for the crowd expected to gather to cheer Barack Obama's projected victory in the next day's presidential election, and it was easy to imagine and foresee the sights we saw on the television last night of the victory celebration, as not just another political cycle coming to its natural conclusion, but as the hailing of a symbolic turn in the ongoing story of the American Experiment. It was astonishingly warm out, as I'd mentioned earlier, an extended weekend from Haloween to the election getting up around 70ºF, but not the October "Indian summer" we grew up with; I'll not be surprised if such record-setting early November bursts of comfortable weather will in Chicago be remembered as "Obama summers" instead, it seemed so timely for such a gathering.

I eyed the preparation of the grounds and staging itself after coming out of the Chicago Hilton and then wandered north through the park, musing on the last Presidents from my home state of Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant, for whom the park as a whole was named, and Abraham Lincoln, who sat immortalized on the north end of the park, in an elevated statue that had him gazing south toward where Tuesday night's gathering would take place. Lincoln and Grant, of course, were figures of the American Civil War, that early first climax of our national disaster of racial slavery. Inevitably, Obama will be seen, like the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as another point on that journey toward a truly multicultural society. I liked what one commentator said last night – I think on CNN, but I'm not sure: I was flipping up and down the dial of the 24-hour news stations and listening to the commentary – about in the story of civil rights in America, there was in this election a kind of turning point. He pointed to the outpouring of rage by some when Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House on 16 October 1901, or the resistance by some to Jackie Robinson's joining baseball's Major Leagues in 1947, that these events provoked the racial anxiety of some because they were "ahead of the curve." The commentator went on to say, "... but this – this IS the curve." I grew up in an extended family that was multi-racial, and had the great blessing of seeing that as normal from earliest memory, though for me that was from a step removed, while my mixed-race cousins had to deal with a certain amount of crap in their early school years. Now my family is more beautifully diverse than ever before, and I could only hope that the commentator's words were true: that the arrival of a mixed-race American to the White House is the turning of that curve that so normalizes this reality that it puts the vast bulk of race-based fears behind us in history. Standing before the Lincoln statue and looking south across Grant Park, it was easy to imagine that someday a matching figure of Obama might gaze north back at Lincoln, a reversal of Dickens' line, capturing between them the worst of times and the best of times.

Obama riffed on Dickens' "the best of times" in his speech last night in Grant Park, along with moments of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and King's "I have been to the mountaintop" sermon, fully aware, I hope, that this is his moment to succeed or fail. The symbolism mentioned above is, in many ways, the easiest part of his election to the presidency. He has a Democratic Congress, and cannot blame partisan opposition so easily for problems in at least the next two years: it just remains to be seen whether his election becomes the shift to a new national unity that he kept invoking throughout his campaign, or whether it settles into a familiar Democratic pattern of the 1968-1973 American New Left that has so dominated Democratic party ideology in the last generation, with the deep irony of having birthed and driven the subsequent neo-Conservative reaction that the New Left so loathed. The Politics of Left-Right Division are easy to maintain, especially in a two-party system, and it is far more ingrained than anything else in our social or political habits. It's easy for people to say, like me, that they want to move past the paradigm; it's hard to see exactly how to do that, and if there's a better paradigm to offer that isn't just the effective conquest of either the "right-thinking" Left or Right perspectives.

I left the Lincoln statue and headed further north, feeling my way around the Art Institute and stopping to look at my hometown giant Lorado Taft's Fountain of the Great Lakes, now sort of hidden behind trees and neglected. I kinda love the thing, but it made me think about American visions left behind: that like the move to new multi-ethnic and multi-racial consciousnesses in the United States, the regional visions of America have been increasingly left behind in American self-identity. Whether this is from the experience of national news, national advertising, and national entertainment because of our telecommunications, I realized I never really thought about myself as part of "Great Lakes States" group. More as a "Midwesterner" in geography and habits of friendliness, but hardly in such a way that separated me in any fundamental way from making friends from either coast. And this seemed to be part of the same movement as the ethnically-oriented ones: a constant widening of perspectives, driven perhaps more by technology and transportation than by philosophy to begin with, and then a resulting shift in conceptions of identity. I looked at The Great Lakes as I'd been looking at the Magnificent Mile's skyline from the park, taking in the architecture and pulse of the city. I'd never been downtown over a period of several days like this, I realized: all of my experience of Chicago had been high school and college day trips and later overnights, but never any chance to just get used to a stetch of the city, like I had just started to get used to the stretch between the Hilton and the Palmer House. It was hardly a full vision of the city, but it was a timely one, in seeing the city and the park get to take its deep breath before stepping onto history's stage for one night.

Continued From Below

On Saturday, Chad and I ended up talking books a great deal over breakfast, particularly about a Western culture text assessing shifts over the last half-millennium by Jacques Barzun entitled From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present. He took me through some of the thesis of that while I dutifully added it to my mental "must buy and someday read" list. A little while later I was floored when I looked through one of Chad's architectural books, this one called Lost Chicago by David Garrard Lowe, which showed me the gems of Chicago that both had been lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and also that had been built and senselessly destroyed within a few decades to make room for a newer idea. In particular, I got my first glimpse at photographs of what had been standing in Chicago during the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, which I couldn't believe had been torn down. I had mentioned this in my conversation with him the night before: about having been told of the great classical architecture put up along the lakefront, of which (I had been told) the only remnants were the Field Museum and the Science and Industry Museum, and that all the land in-between and been filled with such classical treasures. This wasn't entirely accurate, I now discovered (the survivors are now in fact the Science and Industry Museum and the Art Institute), but I could see why the friend who had told me the story had also mentioned that a friend of his, a scuba diver, said that if you went diving off the coast of the city, where the rubble from the demolished pavilions had been dumped, it looked the ruins of Atlantis. How accurate that is, I'm no longer sure, having had Chad tell me and the book confirm that most of the buildings were not intended to be permanent and were not build of the marble they appear to be, but rather of a stucco of some sort. Plans to finish them in marble later were abandoned when much of the pavilions burned in a fire in 1894. So, anyway, I had to grab Chad and gabble about the photographs and the book with him for a few minutes. And then add that one, too, to the must-buy list. This also proved the occasion for Chad to enthuse about a book called The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson, which I had not heard of, but which sounded great fun. I sat down and strained my brain for a bit to come up with a list of books Chad might like as gifts, which made me remember us talking about books the same way years ago, with me pushing Julian of Norwich upon them with great gusto, and their questions about the types of things I was reading inspiring me (on top of a run of similar requests) to start keeping an ongoing Reading List on my old website. I suppose you'd have to go back through the journal here, and add up all the books tags to get the same thing, though that sounds like an awful lot of work.

Saturday afternoon the whole family headed over to the Lakeview Museum of Arts & Science, to take the kids to an appropriately kid-titled exhibition called "Grossology: The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body" which was a wonderland of cartoonish displays of digestion, burping, mucus and zits. This was in addition to the hands-on and fun science of their Discovery Center. I was a bit more interested, along with Chad, in a display called "Within the Emperor's Garden: The Ten Thousand Springs Pavilion," which I tried and failed to photograph surreptitiously from my hip, under the suspicious stare of the little old lady who had told me that photographs were not allowed. The model of the Pavilion from the Forbidden City was interesting in its own right, but what especially captured my interest was the diagram and side display of how the fitted wood beams of their architecture allowed for such ornate and grand construction without the use of any sort of nails. I suggested to Chad that, in lieu of turning his yard into an English-style garden, he might at least construct a gazebo in their backyard on these principles. But when I mentioned that alone putting their home on the local tourist route, I could suddenly see why that might be unattractive.

On the way over to the Museum, Chad had taken me on a roundabout route through Peoria, past a contract his company was working on for a new ministry center for the Diocese (now headed by Bishop Dan Jenkins, who had been the Rector at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart during most of my time at Notre Dame and with the Folk Choir), through the West Bluff Historic District down West Moss Avenue, an older neighbourhood of wonderfully-restored or -maintained homes of interest, including a pair of Wright or student-of-Wright designs that were as tasteful as ever. Older homes under the shade of older trees. Just the way everyone should be able to live. From the Museum, Chad took me on a route that let me eyeball the magnificent homes on Grandview Drive, which I'd seen one night when Darcie Short drove some of us from LOMC around the sites of Peoria. Here on the high bluff above the Illinois River, I was particularly taken with some of the 1930s-style manors which you could easily imagine Cary Grant stepping out from in old Beverly Hills grandeur. Chad told the kids and me stories of taking drives along here with with mother on Sundays after church as a kid, zooming down the hairpin turns. We ended up near the equally-interesting look of the old Peoria Water Works Company down by the river before Eva hit her maximum tolerance of Dad's architectural enthusiasm and lecture, and I thanked Chad contentedly as we raced home before the looming four year-old meltdown.

Angie and Chad wanted to have an adults-only dinner with me (or at least used my presence as an excuse for an adults-only dinner, themselves) and they took me out to a very cool Italian restaurant down near the waterfront district of Peoria called Rizzi's on State that I liked a lot, and hope to return to someday. There I tackled their Pork Chops Siciliana (Thick cut pork chops sautéed with mushrooms, cherry peppers and onions with a touch of marinara.) with a glass of a Chianti whose name escapes me now, and which Chad tried as well. This is where I discovered, as we talked a bit of wine, that Angie – who, when I first had gotten to be friends with her, had been a teetotaler like me, out of caution – had since discovered that alcohol tended to make her quiet, if not sullen, of all things, whereas for me it makes me more lighthearted, talkative and giggly. ("As if you need that," said Dan to me when I told him this story.)

