My former student and now friend Jessica sent out an email that I just got, wishing a bunch of us a happy Feast of Augustine, as today is the 1579th anniversary of his death in 430. As it turned out, I ran into our great Augustine scholar Professor Barnes this afternoon while picking up my syllabi and so ended up with dinner plans with him, which we took at the excellent Miss Katie's Diner, one of those classic American diners that happens to be just off of campus and is somehow entirely off the radar of Marquette undergrads. So we marked the Feast together by having good diner breakfasts for dinner. I've never gone to a place that gives you not just the token two pieces of bacon with your order of eggs, but a whole pile of bacon. Good stuff. So that was just the latest of the spontaneous invitations I've been getting since I returned from Boston, along with dinner with the Harrises at the Lloyds', coffee with Erin F. before she returns to the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, along with such tasks as getting my syllabus ready for the new school year.

Anyway, just thought it cool to get such a Feastday reminder from a student, period. I sat through Barnes' undergraduate Augustine course last spring with Jessica and other former students like David and Ryan, and it's cool to see people internalize something from that encounter with such a great personality, even across the continents, cultures and centuries.

I even learned something new today from Barnes, in finding out that Sebastiaan Tromp, who is a scholar I've encountered in my dissertation research, seems to have been responsible for single-handedly coining the understanding of Augustine's ecclesiology at the Second Vatican Council. And, as it turns out, that understanding was based on about five repeated quotations from Augustine, all taken out of context and applied to an understanding of the Holy Spirit that seems to have nothing to do with anything else Augustine ever wrote about the Trinity. What the effect of that has been, I'm not certain; but it certainly doesn't help us refine our understandings in the present when our scholars mess up their representations of the past upon which we are building. I'm always conscious, as an historian, of a responsibility to both the past and the present (and thereby the future, I guess) to try to make sure my characterizations are as correct as possible, regardless of any use I might have thought to make of history for some present cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against what seemed to be all odds, I had a pretty fine birthday on Saturday. My strength returned and I seemed to finally shake off the worst of this persistent lung and throat infection by Saturday, just in time to receive an impromptu dinner-and-cake party from the Lloyds. Crip and Lisa had arrived the night before to stay over the weekend, leading up to Lisa's Tuesday dissertation defense. Dan baked me a pound cake after an afternoon phone call where he flew into a mock rage upon discovering that I had no favourite kind of cake and had opined that there were only a few kinds of cakes and that they were pretty much all the same. As he began to rattle off cake names in brutal refutation of my mistake, I seized upon "pound cake" as something I had always enjoyed and as a way of stopping what threatened to be an exhaustive taxonomical listing of all known cakes. Mostly it was just exceptionally phenomenal to see people again. I had gone something like eleven or twelve days without talking to a friend face-to-face, which, when I think about it, is really strange: I don't know when I'd ever done such a thing, but that was sort of the nature of the "feels like it's just hanging on for one more day" bug that I had. The Harrises showed up a bit later, rounding out the cutely enthusiastic birthday greetings I got from all the kids. Amy surprised me with a copy of the DVD of Once, which I had recently shown to them, laughing as I opened it that she had intended to get me the soundtrack and had been surprised to receive her order and to find the movie. But I assured her that this was perfect, as it contained both the movie and the soundtrack, as it were. So just lots of friendly talk, eating and drinking through to a little after midnight, which is the best gift of all. I had talked through the day with my folks and with my brother (with little Nate giving an ongoing series of whoops and cries in the background that sounded more like what you heard in the background of the jungle house at the zoo than from an infant vocalizing), and I missed out on the phone call from Leslie and the nieces, which resulted in a voice mail of birthday greetings that sounded enthusiastic from Grace and either competitive (trying to outdo Grace) or just annoyed from Haley, which had me laughing by the end of it.