A block behind us, a photographer was shooting a bride and her party against the background of one of the old brick factories of the Peoria waterfront, and we talked about how that sort of visual juxtaposition had become fashionable lately, while I mentioned beyondthewell and wondered if it was her and her husband taking the shots. I suppressed the urge to go over and find out, though I thought it would be funny to just trip by and surprise her, if so. Their studio is just over in Bloomington, and after describing their business, we then got to talking about paying for serious portraiture and for art in general, and what that was worth to us. Karen herself had written to me about her and Nate taking up Over The Rhine favourite Michael Wilson's availability to do his "Daylight Portrait", and that had gotten me thinking about the value of such things, particularly given that I have an irrational impulse in my head that denies that there could possibly be anything in this world – houses, cars, books – that one ought to pay more than, say, twenty dollars for. [And instantly, Angie's recent citation jumps into my head: From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. – Sir Winston Churchill]

I asked them a theoretical question about their sense of contemporary attitudes in Evangelicalism on the question of "certainty" in faith that they completely shot down, though I suppose that it might have more to do with my specific observations of Evangelicals who convert to Catholicism than with Evangelicalism in general. But I abandoned that tack of making them speak for all of Evangelicalism in America before I became utterly annoying.


We went walking then, after dinner, along the restored and lively waterfront, which seemed shockingly different from the Rust Belt ruin I remember from college days. It was a delight to see something have come to life again like that. I looked at this piece of now-fading painting along one of an old series of railway supports, from a line that once crossed the river here to descend into the city. We people-watched the other strollers, talked about weird Asian fish that had been disastrously transplanted into the Illinois River, wondered about a WWII submarine memorial that apparently stood there for no reason other than these subs having passed through Peoria, eyed the Segway rentals, listened to a bit of what sounded like a Dead cover-band, and talked.


I tried taking a decent portrait shot of them, which Chad was too amused to take seriously, flashing me a maniacal Joker smile when I tried. Angie had told me that they had shown the girls the shots I had taken when I'd last visited, before the girls had come along, which the girls found quite funny, perhaps because of Angie's unusually short haircut from the time. Myself, I was still having trouble getting used to Chad's short and business-like hair today, as he had then expressed his own preference for wearing his longer, and had wondered, if I recall correctly, whether he could get away with letting it grow even longer than it was then.


As we left the waterfront, I had Chad take me a bit further down the district so that we could go up the climb on Persimmon Street where I then told (or for Angie, re-told) the story of my grand misadventure the night of Darcie's wedding, with her Maid of Honour December Saucedo, Rich Alms, and Todd Peterson. The run back up to the downtown area is no longer the gauntlet of crackhouses, shooting ranges, brothels and clubs disguised as the above (and a police precinct squatting innocently in their midst) that it used to be. Chad regaled us with similar memories of sitting with his Dad in the window of the old brick place where he worked, eating sandwiches and watching police raids like they were quality entertainment.

Back at the house, with the babysitter returned to her family (and after a talk on the virtues of jr. high school girls versus high school girls for babysitting), we three just kicked back and talked the rest of the night. Angie was now having a Mike's Hard Lemonade, which managed not to cause the withdrawn effect we had discussed earlier, and perhaps aided in the talk. A bit more architecture. A long conversation on dreams, particularly dreams of flying, with the discovery that Chad and I experienced dreams of flying in exactly the same way, giving rise to my curiosity as to whether this would be a more common male trait, if we could survey the question broadly. For us, flight in our dreams takes an absolutely stillness of mind, a state of perfect confidence or faith in one's ability to fly, any wavering of which becomes a wavering of flight itself, with the threat of disaster. Furthermore, we discovered that we never remember launching into flight in our dreams: we always enter a flight dream in the midst of flying. Angie, on the other hand, described an actual "take off" process in her flight dreams of running down the street with arms stretched out, airplane-style, which had Chad and I howling at the image, to Angie's mild annoyance.

The next day, I simply got ready after waking and headed out to the Bloomington Amtrak station with Angie. We were listening to the soundtrack from Elizabethtown in the car as we began talking, and memories of the movie struck a certain chord with me at that moment. The film had come up during a long train of our Friday night conversation about movies. Waiting for Chad, I was tempted to foist a digital download of Before Sunrise on her when I found out that she had never seen the film, and I talked about why Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset duology had had such an impact on me over the last few years, acknowledging that I might have to push my other top favourites (Never Cry Wolf, A Man For All Seasons, The Man Without A Face) aside for them. She had given me a long list of favourite films, most of which I had never even heard of, which was kind of interesting in itself, to find that her taste had gotten so broad and independent-oriented. But Elizabethtown had popped up in the talk, one of the few mainstream movies to do so on her part, which I had just seen for the first time maybe a month or two earlier, and that got me thinking. I thought it was a flawed film (we both pointed to things like Susan Sarandon's dance sequence), but it somehow felt stronger to me for the flaws, if that makes any sense. While certainly the small town feel appealed to me given my roots, I think it was the theme of remaining open to the unexpected turns ahead of us in life that had struck me most strongly, and certainly that kind of openness was something for which Angie was ready to take me to task, as I had described the last few years to her. And so the parallels between themes in the film and themes in the weekend's conversations suddenly appeared in my mind as we set out on the highway to the road-trip music of the soundtrack. Go figure. She had time to get me to the train station and return easily before meeting Chad and the girls at church, and now the talk was pretty light, of odds and ends, and the occasional thought about this chance to catch up as a whole.

We sat there on the cement slab that serves as the "platform" of Bloomington's train station. We talked occasionally about this and that, but mostly I just found myself looking at her, mostly in a kind of quiet amusement and wonder that she was there. Or that I was there. I remembered the day I met her, noticing her red car pulling onto the gravel road leading back to LOMC after mine, a few days before training started, just after the end of the school year, and being introduced to her as one of the Coordinators for that summer. Along with discovering that she was one of my bosses, there was a bit of recognition that there was something about her that I already liked. Now, sitting on the ground this summer morning, I knew that maybe I was being a bit sentimental: it's a job hazard for me as an historian, paying as much attention as I try to to the past. "Did you ever think that we would still be friends after all this time?" I asked her, shortly before we realized it was already ten and that my train had not yet showed up. I continued thinking along these lines after we said goodbye, and while I sat the extra 40-odd minutes for the train to arrive. So many of these other rich, rich friendships from that amazing summer had blurred and faded with distance, but here we were, still talking as intensely and as curiously after all this time, as much as we ever had, late after the campers had gone to bed, sitting out on the Meadows' Deck, underneath the stars. Like everyone else who has ever lived before us, we had laughed about how it really does seem like just a year or two ago. That we would still be friends might be beyond expectations, but that certainly didn't matter: just the fact that it still seemed perfectly natural to be friends was the only thing that counted. Even though it was my own, there was a sense of realizing that I didn't know that the story would be this good.

With the train about 45 minutes late, I still ended up only missing my connection to Milwaukee at Union Station by two minutes. Declining to take part in the mild riot brewing by those who wanted those last two minutes to run down the track to the nigh-departing train, I took the opportunity to withdraw, grab some food, and go sit on a bench looking out across the water at the city, just a bit south of the Adams Street Bridge. I wished I had Chad handy as my personal architecture enthusiast as I looked at the different buildings, and I mused on the last week, at seeing and catching up with Jenny and Angie within a few days, thinking that I only lacked Sunshine strolling down the riverwalk with her husband to round out the sequence nicely. If anything, the last few weeks had both indicated that there was something in my life that was so much bigger than me, if that makes any sense: a sense of symmetry or narrative structure that didn't seem a conscious creation of my own, but also not quite something I'd want to give the grade school theology tag of God "writing my story:" I do believe that God gives us and our universe too much freedom for such a deterministic understanding of events, and yet... there was a kind of grace going on. Perhaps it really means that I've frequently done things right. I hoped so. I hoped that I've really been given a gift for friendship and for love that I've succeeded in using, and in healing where I've putzed it up. Whatever exactly it all is or was, as I sat there with just the two of us – me and Chicago – it seemed to give my presence in space and time a bit of meaning that defied the obvious fact that I was barely in this city long enough to cast an afternoon shadow. And though there were so many things that told me not to be – right then, I was content with that.

A sudden impulse the other day had me looking around for my Bloom County books. No luck. Moderate panic. I could hardly misplace my bookcases, and the books were clearly not there. It took me 24 hours of searching (well, searching conducted sporadically over 24 hours) before they turned up in a milk crate stuck in a corner, surrounded by course files.

Read a bit of Toons For Our Times before going to bed that night, enjoying the flashbacks to old political and cultural situations. It's funny and weird and wonderful, all rolled up in one, to revisit something like that after a long time and to realize or remember what a huge role it had in creating my sense of humour, possibly more than another of the other stuff I paid attention to, like Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Young Ones, or Mom. It certainly reinforced my willingness to say something daring or inappropriate, but that went right to the heart of the matter, if only people would admit it: I think Bloom County was the 1980s version of Socrates in our society, in that way. Certainly the hold it had over my circle of friends was incalculable. Anyway, looking back and trying to understand myself or my education, it was interesting to realize that I'd made a huge mistake in leaving this out of the equation....

Now that's a poster!

The UK posters are weak by comparison.

Kind of a lame couple of days. My vague temptation to tag along on the Marquette bus with my track team student Erynn for her meet at the University of Missouri today was tempered by the fact that I not only had to teach today, but that an inexpensive visit to Emily that way wasn't possible anyway as she was in Portland for the national 18th Century Brit Lit conference. And anyway, I've had these uncomfortable cramps on and off again for the last 48 hours, now, just some gas from something I ate, I suppose, but enough that I'll constitute a treaty violation at some point down the line. No fun.

I bailed on a dinner invitation yesterday with the Lloyds because I was uncomfortable enough that I knew it was just going to make me distracted and wishing that I was at home. (My baby-whisperer work with Owen has even expanded to Dan holding the phone to Owen's ear and me telling him to calm down and go to sleep, and Amy said they'd like to treat me to dinner in gratitude for their own resulting good night's sleep.) For me on the other hand, this thing keeps waking me up about every hour and so I've been a bit foggy, though I think I managed today's lesson on the dense and difficult Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Human?) by Anselm reasonably well. I spent about eight hours prepping thirty pages there, which gives some sense of how loaded a text it is. I am dismayed when I think of the 40 or 50 pages the students are reading for Tuesday: I don't know that we'll cover those as completely as I'd like, but this is all a first-time effort for me.

The high point of the last two days thus ended up being my student Jessica dropping in to talk during my office hours yesterday. Jess jumped from Biomeds to Theology and Philosophy after taking my Intro to Theology class last year, and thus is one of those students you kind of feel slightly amazed around in realizing the concrete effect you can have on another person's life and vision. She's heading down to Notre Dame for the weekend, taking in the Edith Stein conference with friends with whom she formed a Chesterton-reading society here at Marquette, and we talked about Notre Dame's campus and sights to see: it got me a bit nostalgic. My chief recommendation was her walking around Saint Mary's Lake: walking around Saint Mary's Lake was where I did the bulk of my Master's walk. Too bad it's still too early for those cute little turtles to be out....

I see that Adobe released a free online service version of their Photoshop program today, to try to compete with those kinds of basic service. Naturally, this comes as I'm waiting for my pre-paid copy of next Tuesday's release of Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac. I've been without a Photoshop program since I upgraded to this new computer and had to leave my OS 9 Photoshop behind for good. Tonight that leaves me restless as I'm in that vague and distracted mood where I like to putz around with graphics for fun, something that requires some creativity or thought, but not enough where I'd be alert enough to do school research. It's been frustrating not to have that outlet for the last several months, so I'm eager for April 1st to roll around and that new software to arrive. I can't even do something as basic as a LiveJournal icon as well as I'd like to, leaving a few new ones I've added a bit fuzzy-looking to my eye after using the LJ icon-maker. Still, I think I'd done a number from favourite movies or such since I last put a pile of them up for grabs here:


I wanted to call Grace today to let her know that I finally saw my first robin of spring. Actually, there were a group of seven of them outside of LaLumiere after my first class this morning, just as our unwelcome snowfall was beginning. The eagle-eyed Gracie had beaten me to the punch by a full two weeks, crowing about having seen on Friday morning as she headed out to school when I was down babysitting her the other week. I was secretly pleased that with no prompting at all – at least from me – that she took it to be as important a sign of the coming of springtime as I do, as I look forward to that first recognition of the birds each year.

A meditation on Judas' betrayal on Good Friday. My friend Kevin was thinking out loud about some of this stuff, and ran a question by me. After I typed it up, I thought I might as well throw it on the Journal so that it looks like I did something today.

Why is Judas' betrayal worse then Peter's denial? I mean, in Dante's Inferno Judas is in the deepest circle of hell and Peter of course the cornerstone of our church.....


Intrinsically, I don't know that it is. I think you're right on that supposition. I mean, the anger is still probably there in the New Testament, that these guys still (rightly) blame Judas for betraying their mutual friend and teacher, and hold that against him. At least one of the gospel writers attributes his actions as stemming from demon possession, which you would think might excuse him somewhat, though perhaps one has to give themselves over to a demon, and thus can and ought to be held responsible for whatever happens as a consequence, in the way that the addict no long has much functioning will left in the matter, but did when he started down that road. And one of the writers says that Judas stole from the groups' common purse, which he kept as their money-manager, thus saying that this guy was a rogue from the beginning.

Ultimately, though, I think in a way it simply comes down to whether Judas and Peter actually had faith in Jesus as the Christ. Peter did, and repented and asked forgiveness, giving himself over to the Risen Christ, when that great event happened a few days later. Judas, it seems, did not, and thus killed himself. That may have been out of a genuine remorse: I can look at the events surrounding Judas and understand his logic in the betrayal and what happened afterward, but he didn't look to the possibility of forgiveness, maybe effectively denied it, and thus ended his own story without looking for the miracle and possibilities of grace.

Yes, I wonder about Dante's emphasis. Is Judas the worst of the worst? Even for his betrayal of Christ? I doubt it. I'm sure that under the right circumstances, I'd hand Jesus over to be crucified, too. Indeed, the theology of the New Testament and our liturgy insists on that point: he was crucified because of our sins, our violations. Dante in his sci-fi trilogy reserved the lowest circle of hell for the betrayers. And look who else was there: Brutus, betrayer of Caesar. Yet if you look to Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, Brutus' betrayal is portrayed as an act of sad, regretful heroism, where Brutus puts the good of the Republic ahead of even his own friend's life. So there have certainly been a variety of "rankings" of evil, even among great Christian artists and authors like Dante and Shakespeare. Theology tends not to rank evils or punishments in so confident a way, and maintains more of a modest silence on such things, at least in the better theology over the centuries.

But there is at least an agreement that Judas done wrong, even if it was that very betrayal that was turned into part of the mechanism of redemption. Modern artists have been somewhat more cautious with their condemnation of Judas in this way. Thus you have Judas protesting his treatment in Jesus Christ Superstar on exactly this point, that what he did was necessary to the story of redemption as we have it. In contemporary Irish poetry, Brendan Kennelly's The Book of Judas proceeds from his perspective in trying to comment upon what happened (as well as much more on betrayal in general), and it is in that vein that Bono in U2's song "Until The End of the World" from the masterpiece Achtung Baby sings the piece entirely from Judas' perspective. There is no simple excusing of Judas, I suppose, in the end by these artists, but there's also perhaps a recognition that he's not that remarkable, and is perhaps as sad a symbol for humanity as any other of our lesser lights.

10 years ago this night, I was in Rome with Erik and Hugh, having torn through the city trying to find our reserved-seating tickets for the Holy Thursday Mass at the Cathedral of Saint John Lateran. Of course, that's ten years ago tonight on the liturgical calendar, not on the Gregorian one. And also of course, by the time we finally got the tickets, went back to our pensione to grab Hugh and then got to the church, we had just missed the time limit in which they held the reserved seats. And so some time afterward we ended up at the least-inspired restaurant we apparently could have picked in Rome, although I found some solace in the fact that apparently Chef Boyardee did have an authentically Italian sauce recipe. The table wine was also outstanding, I thought, for table wine – we were in Italy, after all – and this combined with the jet-lag in a most potent way. So at some point in the conversation I ended up in a too-long tipsy discourse about the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist – the centerpiece of all Catholic spirituality and of the most kick-ass theory of art that I can imagine – which only came to an end when Erik pulled out his camera and shot me in the face, bringing me to a surprised halt/stupor. This was funny enough that I've always treasured the photograph (and the joke at my expense) ever since. (And of course I've tried to learn from the point of his joke, which can be hard for an Irish....)

Again, I found myself thinking about the Eucharist a lot today, particularly as it was announced with simplicity and gusto by weaklingrecords, and, for the first time in quite a while, wishing that I was at Notre Dame for the Easter Triduum, to see the liturgy done as well as it is done anywhere on the planet. With the quality of the music provided by the Folk Choir and the Liturgical Choir, there is an ease in sinking into contemplation of the Mysteries that I've never enjoyed anywhere else. I read and think about such things so much that the idea of simply sitting with them suddenly appealed greatly. I'll at least get a chance later in the week.

I didn't attend the liturgy at the Gesu tonight because Diane had asked me to reserve the day for her. Tonight was our "Europe Night." I met her downtown at the Milwaukee Art Museum after she finished work at the Discovery Center, where she works as a writer. We were (finally!) taking in an exhibition I had been eager to see but to which I had not yet made it: FOTO: Modernity In Central Europe, 1918–1945.

This deserves more comment from me when I'm less sleepy, but I was quite struck. The reviews, like that from The New York Times or from Aperture were robust, with Aperture saying, "the most compelling and important historical exhibition of modern photography at a major U.S. museum of the last decade.". I'll have to take their word for it. I've not studied photography in any real way, compared at least to the effort I've put into reading in some other directions in art.

I wasn't hit in the overwhelming way that I was in Florence by some of Michelangelo's work, like when I was overpowered by the David, which I thought wouldn't make much impact on me as I'd seen it so often in reproduction. Instead, it was the cumulative weight of the new ideas and perspectives I gained about this period – and photography's role in it – that hit me today. Just the sheer simple fact of things like my never having thought about how photography itself would convey being "modern" to people of the time, or that to do "experimental" photography would be Modern in its own right: not "experimenting" with an eye toward achieving some set development beyond the experiements, like Michelangelo's drafts and sketches that are simply steps toward achieving the real thing, but that "experiment" in itself conveyed what it meant to be Modern. Likewise, I had never been so struck by the "democratic" sense of photography's accessibility as an art, which would add to its "Modern" feel: the politics here took that often in a specifically "proletarian" way, but the wider principle is the more true one: it was a more widely accessible art, in much the same way the power of Photoshop and image manipulation via computer has put photographic art in the hands of the populace in an even broader way today.

These are simple ideas, sure, but they're ones I had never quite articulated to myself. As I've done intellectual/cultural history over the years, I've come to realize that it's those little points of perspective – those things that are assumed more than trumpeted – that are the real gems in the history of ideas. The things that lots of these people were "trumpeting" as their Big Ideas, that their photography was about, like Soviet socialism or sexual androgyny, these are the things that are more dated or passé today: it's the underlying assumptions that are oftentimes more the critical or engaging ideas and perspectives over "the long run" of history, it seems to me.



Afterward, "Europe Night" continued. We stopped by a grocery to put together a simple meal of a round French loaf of some sort, cheese and sausage, red grapes and dark chocolate. Added to that was the mid-level Chianti I'd been hauling around in my book bag and soon we were back at Diane and Tim's place, fighting off the cats while cutting up the food and getting ready for dinner.

This is where the second major event of Europe Night occurred. Diane and I watched a DVD I'd bought a few weeks ago when it came out, but which I'd been saving to watch with her. We were both curious to see what I guess I ought to describe as Julie Delpy's feature film directorial debut, her 2 Days In Paris. We had meant to see it when it came out this past year, and when I went to look to see when it would arrive at the Oriental Theatre, which is our art house/independent/foreign theatre in town, I discovered to my shock that that was the film's last night in Milwaukee! Go figure. So we pledged to get the DVD and watch it together. Tim is in Madison for a few days, but he hadn't been part of this pact, so we proceeded without him. I'd made Diane watch Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset with me as part of my mass forcing of those films upon my friends, and as she and Tim are the best sort of folks to watch film with, we'd gotten a lot of discussion out of what those two narratives were saying about love relationships in our generation. So we were curious to see what Delpy would do on her own, but working with the male lead, Adam Goldberg, who is another figure in that Linklater circle. I get interested in these kinds of filmmaking "circles," and so I was curious in this case, being particularly taken with the script she helped write for Before Sunset, to see what she would do as director of her own "relationship" story.