Monday, returning to my observation of Barnes's undergrad Augustine class, I was flamboyantly given a present by Barnes in front of the crew, gaudily wrapped in Cartoon Network Justice League wrapping paper that matched the endless supply of Justice League napkins he keeps trotting out at different occasions. I held off on opening the thing until after class, just in case it should prove somehow embarrassing, which I wouldn't put past him. I could feel that the item was framed and under glass, so I was expecting either a photograph (Barnes is good amateur photographer) or perhaps some rare comic book cover framed, which is a sort of thing I had seen him do before. I slowly removed the wrappings under the watchful eyes of him, Jessica, and a few others who hung out for the occasion, to reveal an aged, framed, black-and-white print I had never seen before of Diana Rigg in a black-and-white, very mod outfit, hair blown up and back from her face: all very much from her Emma Peel era. So I really had a good laugh then, since I had mentioned at some point a few months back that I had been quite smitten with Emma Peel when I was about ten years old and had discovered old Avengers re-runs playing on what passed for late-night Rockford television back then. I think we had been talking old movies or DVDS or such, and I had mentioned finding some Avengers episodes recently, and had laughed in retrospect about having had what at the time was an unconventional first sex symbol. Barnes had remembered that and grabbed this piece of pop periphernalia for me, and so that was a slightly awesome gag/pop culture gift.

We all returned to the Lloyds' on Sunday for a cookout on behalf of Crip and Lisa, with Bill and Rachel Oliverio and their kids also making it over. This occasion was sort of a Milwaukee-reunion party for Lisa and Crip, with them excited about getting authentic brauts and cheeses and such, and raiding some of the local markets to put that together, as well as, of course, to see old friends. There was a bit of anticipatory celebration for Lisa having made it to her dissertation defense, and a bit of a belated birthday party for Crip, whose 30th was on the 16th. I had only seen Bill in passing this year, so it was cool to be able to catch up on his news in a bit more detail. Bill successfully defended his dissertation in Theology and Philosophy while I was sick, focusing on hermeneutical schemas for Pentecostal biblical interpretation, and had just accepted a sort of missionary/professorial position, having been invited to come teach at a college in Nairobi, Kenya. So that led us to all sorts of cross-cultural, African political and social situation-type discussions through the night, along with the normal "program" type questions you ask when anyone picks up a new academic position. Continuing from the day before, there was also a lot of such talk with Crip and Lisa about their experiences so far, and just a lot of interesting material (for me) from having three scholars who deal with Pentecostalism centrally, while I'm currently just addressing it in a contextual way for my dissertation. I might actually attend next year's meeting (in Minneapolis, in the spring) of the Society for Pentecostal Studies just to listen in to the senior scholars of the field and get a broader idea of the current state of that conversation, which might give me some ideas of what to do with some of my dissertation research once it's finished. Bill, who I discovered already heads the Society's philosophical study group, immediately started vetting me for possibly delivering a paper for the group while Lisa and Crip just laughed, but it didn't take me too long to convince him that I was doing nothing that fit naturally into distinctly philosophical categories. An unfortunate amount of time ended up being spent talking about the security concerns of working in Nairobi at this time, which are not inconsiderable. Bill is flying over to eyeball the job and the situation in May, but remains cautiously optimistic.

My mind felt like it came back today. Talking to my sister earlier on the telephone (I couldn't get a hold of Dad to wish him a happy birthday, and checked to see if he happened to be out there), I used the image of a limp, washed-out rag to describe the way I'd felt the last two weeks. Not "sick" in an overt, fluish way, just weirdly drained, as well as all the coughing from this lung/throat infection.

Starting yesterday evening I just started feeling more and more refreshed. This was a bit of a shame, in a sense – too little, too late – since the Lloyds and the Harrises had wanted to take me out last night, and had canceled their plans and their babysitters since I was still feeling under the weather. I haven't had a face-to-face conversation with anyone in nearly two weeks, and that just feels bleak, so I really missed out on their company. Still, by the time I'd had a late dinner, I felt like I had regained 50 IQ points and so I threw myself into getting a couple of dissertation pages written at a good clip before hitting dual landmines of a NIRV (Nigh-Impossible Reference to Verify) and a WFNFR (Weird Foreign Newspaper Format to Reference).