The movie is laugh-out-loud funny. And I point out that this was with only one other person in the room. I think the bigger the audience, the greater the tendency or freedom to laugh out loud. But Diane and I kept looking at one another in glee or horror and bursting out with full laughter or sneak-attack gasps of laughter as we were taken by one line or another. It's a very different piece than the Linklater, to which it bears only superficial resemblance of location and subject. Delpy's writing is bawdy, full of ribald joke and conversation between the characters in a way that highlights some of the cultural comedy of the American/French dynamic, but which also in its way helps highlight the issues and pitfalls of committed love by coming at these ideas from an unexpected angle. If you can laugh at such, you'll laugh at this, and I'm looking forward to inflicting it upon my friends with different but equal enthusiasm. It's really a first-rate piece of filmmaking for a little film, and I can hope that it persuades sensible producers to get behind Delpy as director in the future.

One of the most remarkable documents I've ever read from the ancient world is The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. What makes this account of the martyrdom of a group of new Christians particularly noteworthy is that the text contains within it the journal that this 22 year-old woman, Perpetua, kept while she was in prison, awaiting her execution. We have virtually nothing written by women from the ancient world. And while she's educated, she seems to write in a more immediate style compared to other texts I've read from the period, one maybe less affected by current literary conventions, but perhaps for all that more to our own literary taste. For women's history, for early Christian history, for popular history – for all these areas of historical interest, her document is an absolute treasure, beyond price.

Hers is a robust, deeply-experiential Christianity: one given to the interpretation of dreams and the expectation of God speaking to them in visions. Early instances of prayer for the dead, of Christian visions of the afterlife, of the high status accorded to martyrs and the belief that their spiritual status and authority is one to which the bishops would appeal: all of these appear within the text. It is another side of the African Christianity that dominates Christianity's roots – Europe not becoming the intellectual center of Christianity until the Muslim invaders destroyed the bulk of African Christianity and culture in their invasions in the 7th century.

This is a text I had my high school Church History students read, their first experience at reading a primary source in my course. I toyed with the idea of pulling it out for my current Theology Through the Centuries course, but it didn't seem to fit as strongly as some other texts for our central "Trinity, Incarnation, Salvation" themes. Nevertheless, it remains a favourite of mine. Today is their feast day, the 1805th anniversary of their deaths. I try to make a point of remembering these people on this day: Vibia Perpetua, Felicitas, Revocatus, Saturninus, Secundulus and Saturus, their teacher who voluntarily joined them in prison so as to help see them through what lay ahead of them, and becoming, to my mind, perhaps the most dedicated teacher in Christian history.

Saturus is the most interesting figure in the text other than Perpetua and Felicity, and though he probably deserved his name in the title of the text, too, he has traditionally been overshadowed by the drama involved in the martyrdom of these young women. This was true even in antiquity, as I can see in the sermons Augustine annually preached on this day, commemorating the locally-popular heroes, which featured public readings of Perpetua's text. He too was, with the people, particularly focused on Perpetua and Felicitas. (Although Felicity is really the third most prominent figure in the text, I'd say, after the distant "second place" of Saturus.) And thus Augustine could ask, "For what could be more glorious than these women, whom men admire much more readily than they imitate?"

For me, personally, it was a tremendous afternoon when I had the chance to make a pilgrimage and visit the site of their martyrdom in the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre in ancient Carthage. I have a photo study of the Amphitheatre of the Martyrs here in my ScrapBook/Photo Album, if you are curious. More importantly, though, if you have the time or the interest, you might read the account, too. Perhaps as a Lenten moment. It seem to be winning more fans today, I see, with two recent novel/historical fiction adaptations, and even this attempt at translating the text into colloquial English (or this edited and less robust one).

The text leaves several images burned into my mind, not least of which is this final scene, reproduced here in this contemporary painting. The utter courage and faith of the woman, and maybe the wherewithal to still be challenging the jeering crowd, is here vividly and even brazenly demonstrated: she takes the sword of the freaked-out soldier (who understandably could be wavering, as he probably hadn't conceived of his role as a Roman soldier to be publicly stabbing young noblewomen) and guides it to her own throat in a final act of acceptance or defiance. Little wonder, then, that she still captures our memory and imagination today.

Still sick. Unable to sleep more than an hour at a time between my throbbing head and other special effects from this mild flu. Blech. Still had to take care of some business for my Theology Through the Centuries students for today, and so I'm typing some stuff up for them, along with instructions as we turn to reading The Rule of Saint Benedict for next week, and as I ask them to start thinking in terms of applying Christianity to lifestyle. I'm particularly interested in seeing how they think of adapting the fabulously-flexible Rule to contemporary life and beyond its original monastic intent. I want them to really use studying this as an exercise in adapting such an established piece of Wisdom beyond its historical confines, and I think The Rule is particularly amenable to this kind of re-imagining, and so will serve as an ideal subject for such an exercise.

Somehow in the midst of that, I discovered this new website that I was very pleased with, The Asian Christian Art Association. Speaking of "adaptation," I've always been struck by art I have seen where you see the adaptation of such well-established Western Asian imagery as the biblical stories into the forms and motifs of Eastern Asian art. I had a small copy of a Holy Family as (I think) Chinese peasants hanging in my classroom at Saint Joe's that I was very fond of, though I did not know the artist or origin of the piece. There were a number of pieces and artists I was taken with, such as this Nativity by Japan's Hiroshi Tabata, but I couldn't help but notice that all of the work by one artist in particular consistently grabbed me.

So, here in this site I managed to discover a new artist I can or could be very enthusiastic about, one Yu Jiade or Yu Jia-de, apparently of Shanghai, whose slightly more representational style makes the distinctive "adaptations" all the move vivid for me. At the same time, his work hits me as containing within itself a fairly epic sense of the power of a given moment. Unfortunately, there's very little of him represented on this site or on the web as a whole, it seems, and not a hint of being able to purchase a print. Or, there might be at the website of the Amity Christian Art Centre (which shamelessly lifts the web code of the Vatican's website), because this looks rather like his work, but their English version isn't up, and all the text is in Chinese, so I can't tell.... I think my very favourite of the ones I saw of his would be this Nativity, which I would love to give to Haley, for some reason or impulse I don't particularly understand, and in a near second place, his Woman at the Well.



Speaking of art, I couldn't help but be struck by this AP story the other day. I gotta start breaking into abandoned cars more often....

2 Stolen Paintings Found by Swiss
Feb 19, 10:06 AM (ET)

By ERNST E. ABEGG

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) - Two Impressionist paintings stolen in one of Europe's largest art thefts have been recovered in an abandoned car, police said Tuesday.

The pictures by Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet were among four paintings worth $163 million that were stolen from a private museum in a Feb. 10 armed robbery.

The two other paintings taken from the E.G. Buehrle Collection - one by Edgar Degas and the other by Paul Cezanne - remain missing, Philipp Hotzenkoecherle, commandant of the Zurich city police, told reporters.

The recovered paintings - Monet's "Poppy field at Vetheuil" and van Gogh's "Blooming Chestnut Branches" - were discovered in a parking lot in front of a Zurich mental hospital on Monday. It was unknown how long the white sedan in which the paintings were found had been parked there, Hotzenkoecherle said.

The pictures, worth a combined $64 million, are in good condition and were found still under the glass behind which they were displayed in the museum, he said. They were identified by museum director Lukas Gloor after a thorough inspection.

( Read more... )

Back in and trying to settle down from traveling and visiting family over the Christmas holidays, and revving up to work on Chapter 2 of the dissertation. Just in from Starbucks where I was working on the main text from Sullivan for the chapter. Among other things while traveling, I tidied up a bunch of old computer files on my laptop and glanced through old journals. Taking care of a bit of that on my new desktop computer as well, I just happened to find something I'd thought about a few weeks ago, which I had feared lost: an old poem, the fair copy of which I hope is still tucked into a box of old letters. One of the stranger and more precious things in the world is to find yourself the subject of a piece of art. All these years later and I'm still only left in silence before Angela's words, not sure at all what to make of them. Or that's not exactly it: perhaps I think that they might be pegging me, or the me of those days, far too exactly – maybe even more than I'm prepared to understand. (Or perhaps that's all the overstatement and undergraduate drama. Either way, I find that the simple fact of the poem is still something I very much treasure, even though I've not spoken with Angie in years and years, and our friendship is really only a memory or a permanent piece of goodwill.)

Angela was the third part of my trio, along with Angie Brunner, in the summer of 1989, which I always called the greatest summer of my life: my second year as a Small Group Leader and occasional Trip Leader at Lutheran Outdoor Ministries Center. Angie Wheeler and I were both writing quite a bit at the time, and while I look back at most of the verse I wrote in those days and shudder, it was a significant thing for me at the time to have a critical and sympathetic eye like Angie's reading my stuff, and to be allowed to read hers, particularly while I was openly carrying a big torch for the other Angie. Hanging with the Angies – I always thought "The Angies" would be a great band name – was at the very least a new high mark in learning to have deeper relationships with women at that point in my life. Later on, Angie wrote these words about me and I found them preserved in a Notre Dame journal, where I now read them for the first time in at least six years.

Sunday 4 Dec 1994
I was typing up old journal stuff from my Spring 93 journal and typing up some old verse when I found the poem that Angie Wheeler wrote about me. Thinking that I should copy it for safety, I couldn’t decide what file to put it into and decided to place it here. I think that she must have given me this when we lived in the Green House, probably around Oct of ‘91. I remember putting it on the wall of my and Dave’s room, in the corner facing the map of the Moscow subway system. Perhaps it came from earlier, when we were at High Terrace. I’m not sure when our correspondence lagged. It does come after we’d exchanged copies of some of our verse. I remember sending one of my little copy-books to her, I think containing even the rubbish of when I first began to try to write verse, back when I was running around with Ann Stahl. Anyway. It did also have some better stuff in it, including the verse where we both thought that I’d captured Brunner’s spirit.

A man to look at,
not touch.
Drifting away from
the world.
Fantasy in one hand,
God in the other.
Searching outside
longing for completeness.
Energy wasted.
Unfound tears,
beating against closed doors.
Seeing too much,
blindly.
Compassion and guilt
walk hand in hand.
Entwined in reality,
not fitting the dream.

A man to look at,
not touch.
I read him carefully,
feeling so much.
My hand runs over the pages
believing, not believing.
Walking with him
I stumble.
Both, climbing and falling.
I reach out to him
But he’s a man to look at,
not touch.

AW

Blech. Felt crappy all day. Not quite sick, but close enough: you know that feeling? I guess maybe it started last night. Jules and I had been playing tag since the Regina Spektor concert and saw one another for the first time last night when we went up to Brady Street and grabbed dinner at the Emperor of China. I'm going to see her at her birthday party on Saturday, anyway, but this would give us more time to talk one-on-one. And then I turned out to be the Walking Dead. I was so embarrassed about how lethargic I was through dinner, that I couldn't help but actually apologize for it, a couple of times. Fortunately for me – and for her – she was the exact same way, which then mercifully made it kind of funny to hear ourselves trying to rally to say something interesting, or watch ourselves struggle to stay focused on whatever it was we were saying, much less what the other was talking about. So that made us laugh a bit, but we cut out early. She gave me a random gift of a stuffed Notre Dame Leprechaun that she'd found somewhere, while returning some music she'd borrowed and the Loeb/Sale's Catwoman: When In Rome, she having become a big Loeb/Sale fan.

After that, I had the worst sleep last night, both frequently interrupted by not being able to sleep for more than two hours at a stretch, and then those two hours being filled with wildly exciting adventure dreams which made the actual sleep exhausting. It was everything I could do, I confessed to my second class tonight, not to lie down on the table at the head of the class while I reviewed with them for their Final Exam tomorrow. But I managed to keep a more authoritative posture, if not presence. I had some fun/interesting chat with the students who stayed the latest, Michael Duxbury and Kelly Pechan, both of whom added a lot to the class and to my enjoyment of it by their intelligent and reflective questions.

They had some things to say about the nature and structure of the course that I found interesting, as well as the structure of the Final Exam, which had been something I'd been wondering about since last year. Jen had argued that the large amount of identification/matching I did on the exam was inappropriate to a college-level course, but I was unconvinced about that, given the remedial nature of Intro to Theology, where I was really starting at the beginning with students. Since this wasn't something where I was building a college course on the graduated knowledge they had from 3rd grade, 5th grade, 7th grade, 9th and 11th grade Theology or Church History courses, I really felt I had to stress such things as basic memorization of key names, concepts and data because I couldn't assume any of that in students, but it is all critical in that Theology is a subject that is forever intricately interacting with its own past and sources, and you have to have access to the basics and have them in your head for you to understand more advanced references or arguments. I suppose any science is that way. In fact, I suppose that's one of the things that makes Theology difficult to pick up in our culture: we don't grow up with anything more advanced than a 3rd grade religious ed course in our heads, and then when we're walloped by the real, adult version of it all, we want to shut it down for overloading our minds, and for seeming to make such a big deal out of something we've been conditioned to think we can do without.

The following story is included because it's fun to see that the movies aren't all hoopla: there really are nefarious art-forging families out there even scamming the great museums! Who knew?

Is Chicago Museum's 'The Faun' a Fake?
Posted: 2007-12-12 23:08:44

CHICAGO (Dec. 12) - A half-man, half-goat ceramic figure supposedly sculpted by 19th century French artist Paul Gauguin has delighted aficionados visiting the Art Institute of Chicago for a decade, but now the museum says "The Faun" is a fake.

"No one could think of any other instance in which anything like this happened here," the director of public affairs at the institute, Erin Hogan, told the Chicago Tribune for a story posted Tuesday on its Web site. "So we don't have experience in this area."

The museum said the sculpture is among scores of forgeries produced by the Greenhalgh family, which has been under investigation by authorities in Great Britain for nearly two years.

A private dealer bought the piece at Sotheby's in 1994 and the Art Institute purchased it from the dealer three years later.

A British judge sentenced Shaun Greenhalgh, 47, to four years and eight months in prison last month. His mother, Olive, 83, received a suspended term of 12 months, and his father, George, 84, was to be sentenced later.

Shaun Greenhalgh created the fakes, while his parents handled most of the sales. All three pleaded guilty earlier this year to defrauding art institutions and other buyers over 17 years. They had also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to laundering the proceeds from the sale of a fake Egyptian statuette.

The creations by the Greenhalghs also included Assyrian stone reliefs, and several copies of paintings by American artist Henry Moran.

Hogan declined to reveal the purchase price of the discredited piece and said the Art Institute was talking with Sotheby's and the private dealer about possible compensation.

"Everyone who bought and sold (the work) did so in good faith," he said.

How amazing is it, that there is still something new of the Master's to discover? I never get to find things like this tucked into my things! That said, I'm turning in: I've been up working for 32 hours and I've earned my rest.

Vatican: Michelangelo Sketch Found
Dec 6, 3:52 PM (ET)

By FRANCES D'EMILIO

VATICAN CITY (AP) - A long-missing Michelangelo sketch for the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, possibly his last design before his death, has been discovered in the basilica's offices, the Vatican newspaper said Thursday.

The sketch, drawn in blood-red chalk for stonecutters who were working on the construction of the basilica, was done by the Renaissance master in the spring of 1563, less than a year before his death, L'Osservatore Romano reported.

"The sureness in his stroke, the expert hand used to making decisions in front of unfinished stone, leave little doubt, the sketch is Michelangelo's," the newspaper wrote about the discovery, which it said will be presented at a news conference at the Vatican on Monday.

The sketch shows that Michelangelo "on the threshold of 90 years of age, even though he wasn't coming regularly to the (basilica) construction site, continued to take binding decisions" on how the work was being carried out, the Holy See's official newspaper commented.

The sketch "now becomes the last known design of the artist," the newspaper said.

Michelangelo, who began working on the basilica's construction in 1547, was in his late 80s when he did the sketch. The sketch is especially rare, the Vatican newspaper noted, because the artist ordered many of his designs destroyed when he was an old man.

The sketch was discovered in the Fabbrica of St. Peter's, which contains the basilica's offices.

L'Osservatore Roman said most sketches done by Michelangelo for the stonecutters were destroyed or lost in the cutters' workplaces, but this one survived because a supervisor used the back of the sketch to make notes about problems linked to the stone's transport through the outskirts of Rome.

Assistance in the research for the sketch came from the University of Bonn and Rome's Bibliotheca Hertziana.

Michelangelo apparently drew the sketch for the stonecutters because he was dissatisfied with how with some blocks of travertine were cut, the newspaper said.

Travertine is a particularly resistant stone still used today in building homes and offices in Rome.

Michelangelo's design shows a spur of the drum of the dome to indicate to the cutters just how much stone needed to be hewn. Included on the sketch were three numbers - "6, 9 and 3/4" - but it was not clear what the figures referred to.

Michelangelo completed the dome and four columns for its base before he died in February 1564. Three weeks before he died, when he was nearly 89, Michelangelo went up the dome to inspect it.

The construction of the basilica, whose cupola defines Rome's skyline, spanned several working lifetimes of some of the Renaissance's most celebrated artists and architects.

The first architect of the basilica, Donato Bramante, died eight years after the cornerstone was laid. Other architects, including Raphael, followed, until Pope Paul III turned to Michelangelo in 1546 - 32 years after the artist had put the last brush stroke on the Sistine Chapel's frescoed ceiling.

Random entry time. I've been locked in pretty much all week, other than teaching and the occasional visit to library or coffeeshop. After my attendance at the Over The Rhine concert last Wednesday, the only social thing I've done is having Diane grab me for dinner and drinks on Thursday, which was very good timing, as I knew I'd been rudely invisible the previous three weeks while working on the Theosis book chapter. So we went out to the Water Street Brewery where we both got giant variations on Chicken Alfredo (mine fed me for two more meals) and just caught up. We seem to like winding down at the Metro over dessert, and we headed over there but both ended up not wanting to order anything to eat. It was strangely quiet for a Thursday we though, and we just relaxed on a couch and nursed a few glasses of port over the next few hours while we talked. Maybe that's why I'm not recalling lots of what we talked about. Or maybe it was just not a wide variety of topics. I remember a long examination of female culture, as she related having fallen into an extended conversation with a group (in a friends-of-friends sort) dominated by the utter cattiness that we both find so ugly (where she tried to keep a discrete silence). I think that took us to just talking about love, marriage, dating, and sexuality in general. She wanted to know what I was up to since the date with the English professor, but with the writing and all, I hadn't given it the least thought. I did laugh to tell her that my memory had been clanging through the day with a mental note I'd filed from the spring that it happened to be Jen Wilson's birthday, but I was now released from my duty to try to equal or better her birthday presents to me. I hope her friends treated her to some fun.

Speaking of old flame flashbacks, I got a great Christmas card from Angie the other day, with a fabulous photo in it of her, Chad, and their three girls. What made the day really funny, though, was the fact that within a few hours of reading that, I had opened an old notebook as I was moving some things around and found an old love note from Jenny Patton. As these two were the other key players in my ill-advised undergraduate attempt to (openly) date two people at the same time – an utter failure of courage on my part that I now recall as a brief sojourn in madness – the opening of both of these notes in the space of a few hours felt rather like the universe still chiding me for having subverted the natural order. I do need to catch up with both of them, though: it's been some months since I've spoken to either of them.