Today we had one of those brief and welcome temperature spikes, a sort of tease of the upcoming summer, with a sunny day in the 80s. This was a good day for getting back on my feet. I had to replenish my supplies in the worst way, and so I was over on the East Side hitting the Metro Market and just enjoying the wild, warm wind that was enlivening the city. College students were out everywhere in force, probably enjoying the beach a bit, and making the bus too loud, but they did their bit for making the day feeling like a lively one. The feeling of isolation in the midst of such numbers, because of not having seen anyone due to being sick for so many days, brought back to me a curious note Professor Barnes had sent to me the other day, part of which read:

Next year will be ordered by the tasks of defending, job-hunting, and teaching. I will offer you another perspective on next year: it will, most likely, be your last year here in the midst of the emotional "communio" you have here. Think about what that community will mean for you after you've left (and it is no more) three years from now, ten years, twenty years. Take it in in such a way that you acknowledge its value, and in such a way that it might fortify you during those future years when there is nothing like it in your life. In other words, don't assume that you will find, or be able to build, another community later. Odds are you won't be able to (for internal reasons as well as external; for reasons of choices freely made as much as for circumstances beyond your control.)

I was so honoured by his boldness in writing that. Many people have remarked, especially this last year, what a gift I've been given in my friendships. This is true: I've had extraordinary luck or blessing in being able to find a circle of friends who are willing to open up, live their lives deeply and thoughtfully, and to share those lives across all our differences. High school was pretty good for that. College was better. Graduate school at Notre Dame even more rich, and Marquette has been just as strong.

I've wondered myself if I can make that happen again as a faculty member somewhere, or whether this has been dependent upon the student experience. Even my time as a professional was still partially built upon my Notre Dame circle, although I did meet some new and major friends in that time. So I'm left wondering. Without the security and pleasure of a "home base" in a marriage and family of my own, everything does seem increasingly precarious in that sense. Not that I lack confidence in the staying power of my friendships, which tend to remain as strong long-distance: it's just the possibility of a more quotidian loneliness, no matter how tempered by the strength and occasional enjoyment of already-established friendships then experienced at a distance. But it's no use to borrow trouble from the future, of course: we'll see what happens when all that happens. With those thoughts and feelings and speculations on the future, though, today kind of feels like an official foreclosure on a youth that has been wildly extended. How's that for overly-glum? I guess I'm still related to that freshman I remember: drama, drama, drama.

Leslie told me that she and Jim took the girls into the Cubs game yesterday against the Reds, having first-row seats right by the visitors dugout and on-deck circle. The girls proved popular, even in their matching Cubs jerseys, with (if I remember the order correctly) an umpire coming over to give Grace a game ball, and then the Reds third baseman giving Haley another one some time later. Then the Reds batboy came over a bit after that, offering to trade a nice, shiny new ball for the one given to Haley, with an aside to the parents that that ball had been pitcher Aaron Harang's 1000th strike out, and that they had wanted to give it to him, which Leslie graciously agreed to. Haley actually thought she was getting the better of the deal in no longer having a dirty, banged-up ball. Some of the people nearby started good-naturedly yelling to the Reds that "Sophie needs a ball" (the girls names are all on their jerseys), and that she was getting slighted in the typical youngest-child way. Leslie just thought that that was fun and funny, but as she kind of wondered if Haley had just gotten gypped out of an actual gameball, the batboy came over again and asked them to stick around after the game since they had been such good sports about the ball. Harang then signed and gave them his game bat, battered and oiled and full of character. The girls, too young to realize that that was the coolest item of the lot, thought that the bat could be Sophie's.

I've had some fabulous "people-time" over the last several days, but, like the best of such times, I don't know that it easily lends itself to description. Not that it needs description, other than for perhaps the obscure and arcane purposes of journal-writers. It's been a quiet day, but I've been a bit scattered, so maybe this writing will help me focus. Poor Barnes is pretty sick, and didn't teach his class today, but I went for the session nevertheless (even though I'm basically attending to observe his teaching) so that I could bear witness to Rebecca's first time teaching, ever. (Rebecca is his TA this year.) She did quite well, in fact, although I suspect that an undergraduate course is an easier first-time experience, since you don't have to deal with all the classroom management issues of a high school class, or younger. And this Augustine class is an exceptionally focused, dedicated and pleasant group. But she jumped in and dealt with them and the material at a perfectly "high" level of expectation that made the transition from his work as smooth as could be: it definitely wasn't a wasted day for the students. So that was cool to see. We chatted about it afterward, and my current dissertation stuff, as we walked across campus.

Thursday night with Bob visiting was a virtual riot of conversation at Dan and Amy's. The sound was commented-upon by several people throughout the night, and it's a wonder that the kids fell asleep at all, much less a few adults checking out as the night went on. Bob was on his way through to the Upper Midwest AAR meeting where Dan would be presenting a paper on Saturday, and so the two of them would be driving up to St. Paul, Minnesota on Friday for the first sessions. We hadn't seen Bob in the better part of a year, at least, and so Mike, Donna and I all came over for dinner and then the loud, laughing, rough-and-tumble of conversation that seems to naturally follow Bob, as he is often a more emphatic contrarian than Mike is. I'm not capable of trying to chart the course of the conversation. There was the expected political and economics talk, some discussion of the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica, for which Bob has been the most distant or even "honourary" part of our viewing circle, and only a little bit of theology "shop" talk. There was some discussion or even protest on his part about my journaling habits, attendant on a long talk about the effects of communications technology on student relationships today, particularly as regards the capacities for depth of friendship, and he insisted upon looking at my account of one his more recent visits, although he didn't seem to find much objectionable there. His news was more exciting to us: Carmen had completed her residency in Emergency Medicine and was now an Attending Physician, which I think made us all conscious and amazed at the time that had passed by, in the way that one is always amazed at the passing of time; there was also a great deal of kid-talk over his accounts of just how contrarian Logan had become as he was approaching school age, not that it occurred to me at the time to put that in such Bob-like terms. Good times, with all of us conscious of how rare Bob's presence was since he and Carmen had relocated for her work at the University of Michigan hospital.

Saturday night I spent with family, as Mom and Aunt Pat were up visiting Uncle Bill and Aunt Helen. They were spending the day hitting the Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum during the day, although I opted out of joining them for the afternoon with that since I had plans to see it the next day with Erynn. I don't have anything against seeing exhibitions more than once – far from it – but I wanted to be able to see it with her with fresh eyes, in the same way that catching a new movie is more of an "event" when you're seeing it for the first time, and how friends can be disappointed to find out that you already have seen it. So I made plans to join them for dinner afterward. They swung by and picked me up on the way home from the Museum, and we spent some time in the living room talking over cheese, with Helen popping in and out of the conversation as she made a large Paella...

Hmm. Paella. [off to eat leftovers Helen sent home with me]

There was a considerable amount of talk of cousins Ben and Becca off on their respective adventures in Spain and in Brazil. There was the especially good news of Becca's having won a fellowship that is allowing her to study this summer a kind of underground printing or press culture that has formed among the poor in Brazil, and which has also resulted in her getting a conference presentation slot back in Madison next year, which is fabulous for a junior. She's down there now for Spring Break more than anything else, and will return – I think they said – for six weeks during the summer. Ben's year in Spain will conclude some time in June, and so I might have a chance to see him this summer, although the rumour is that he may be doing the kind of summer camp work that he did last year for kids with special needs. I fielded a lot of questions about the job hunt this year, and the character of the interviews I've had, and I think a few about the dissertation work, but otherwise kept pretty quiet and just listened more, fencing off a bit of low-key, genial, Irish harrassment here and there. Aunt Pat was very droll and took me by surprise when she responded to some comment I'd made with some line like, "Well, that's something I can agree with." Nice.