I think I got so sick of paying attention to politics during the last presidential election cycle that I've kept that part of my mind pretty much shut down since, waiting for 2008 and the end of the Bush era. I've not been doing the CNN-junkie thing since John Paul II's death and the Papal Conclave that elected Benedict XVI. But I think I have to open that up again soon and start figuring out who to support. However, I still think that, as per my New York Times letter the other year, the primary system completely subverts my ability – since I live in the later-voting Wisconsin – to fully take part in the Presidential election process until after the conventions. I still just can't shake a conversation I had with Shirley Williams where she said that she just was amazed that people hadn't noticed that democracy had failed in the United States and had finally been replaced by plutocracy: more than anything else, the money involved in Democratic and Republican politics is the threat that even the ability to vote doesn't seem to be a strong-enough defense against.

In contrast to that pessimistic-sounding note, something the other day – maybe something about movies or such – made me think about how much people wish they were somewhere else, doing something else, being someone else. And I thought to myself, "What else do I wish I could be doing other than this work? What would I trade it all for?" And I realized: nothing. I'm doing what I like the most, and what I think it most important for me to be doing. Sure, there are details of life I'd change, but I was suddenly struck by what a blessing I'd been given.

A memory came back to me of being surprised in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence the other summer with Erik when I saw Canaletto's painting The Doges' Palace and Piazza San Marco, Venice, which was at nearly the same angle as my own vision of the same place the day before.



It was just one of those moments where you blink for a moment, trying to get your bearings about whether you had merely seen the painting before, or whether that was a vision from your own life....

Temporary entry: for possible use in my class tomorrow, studying the Trinity through the perspective of the visual arts, specifically Masaccio's Trinity. And now to bed!

( Read more... )

Edit: Okay, I have to leave this entry here, even though I ended up not using the images in class (not as many students were using laptops as I thought might be), because jucundushomo left too fun a comment on here for deletion.

Before I forget and break tradition:

MICHAELMAS!

Giulio Romano; Roman, 1499 - 1546; Saint Michael, c. 1530;
pen and brown ink, National Gallery of Art
Celebrating Michaelmas (well, among other things) got an early start last night with a feast over at fellow-Michael Mike Harris' place, where he and Donna were hosting our guest of honour Markus Wriedt for the evening. I was there as well, as were the Lloyds. Markus is doing his dual-placement thing right now, being a professor both here and in Frankfurt. As he is one of Germany's most famed food critics as well as a professor of Reformation history and theology, he is much sought-after for his cooking services here as well. We opened last night with a very full German white wine, so much so that I almost felt compelled to chew it, and a few bottles of this as well as seafood appetizers (shrimp and octopus, with various sauces) kept the adults content while the kids ate and then were gotten ready for bed.

Markus prepared a meal of stuffed peppers (green, gold, orange, and red, for our preferences), stuffed with minced beef and pork in about a 2/3 to 1/3 ratio, and then this was served with simple white rice, very moist, with a light glaze of a tomato sauce of fresh tomatoes from the Harris' garden. A series of red wines were served with this and the conversation was much quieter now that the children were asleep. Lots of talk about Markus and his family, and his recovery from his illness. This led in turn to the novels he was reading while recovering, having been forbidden from real historical work/reading. He nevertheless gravitated toward work with real spiritual roots, things that might have a shot at making the shelf of "The 100 Greatest Works of Literature" that he keeps in comparison to a bookseller friend of his back home, where each substitution on either's shelf become an occasion for hours of talk. He is a huge enthusiast of Nabokov, and he urged us to read Pnin and Lolita, in that order, and this led us to talk about the Russian soul, the 20th century, and the writer in exile, whether Nabokov or Solzhenitsyn. He then began to speak of another book I've not read, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which I'd heard of from varia109. The redemption images in this, and what sounded to me like their difficulty as well as their glory, made me think of Shusaku Endo's Silence, which Markus, in turn, had never heard of, and so I shared some experience of reading that, and my decision not to read it with my high school seniors as too much spiritually for them to be ready to absorb.

There was much talk also about the good life, about travel and family around the table. Markus told a story of an old blues artist he'd been acquainted with in his younger days, a German who went abroad and who saw much of life from the streets or the gutter in a hard run of years. Markus had taken his wife and then-13 year-old son to see a performance when the musician had returned to Germany after a great while, and they renewed their acquaintance after the show and made a real friendship out of it. This musician was "taken in" to the family table and became deeply moved at the way Markus' son, a great lover of music who had been deaf when very young and is now a musician himself, sat leaning against him in a posture of utter familiarity and comfort, even of intimacy. Like family. And the musician exclaimed how he had been looking for that kind of feeling for years, around the world, because Germany had very much lost that, somehow, in their own culture. Markus spoke of really finding that when staying with a family in Naples, but that this was part of what made their Christian home now very distinctive in very secular Germany.

This brought to mind a painting I had just that morning discovered friede had done, in her style of taking photographs and digitally painting over them, breaking them down into more elemental forms and colours. She had commented in a journal entry of mine back in middle June, where I had noted that I had updated a November 2006 entry with a few photographs that Andrei had just sent me, how much she loved the form or spontaneity of the photo, although acknowledging that it really wasn't a great photo in itself. Her painting, of me holding Renée while I was eating and talking at a gathering at the Lloyds, really does pull out the essence of the moment much more strongly. So that came to my mind and I shared that with the group at dinner, as an example of just that kind of image or reality that Markus was talking about. (Along with the painting, you can see the original shot here, if you're so inclined.)

As dinner finished up and the conversation continued, I became the object of occasional amusement. I hadn't slept much the night before, had been on the run all day and hadn't eaten until dinner, and then, combining much wine on an empty stomach and my medication, I began to nod at the table. When I was talking, it was easy to resist any weariness, but sitting still, well-fed, listening and just breathing too shallowly, I began to do the in-and-out fade that's so embarrassing whenever you do it in some public function. As is usual with everyone, my attempts to disguise this so as not to appear rude failed utterly and everyone just began to laugh at me. Markus keeps earlier hours, though, so we called it a night before too much time had passed, and I was soon home where I could collapse at my leisure. I totally failed to wander over to the commons by the Union, where the Studio 013 Refugees were doing their all-night 12-hour improv comedy run and where Julie said she'd be, and so I'll have to do some Michaelmas begging for forgiveness.

( An article on Michaelmas from today's Peoria Journal Star that quotes my old boss, Larry Cunningham, the great spirituality scholar at Notre Dame, among others. )

Today is the 10th anniversary of the death of Rich Mullins. It was a stunning piece of news, and everyone who knew his work moved in a sort of shocked state of disbelief that day, looking at one another with a bleakness that belied words. He and L'Engle were the only two I considered "first tier" spiritual masters that lived in my lifetime, and he was the only one I met. His big achievement on my behalf was to fill in the great gap left in my childhood Catholic formation of passing onto me a sacramental vision of reality. In company with our mutual master and great influence, Francis of Assisi, Rich broke through to me in my undergraduate years both in giving this ability to see God revealed in all things, as well as embracing a lifestyle of simplicity, or even poverty, where the lack of ownership opens up the pleasurable use of everything in the world.

He was a songwriter who the Chicago Tribune, in a retrospective feature on October 10, 1997, rightly described with, "In a career spanning seven albums in 11 years, Mullins matured from a sophomoric-but-ambitious neophyte into a master craftsman who, creatively speaking, deserves the same praise as Sting, the Chieftains and Paul Simon...." In those seven albums, he produced many well-received songs, and two albums which I would grant the rank of "masterpieces" – a term I do not liberally cast about. The World As Best As I Remember it, Vol. 1 and A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band both earn that lofty recognition and do so with very distinct merits and styles. (By way of comparison, I would rank another favourite of mine, the more widely-known U2, as having produced three "masterpieces": The Joshua Tree, Achtung, Baby, and All That you Can't Leave Behind; just to let you know what level of quality and artistic achievement I'm talking about here.) With the luxury that we always realize we had only when it is illumined by death, I had expected many such more over the course of my life. I gathered with other mourners over the coming weeks, to hear a copy of the scratchy, awful, brilliant boom-box cassette demo of his "Ten Songs About Jesus" that he had spontaneously pulled over and recorded in an empty country chapel ten days before his death. He never recorded demos in that way, but this time he had, and these dubbed cassette tape copies were meatier than most other artists' studio recordings.

My roommate David Nutting turned me onto him, and in time I found myself part of a troupe of students who would follow Rich around the area, Deadhead-like, whenever he would tour in the region. He gave words – supported by a music indebted to the breadth of the American folk and rock traditions – that gave expression to the love I felt for my Midwestern landscape, being the only singer I knew who seriously sang about the land itself, and not some more abstract "Earth" or "Nature," but with the sacramental depth that supported the love of the world as something beyond an end in itself. It wasn't just for the music that we followed him (he frequently toured without a band and chronically had difficulty remembering his own lyrics, which we would shout to him from the audience whenever the vague look of panic would cross his face), but even more for the "conversation" with his audience: a sort of free-form ramble through his train of thought that featured reams of insights that could have filled books of useful quotations. Although he'd occasionally say something ill-advised, which he was likely to point out himself, we were aware that we were in the presence of a man who was being transformed into something distinctively new. I couldn't help but notice the similarities to Francis, as I read The Little Flowers and other such early sources in those years, but here we were seeing it in our time and culture. One of the most successful musicians in the industry, he gave his entire income to a charitable fund from which he drew an annual salary determined by the annual average worker's income in the U.S. So different from the glam of Nashville, and the gruesome "gospel of prosperity" so popular among some wings of Evangelicalism. Rich's own journey into Catholicism paced my own, although for me it was a matter of return, without nearly so much baggage as someone coming straight out of the Protestant American context.

In the aftermath of the traffic accident that took his life, I was stunned by how often his own death seemed to obliquely peer out from behind his lyrics: a desire for consummation in the God of Jesus Christ that wasn't hidden by his own frustrations, nor hid them, whether his confusion about what to "really" do with his life, his disappointment that he never married, or his struggle with his own deep anger and inability to move beyond old wounds.

Calling Out Your Name
Well the moon moved past Nebraska
And spilled laughter on them cold Dakota Hills
And angels danced on Jacob's stairs
Yeah, they danced on Jacob's stairs
There is this silence in the Badlands
And over Kansas the whole universe was stilled
By the whisper of a prayer
The whisper of a prayer

And a single hawk bursts into flight
And in the east the whole horizon is in flames
I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

I can feel the earth tremble
Beneath the rumbling of the buffalo hooves
And the fury in the pheasant's wings
And there's fury in a pheasant's wings
It tells me the Lord is in His temple
And there is still a faith that can make the mountains move
And a love that can make the heavens ring
And I've seen love make heaven ring

Where the sacred rivers meet
Beneath the shadow of the Keeper of the plains
I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

From the place where morning gathers
You can look sometimes forever 'til you see
What time may never know
What time may never know
How the Lord takes by its corners this old world
And shakes us forward and shakes us free
To run wild with the hope
To run wild with the hope

The hope that this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in a song not sung in vain
And I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

And I know this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in a song not sung in vain
I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And with the prairies I am calling out Your name

Our friend friede did us the service of passing on this Salon article to me. Those of you mourning Madeleine L'Engle's passing with me might find it interesting.

L'Engle's Last Wrinkle
Madeleine L'Engle wrote children's books that were too complicated for grown-ups. I'll miss her.

By Laurel Snyder

Sep. 10, 2007 | I got the news Friday morning, hunched over my laptop in a coffee shop, and it forced me out of myself, tossed me sharply back in my seat. I took a little breath. I said, "Oh!" a little too loudly. I disturbed the young man in an Atlanta Falcons T-shirt sitting quietly beside me.

Madeleine L'Engle was dead.

Perhaps this sounds grandiose, but I'm serious -- I felt the loss deeply, personally. I was bewildered at the death of a woman I'd never met. Because, to me, Madeleine L'Engle was more than a writer. She was what a sixth grader in an English class -- taking hold of her masterpiece, "A Wrinkle in Time" -- might call a theme. For those of us who write for children, she was a gold standard, a symbol. She was an example of what one could accomplish without succumbing to the easy tropes and obvious forms of fantasy or young adult or science fiction.

Of course, L'Engle wrote all of those things -- fantasy, Y.A., science fiction. But in doing so she reinvented the wheel, she made a bigger, better wheel. Fairies and witches weren't enough for her. Nor were spacemen, time travel or high school romances -- though all of these things, boiled together, created the landscape of her stories.

Nothing was enough for L'Engle. As an author, she danced with demanding philosophical questions and toyed with quantum physics. She wrote about faith with devotion, dabbled in ethics, psychology, myth, art, politics and nature. And she blended everything into stories that describe the crushing complexity of a child's life in this century. Her books are timeless, but at the same time contemporary. She made art for children, real art.

Of course, she also wrote for grown-ups: more than 60 books -- poetry and essays, novels and meditations, memoir. Her adult works contained the same complex ideas, ideas she never exhausted -- treatments of magic and faith and science and government -- challenging and digesting all the rules of the universe. L'Engle was the name I threw around in defense of children's literature, the evidence I could toss at my friends who wrote "serious" books of literary fiction or poetry, and say, "Children's literature isn't just easy genre writing -- see!" I lumped her with J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis, as a brilliant writer who just happened to speak to children.

( Read more... )

As New York City was a perennial setting – or even character – in her writing, I make a point of including here The New York Times obituary for Madeleine L'Engle. I also add her website's brief obituary.

Madeleine L’Engle, Writer of Children’s Classics, Is Dead at 88
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: September 8, 2007
The New York Times

Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

“Of course I’m Meg,” Ms. L’Engle said about the beloved protagonist of “A Wrinkle in Time.”

The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: “Wrinkle” is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” it begins, repeating the line of a 19th- century novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and presaging the immortal sentence that Snoopy, the inspiration-challenged beagle of the Peanuts cartoon, would type again and again. After the opening, “Wrinkle,” quite literally, takes off. Meg Murray, with help from her psychic baby brother, uses time travel and extrasensory perception to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing. She does so through the power of love.

The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians.

In the “Dictionary of Literary Biography,” Marygail G. Parker notes “a peculiar splendor” in Ms. L’Engle’s oeuvre, and some of that splendor is sheer literary range. “Wrinkle” is part of her series of children’s books, which includes “A Wind in the Door,” “A Swiftly Tilting Planet,” “Many Waters” and “An Acceptable Time.” The series combines elements of science fiction with insights into love and moral purpose that pervade Ms. L’Engle’s writing.

( Read more... )

For probably the last three years, I've been telling myself this day would come and I would regret putting off my impulse to write to Madeleine L'Engle and to thank her for her broad literary production, which has come to mean so much to me. It seemed to me, as dorky as it might be, that some note of appreciation was due: that the artist deserved to hear her applause.

Emily posted the following notice to me from the Publishers Weekly website:

Madeleine L’Engle
Author Madeleine L’Engle died last night in Connecticut, at the age of 89. Best known for her 1963 Newbery Award winner A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels, L’Engle was the author of more than 60 books for adults and young readers, most of which were published by FSG. This spring, the Square Fish imprint of Holtzbrinck reissued L'Engle's Time Quintet in new editions.

On my first homepage, back in the mid-90s when I started experimenting with the internet at Notre Dame, I made a "spiritual masters" page off my main "theology page," where I was going to put links to various online resources to these people who had been particularly important in crafting my spirituality and theology, and L'Engle's name was on the short list. In fiction and non-fiction alike, her writing was replete with the normal and the fantastic – and the fantastic obscured for as as the "normal" – in physics, art, music, classical theology, and perhaps most radically, family love.

Nowhere else have I seen an author who could weave these elements together and let you see the mixture as natural. The arts for her were not high-brow, and they could have been for this young woman who wanted to be a writer and who figured she would support herself on that quest by acting on Broadway: her "temp job" that is so many others' great life goal. Instead, she revealed the arts to be elementally human: accessible and even "average" in a way that neither diminished the significance of the arts, nor bought into the ruinous "cult of the artist" that has so damaged art in our era.

Incorporating her vision of the arts was for me part of the key to absorbing the lessons possible in associating with the Catholic humanists known as The Freeks at Notre Dame. When Kate really introduced me to her writing in those days – I had only read A Wrinkle in Time in grade school – I saw it as a recreational distraction. In retrospect, she turns out to have been one of the primary authours I read during that period, even in the young-adult novels with the horrible teen-romance-style covers I hid behind my copy of Rahner as I read. I taught her to my high school students studying Sacramental Spirituality, using her autobiographical account of her marriage to actor Hugh Franklin Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage as one of my two potential texts for our long talks on love, sexuality and marriage (the other option being Vanauken's A Severe Mercy) and her book The Irrational Season as a key resource to open up our talks of our experience of time as spirituality, in calendar and in liturgy. I have a sub-list on my Amazon Wishlist helping me keep track of my purchases of her, as she is one who I've decided is worth tracking down and owning the whole immense corpus. I will still lead students to her, and one day, my nieces. There is perhaps no higher praise I can give than to hand over my students to a better teacher.

It was interesting to trip across this AP article today, and to read it in light of a long conversation I had with Fortunate Ojiako at the picnic on Saturday. He spoke, somewhat in complaint, of the Western tendency to dismiss the African perspective, particularly African metaphysics, which he said is distinct from that of the West, even when operating in their Western Christian context. The African experience, he said, is one of a directly-perceived interaction with the spiritual world, to which Western perspectives have been blinded by materialist philosophies or anemic, self-absorbed spiritualities. So he spoke about the confrontation between Christian prayer and native magic as a constant and dynamic clash of power that was quite visible. It was so much more like some of the Jewish perspectives that I'm used to from the first century, and I just tried to ask as many questions as I could.

So it struck me what an example of Western tendencies this AP article was, in its implicit assumptions that religion was expressive of mere "belief" that had nothing to do with objective reality, and that it was the Western concept of "culture" that was paramount and unquestioned. The article never considers the kind of African perspective Fortunate reported to me, whether Christian or animist, and only quotes those who buy into the Western concept of culture, where the implied African duty is simply to preserve their society and artifacts according these philosophical assumptions. Without our conversation, I would have never noticed anything near like the conflict of perspectives that this article represents, other than the ones it chooses to select and judge on the writers own, undeclared terms.

Christianity Vs. the Old Gods of Nigeria
Sep 4, 1:19 PM (ET)

By DULUE MBACHU

ACHINA, Nigeria (AP) - Born to a family of traditional priests, Ibe Nwigwe converted to Christianity as a boy. Under the sway of born-again fervor as a man, he gathered the paraphernalia of ancestral worship - a centuries-old stool, a metal staff with a wooden handle and the carved figure of a god - and burned them as his pastor watched.

"I had experienced a series of misfortunes and my pastor told me it was because I had not completely broken the covenant with my ancestral idols," the 52-year-old Nwigwe said of the bonfire three years ago. "Now that I have done that, I hope I will be truly liberated."

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Treating myself to a re-read of Brideshead Revisited before the term begins. Just back from Venice. Et in Arcadia ego. I wonder if, looking back, I'll find that I'm still in that movement, myself?

Alex Ross did a tremendous two-part cover painting of the new group for this last issue of Justice League of America. Along with research requests, Professor Barnes has me trailing all sorts of issues, and now the Sinestro Corps, for him in emails from the farm. As always, kudos to friede for really turning me onto Ross' art.


The following caught my eye about the medieval treasure found the other day in Austria. I recognize the Czartoryski name from when we played host to the Prince in Milwaukee back when I first arrived in 2002.

Polish Count Claims Medieval Cross
Aug 22, 7:48 PM (ET)

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER

LONDON (AP) - A Polish count laid claim Wednesday to a medieval cross fished out of a trash container in Austria, saying it had been stolen from his family by the Nazis.

Count Adam Zamoyski, the chairman of a Warsaw museum, said photographic and archival evidence left no doubt that the cross was the one held by his ancestors at the Goluchow Castle in Poland before World War II.