Dinners have been my chief joy the last several days. I wasted an incredible amount of paperwork time nearly inheriting (again!) my grandmother's car from my cousin Jane, only to discover that there were some extra costs associated with my particular position, so much so that I could not afford to receive a free car. So I am restrained from committing the great Green sin for a while longer. I also found that I was the Last Man Standing for the Canadian professorship search I had been part of, only to have that Department re-assess their goals for the professorship having undergone the process, and deciding to re-write the job description and conduct the search again next year, which they invited me to take part in, should I still be on the job market. And so, with such seeming bonanzas sprouting wings and fluttering off at the last minute, the dinners I mentioned become the clear highlights of my week.

I started to play the game of "When do you have some free time?" with Jessica last Wednesday after Barnes's undergrad Augustine class (which I'm sitting in on), when I had the inspiration of then realizing that I could do dinner right then, which actually turned out to be one of the few openings in her schedule. She had never been to Zaffiro's Pizza and Bar, it turned out, which happened to be my craving of the moment. Since this is a Milwaukee classic, I came down somewhere between suggestion and insistence, and that's where we ended up. The fact that she's currently doing the vegetarian thing didn't end up being a problem, as they do a decent veggie pizza, too, and we compared pizzas of America, Italy and Ireland (not recommended!). This gave us more chance to talk about her engagement, and we talked criteria for deciding who you marry, and quite a bit about friendships attached to or affected by getting married. There was some particularly curiosity on her part about how I've stayed friends with people I've dated, and even been accepted as a friend by husbands of such. That her best friend is the ex of her fiancé is a juggling act in which she has found herself. So that lead to some interesting talk on balancing friendships with marriage.

Friday's gathering at the Lloyds' of the group felt especially good after having missed it the week before due to being sick. I started to share the news of Jessica's engagement (pretty much everyone knew her, even if they'd only met her once) but I found out that everyone already knew, Barnes having had his own dinner with her the night before. That most exciting bit of news out of the way, I played with the weird drama of "won but didn't win" in telling everyone about the Canadian professorship as we ate the fabulous ham dinner Amy had prepared. And Barnes shared the discussion that his undergraduate class had had on Wednesday about another thing I missed while sick, the consolatio-style talk that his friend Julia had had with the class about her upcoming death from cancer, as a lesson built off of the discussion of Augustine's friend's death in Book IV of The Confessions. Students had been reporting that that session was the singlemost important class they had ever attended, and spoke intensely about it for about 50 minutes before Barnes turned the class to a more text-based subject. I'll watch the recording of the session at the library soon. There was some talk then on Friday about how he came to schedule such an unorthodox event for the course, and how it was that he came to ask Julia to do this, both as much for her as for the students, he said.

Our BSG-watching that night proved to be very exciting as a lot of the hidden background history of the show was finally revealed as the story is coming to its conclusion, and it was a mercifully satisfying piece of writing. Talking about that gave way to general conversation that kept us all going until about 1am, when we all finally turned in, all of us again spending the night. I loitered around in the morning after the Harrises left, talking with Amy while playing cars and trains with Owen while Dan gave Anna a reading lesson, and chatting with Dan about Roman rhetoric and such random topics until he went in to the library around noon. While he worked on some research there, I took care of my business and then headed back to their place for another dinner invitation, this one over yummy meatloaf. I checked on the ride back to make sure that Dan remembered that this was Valentine's Day and that "Let's hang out with Mike!" wasn't a disaster in the making on his part, and was relieved when he said that, having to roll with their babysitter's schedule, he and Amy had dinner-out plans for the following night. So we were making up for a movie night invitation I had had to turn down earlier in the week as I was trying to make up for lost time with the dissertation. With Dan and Amy, we'll often go old-fashioned and do a "short" before the feature of the evening, often an episode of the hysterical Arrested Development, which I'd never seen until they started showing it to me. This night, instead, I had them watch the pilot of Everwood, which series I thought they might really enjoy together, since I thought it was an exceptionally-written multi-generational family drama, and is still one of my top-3 all time pieces of television. That went over well, with some interesting observations just about the nature of television pilots as a distinct sort of thing in themselves, and how you have to watch them with slightly different expectations than a series in the midst of production. We then went on to the Coen Brothers' recent comedy Burn After Reading which gave us plenty of laughs, though I observed that somehow their movies often seem more funny in their individual moments than they seem as a whole film.

Well, this bout with whatever-it-was is finally coming to an end. I kept saying that over the last few days, but it kept lingering, whether it was the Mother of All Chest Colds or perhaps a mild walking pneumonia. I've had the latter before, and it felt more like that, but I never had a fever that I noticed, and usually that infection provoked some kind of fever in the past.

So this has been the second night that I've gotten a long, productive run in on the dissertation, without being utterly baffled or hypnotized by the project. I'm currently analyzing the theology of charisms Sullivan has operating in his retreat notes of the 1970s, and will then run with that to see what impact/contrast it offers to the form of his final published work on the topic.

I ventured out today, although I'm still coughing and worried about being infectious, and I sat in on today's session of Barnes's undergraduate Augustine course, which I had been doing and recording up to this point. While the conversation was interesting on the "Narnia" of the Manicheans, the text known as The Hymn of the Pearl, I was really most excited by noticing during a whispered exchange with former student/current friend Jessica that she was now sporting a diamond on her left hand. When my eyes popped out as she was making some gesture, she nodded and whispered that she'd fill me in after the class concluded. Apparently Nathan proposed last weekend, having asked Jessica's Mom's permission over the Christmas break, when he visited Italy, which was the first time I'd heard that he'd made the trip. (That's what I get for having to cancel all my social plans for feeling crappy.) So she made a point of asking if I'd be available for a Marquette wedding on January 2nd, which I assured her would be no problem at all.

Travel arrangements have been made for my next interview, and I'm also lining up travel plans for heading down to the Cincinnati area to stand Godfather for my nephew Nathaniel Alan on the 22nd. Speaking of transportation, I'm about to join most self-proclaimed environmentalists in their hypocrisy and commit the ultimate Green sin: I've about to cave in after years of resistance and own my first car. I'm pretty embarrassed.

Other things worth jotting down have just been a nice stretch of social times over the last few weeks. The regular Friday nights at the Lloyds started up again with the beginning of the last series of BSG episodes, and so the Harrises and I have found ourselves hosted over there, with dinner and chatter before putting down the kids and settling in for a 9pm showing. The first night, in the midst of that awful cold snap we had, had us all sleeping over so that we didn't have to try to take the Harris kids home in such brutal weather. Barnes has been over for the meals and talk with Rae, who has become a favourite guest star among the other kids, and who seems to enjoy it despite being two years older than four-year-olds Renée and Anna. Predictably, the conversation is fairly unpredictable, he wrote lamely. For instance, conversation between Dan and Mike on the way home from the library on Friday about sending the girls to the German language school here in Milwaukee turned into a long conversation between me and Mike on the rise of Hochdeutsch, "High German," the standard German we learn in school here and is used in national media in Germany. Mike's experiences in visiting family over there, and what he remembers from his Mom's accounts of growing up over there were set against what I supposed must have been a national drive for language uniformity that would have been advantageous during the war by the Third Reich. There was quite a bit of debate about the necessity in combat for full language compatability for small group tactics. Some Wikipedia-hunting then occurred, with me being surprised that more of the push for the propagation of Hochdeutsch actually came in the post-war generation. When Barnes arrived we caught him up on the general thrust of the conversation, but then we drifted pretty quickly into some of his youthful adventures when – speaking of language – Mike mentioned Barnes's Mom as being born in Hanoi, and Barnes took this to mean that I had been recounting some other conversation.