The item was found by a woman rooting through the discarded belongings of a deceased hotel owner in western Austria in 2004, but it was not until last month that it was taken to an Austrian museum for valuation and safekeeping. ( Read more... )

Fabulous! The album preview of J.P. and Sheila's wedding album from the sehr talented Image Source photography studio of David Mason is now online! I really like this guy's eye for not only a good photograph, but also for his layout talents: I think they're attractive and are going to give a vision of real beauty for Japes and Sheila as the vision of the photographer becomes over time increasingly their own vision of their wedding experience.

On a purely self-absorbed and irrelevant note, however, I kept cringing at my crooked bowtie: the strap was mis-sewn into a Möbius Strip, the net effect of which was to have my tie keep trying to turn to the vertical. So I'm the one who looks like he's been drinking through the whole affair. How much would it cost to Photoshop that straight...?

Mike and Donna bought a place last year, a Milwaukee Bungalow in the Riverwest neighbourhood, that needed lots of work done on it in order to convert it from duplex to the single-family home that they wanted. Now, when I think of "fixing up" a place I move into, I'm thinking painting and maybe some very basic wood surface work. Mike, like Dan, has instead taken to tearing down walls, building new rooms and the like. They've raised and leveled the first floor over the last year, and yesterday, in prelude to tearing down a wall for the new kitchen-dining space that's coming, Mike, Donna, Dan, and I put up a 12-foot beam that will support the second floor in lieu of the soon-to-be-absent wall. Mike and Dan, naturally, did the bulk of the heavy lifting, which is the type of thing I'm not supposed to do after my adventures with steroids, and Donna and I swapped off on watching the kids. But I did lend a third set of hands in getting the thing into the room and in figuring out how to turn it so that it actually could get into the position intended: no mean trick given that the beam was longer than the room itself. Mike's losing a lot of study time to the project, but he and Donna should walk away from their time in Milwaukee with a profit on their living expenses, and I can't knock that. We had a dinner together of yummy homemade waffles with bacon, an unending stream of chatter from Renée, and odd moments of sound and expression from Zeke and Owen (Amy being off in NYC and NJ with Anna).

Friday night was Gallery Night in the Third Ward, and it was way bigger than I expected. Just the thing for a fun night out, if you could stand the crowds. I wandered a bit, but made my way before too long down to Artasia where I was meeting Diane prior to us watching Before Sunrise, which I've wanted her to check out for quite awhile. In fact, this was the third time in two weeks we'd made plans to see it, but things kept coming up, like the tragic collapse of her friend Robin last week. It turned out that the third time wasn't the charm here, either, as I thought she was getting off work around 8pm and it turned out she was going more toward midnight. I hung around the incredibly crowded shop, and look at some gift ideas, while getting the full tour of the wares from Diane, as well as meeting some of her coworkers that I'd long heard of, but never met. In time, her brother Dan showed up and between those two, and a pair of customers that I got into a long conversation with over wine, the night ended up being a blast. After running a car-shuffling errand, it was really too late to try to get the flick in, and so we grabbed a late dinner at Ma Fischer's, which I thought just the right way to end the night, being my favourite dive in town. As usual, the soup tasted incredible (New England Clam Chowder) and the potatoes remained the most disgusting instant sort. As, always, we had some great conversation that left me with a lot to think about.

I'm finally finishing a draft of a specific chapter after two months of just raw, unorganized writing on the dissertation. Now I'm stripping away things that I can save for later chapters and just seeing what I need for the biographical essay on Francis Sullivan. It's interesting to see it coming together, like I'm stepping back from a wall I've been building stone by stone, and can now start to see more of the whole. I'm not doing lots of free reading these days, other than the basket of books, magazines and catalogues I keep in the bathroom. I knocked off David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day at Julie's recommendation, which I thought got better as it went along, more pure wit and less snarkiness. I've been working for months on The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, and will likely take many more months to complete the three-volume set, the third volume of which I've yet to pick up. I confess that I love reading people's mail. Whether the earlier Letters of C. S. Lewis the letters of Augustine, or the Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo that Dad gave me for my birthday the other year, I find that I learn so much more about a thinker from this angle than I do by reading such masterpieces of self-consciousness as Augustine's The Confessions or Lewis' Surprised By Joy alone. This first volume, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931, is surprisingly painful at parts, to see the unedited tensions in his relationship with his father, and the dull shock of the decimated generation of young men that made it home from the World War I fields of France. But there's also the educational process going into the making of a great literary scholar and just the naked, sharp thinking and flair for illustration that would become his trademarks as an educator. In the back of my mind is lurking the Alan Jacobs essay that frey_at_last or amea did the great favour of pointing out to me, from First Things entitled "The Second Coming of C. S. Lewis" which does so well in pointing out the negative side of the "personality cult" that has evolved around Lewis in American evangelicalism. The unique factors of why Lewis, Tolkien and the other Inklings would appeal to this American audience are not going to be repeated in that way again, and the evangelical eyes that have kept looking for and announcing "the next C. S. Lewis" are doomed to disappointment, while in the meanwhile great theology and literature is being produced and could pass by relatively unnoticed since it didn't fulfill the expected form. The letters keep the reader focused instead on reality, with its triumphs and failures. I've been especially interested the last several days, hauling the book with me to the breakfast table and such, as I march through 1922 and a world so different, though still – astonishingly – in living memory....

Friday featured my interview with Peter Giersch of Cathedral Consulting Group on the prospect of taking the Headmaster position at a local private Catholic academy. I had told him up front that there was something like less than a one percent chance that I was really interested in the position, but that I would be interested in talking with him for a variety of reasons nevertheless. I'm no administrator, and as a high school teacher my years were marked by a turnover of principals and an organizational structure that tended to keep them away from me, anyway, so I never developed what I felt was a great insight into such educational administration. Still, I have a strong academic interest in Catholic Education as a whole, and the desire as an educator to understand those parts of the educational process that are even beyond my purview, so as to strengthen the effectiveness of my teaching in those oblique ways, too.

It was a friendly conversation, with other talk about recording music (he was an amateur musician, too) and Theology (a Master's grad from Marquette), all as part of getting a feel for one another. We sat out in the sun up outside the Potbelly Sandwiches at Bayshore Mall, where I skipped the sandwich for a large bowl of yummy corn chowder. He told me about the prospects of the specific position, and the ten-year development plan he was aiding the school system in constructing. I shared my observations about teaching Theology at the secondary level, and the primary academic and structural problems I'd seen in my experience, particularly with an eye toward recruiting and maintaining a gifted and stable body of instructors. While we both felt that the specific Headmaster position was not going to be something I would find fulfilling, he was interested in bringing me on for some further conversations with the principle architects of the plan. Consulting in that low-key, volunteer way was something that I said I would be more than happy to do in contributing to the structures beginning to emerge.

I spent the latter part of Friday in the company of Dan and Amy, after a last-minute invitation over to their place. They had just returned from their first vacation since they got married – two babies, one house, and half a doctorate ago. They were positively radiant from their time in Myrtle Beach with Dan's family, and so they were that much more pleasant to be with. It was one of our low-key nights: lots of talk, particularly after Anna and Owen were down, and a final "veg" while watching an episode of Arrested Development. (I'd never seen the series before they started showing it to me, and now we often watch a single episode as an old-fashioned serial or "short" before a film....)

Thursday was Julietime. She grabbed me in the afternoon and giggled to herself about the surprise she had waiting for me. Unfortunately, her surprise ended up being some double-foiled. She was taking me to Collector's Edge South, thinking she'd discovered this huge comic shop I knew nothing about: I had actually been going there for about half a year after I started reading these stories again, until I swtiched to the East branch because it was a direct and shorter bus trip from my place; and it turned out that South was closed at that time, not opening until later in the afternoon. A bit disappointed about the less-than-ideal results of her plan, we went up to the East Side instead, let her change at her apartment while I looked around at it in its now tidier-than-moving-in state, and looked at a few tokens from her recent trip to Croatia. Then we walked down Lafayette over to Villa Terrace, to which she had never been.

We nosed around the current display, A Worthy Model: Works by Édouard-Marcel Sandoz, a set of animal figures in a variety of materials but all for household decoration or use, as vases, salt-and-pepper shakers, and the like. We then looked at some of the permanent displays and wandered out onto the terrace itself. Julie had caught me up on her news and vented some to me during the drive and I returned the favour as we strolled around the garden, pausing here and there to debate the identity and signficance of various goddesses. We then ended up sitting at the end of the waterfall where we launched into a little more theoretical discussion, me coming from the basis of what I know of formal Christian ethics and her bringing in her research-oriented approach to psychology. Time wandered away from us as we talked and when I idly looked at my watch so as to see whether we had an hour or so left, I found that it was 5:20 and that the Museum had closed twenty minutes earlier. Instantly reverting to giggling kids who knew they weren't where we were supposed to be, we climbed up to the house and saw that the gardens were themselves blocked off on the sides of the house by the same large spear-topped fence that surrounded the entire grounds. We went back up onto the terrace and found the door still open, so we crept into the house, looking for someone to apologize to. We found no one, and the front door locked. So we opened that and hoped someone would come that way again to lock it. After we got out the courtyard, we saw that the front gates were open with a few cars still in the drive, so we figured some of the staff were still inside setting up for Saturday's "Gershwin in the Garden" event. Thankful that the gates were not shut and that we wouldn't have to try to climb the sharp iron fence, we set off down the street, laughing at one another's old fence-climbing stories that ended with shredded pants or shorts and much embarrassment.

That evening I spent with Cousin Ben down at the Jazz in the Park performance of Fareed Haque, as I mentioned earlier, I think. Packed as usual, and also filled with so much conversation that it was hard to pay attention to the music, we nevertheless had a good time with it, eating from the vendors on the street and then ending with some dessert when I introduced Ben to the Metro.

Uncomfortable day. Stayed home from the library and working on dissertation here. One year ago I was wandering the streets of Florence after Mass and dinner with Erik, getting ready to leave for Geneva.