This was a bit of a throwback to conversation from Sunday the 18th, when I went out with Barnes and several of the newer generation of Barnes students – Alex, Rebecca, Katy, and Martha – to the cheap theatre's showing of Quantum of Solace, which I'd seen with Barnes in the fall. On the way over to Genesis, the 24-hour diner out there in Greenfield way, I had mentioned Barnes's high school career as a dangerous underground high school newspaper publisher on whom the FBI kept tabs. (It was the late 1960s.) Since the others had never heard of this stuff, there was some demand for these stories, which are pretty funny-sounding now, and so Barnes went through some of this with them, explaining that the fact that his Dad had a sensitive job at a missile-building plant, and that his French mother had been born in Hanoi, had some bearing on why the teenage Barnes had been deemed a person of interest to the FBI. There are some pretty funny stories in that lot, and other than a few brief side-conversations of a catch-up sort with Martha that I had, Barnes pretty much held center stage. We moved on to more Augustinian and Patristic concerns after a while, talking theological shop, and especially dwelling on the flaws in contemporary Systematic Theology education. Naturally, since I was the Systematics student there, I was particularly sensitive to having become aware of these deficiencies, which center on the lack of an attentive examination of the core philosophical texts that inform or situate Modern theology, such as Descartes's Third Meditation, Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, some Hegel, and Heidegger's Onto-theology. The final question in light of such a hole is whether or not contemporary systematicians were, in Barnes's words, simply being trained to be hacks. Yay.

Julie came through town the other week, and we got together on the afternoon of the 16th for some hot chocolate at the Pfister, which had been outrageously good when I had been there New Year's Eve with Erynn. Unfortunately, now it was depressingly average, but that was the only bad thing. We just sat in a corner of the lobby lounge with an occasional ear on the pianist and caught up, talking about some of her feelings after having finished a semester of her doctorate, both about the program and the people she had met, as well as just her read of the location in general. Any romance of being in the New York area had seemed to have faded, and the weight of the comparative social isolation of graduate school had seemed to set in, particularly since the bulk of her classmates were married or involved in serious relationships that seemed to cut down on the opportunity of making significant friendships in her program, much less outside it. I hated to hear that, though I wasn't at all surprised by it, having seen that sort of thing myself. I shared my interview experiences thus far, and that sort of speculation about the different places I might find myself living within the next year.

Today's the Feast of Lewis, being the 45th anniversary of his death, as well as those of Kennedy and Huxley.

My birth certificate showed up in the mail, which was a relief. My identity remains my own for another day. So all my paperwork is in order, and my files can be put away for another decade. The day was spent digging back into Chapter 1 of the dissertation, refreshing myself with what I had done there so that I could clarify in my mind what remained to do in this next chapter. I had a headache through most of Friday, though, which was discouraging. Still, over meals I watched a few episodes of the 1965 season of The Avengers, which I had found on sale the other day for a mere dollar. I hadn't seen these since I was in junior high, when they were my first exposure to quirky British television and intrinsic British coolness, as well as the more fundamental fascinations of Mrs. Emma Peel in a leather catsuit. The music, the camerawork, the locations: it was all great fun to watch now as an adult, and to remember 1965's contradictions from a 2008 perspective – of people who moved between upscale London buildings with their modern amenities and open-fire village pubs and houses, as both being "normal." The countryside village conditions, from my eye, though, were hardly removed from what I grew up considering "camping," they were so basic. Ireland was the last of the European nations to so modernize, with a lot of folks describing to me in 1997 how different things had been just a few years earlier, and how much more prosperous everyone was feeling in that "Celtic Tiger" economy as it made fundamental changes in the popular standard of living. So watching these were both fun "spy-fi" in themselves, as well as interesting historical documents in indirect ways.

The other morning I attended Fortunate's dissertation defense with Mike and Ellen, which was quite fun because this was one defense where I already knew the material in great depth, which is not often the case in our diverse and specialized dissertations. But Fortunate is an Augustine scholar, among other Early Christianity interests, who dissertated under Barnes, and did an historical project that he nevertheless tied in interesting ways to struggles today in divisions among African Christians, offering his work as a model of an historical pattern worth trying to avoid. The rest of the committee – Zemler-Cizewski, Dempsey, Johnson and Carey – all asked potent and interesting questions from their various specialties and perspectives. Mine was the only "public" question. In my own work, touching on the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, I had been struck by the fact that, as with many Church councils, no one had ever attended a council before, since there had been none in their lifetimes. So they sort of had to make up their own way of having a council. Since Fortunate's dissertation, and the faculty conversation regarding it, was more explicit about the African cultural elements Augustine and the other African council leaders were trying to rein in or modify, I asked about any particularly African characteristics in their councils themselves that Fortunate might have noticed. Most of that conversation seemed to stay in the moral mode, as well as mentioning the African concern with universal perspective or function in the Church, which one can see back to Cyprian in particular.

"Broken Nets": Augustine, Schisms, and Rejuvenating Councils in North Africa
Fortunate Ojiako, B.A., B.Th., M.A., M.A.
Marquette University, 2008.

This dissertation studies the schisms ("broken nets" according to Augustine) [he was using the image of the story of Jesus instructing disciples where to fish, with one casting of their nets resulting in a catch that burst the nets] that bedeviled the North African Church, as well as its moral conditions during the late fourth and early fifth centuries. This study equally shows the rejuvenating nature of the Aurelian/Augustinian councils. These councils sought to regenerate debased and erroneous aspects of North African customs. The sanative nature of the Aurelian/Augustinian councils is not only buttressed from Augustine's Letter 22, but also from the content of the conciliar decrees emanating from the North African councils. These reforms were liturgical, moral, as well as disciplinary in nature. In correcting the African Church customs, Augustine sought to align them with those of the universal church.

The trademark moral rigorism of the African Church that had dire consequence for her is likewise highlighted in this work. Rigorist views were espoused by Tertullian, Cyprian, the Donatists, and even Augustine's Catholic Church. Rigorism is also present in the consuetudo or the so-called African theology that sought exclusion for apostates and also rebaptized former heretics and schismatics. This work adumbrates that nets and broken nets were products of the time. While the Decian persecution of 251 AD gave rise to the lapsi, (and in extension Novatianism) the Diocletian persecution of 312 produced the traditores, which in turn aided the Donatist schism.

Part two of this work explores the state of the North African Church that Augustine and his cohorts sought through councils to reform. This section also examines the Cyprianic councils and the impact of customs and scriptural interpretations on the controversy in the North African Church.

The result of this dissertation will not only show the rejuvenating nature of the Aurelian and Augustinian councils, but also adds its voice to those among Augustinian scholarship that see a greater need and importance of studying Augustine more from his African environment. This is not in any way an attempt to discountenance the importance of other paradigms that go a long way toward a better understanding of Augustine.

Yesterday hit me with a bit of a wallop: just sore, achey, and wiped out – maybe the hours I'd been pulling on the application run catching up to me. I'd been giving myself one slow "off" day on the weekends, but I listened to my body and moved the schedule up to accommodate its demands. Laundry needed to be done, anyway, and that slowed me down enough to get to it. Napped a bit, too, to recharge from my "just get by" sleep of the last week or ten days. The University shifted into Fall Break mode as Wednesday came to a close, and so I'll have to shift more of my work to the apartment rather than my library carrel. Did a little bit of thinking of theoretical categories of Barnes and Ayres' "New Canon" criticism for Anthony's current encyclopedia side-project and wrote a few notes on that regard.

Began shifting gears back into pure concentration on the dissertation without all that paperwork hanging over my head. I realized that I really needed to work on "communion ecclesiology" more in my current chapter, because, in speaking of the Church in terms of "communion," that ecclesiology really tries to be as all-encompassing a theory of the Church as I've been thinking that an ecclesiology of charisms has the potential to be. So I'm reading in that direction right now, and looking in particular at the number of communion ecclesiologies that have been proposed, some of which seem to conflict with one another. It's obvious from mere observation, and has been since Paul wrote about the Church in the First Letter to the Corinthians, that the Church functions as what we today would call a unity-in-diversity. I'm wondering if communion ecclesiology, in making union (or "communion," in this case) its motif or theoretical basis, might set itself up for a problem as a theory of the Church. It seems to me a bit of a danger in trying to find a way to adequately describe the Church if we use a theoretical language that "automatically" looks at or casts matters in terms of unity: unity is more a result we see in the Church rather than a starting point, and I wonder if using communion language muddies the theoretical waters by inadvertently "assuming its conclusion" of unity. So I'm meditating on that in order to see whether the language of describing the Christian Church in terms of charisms might instead provided a more grounded theoretical language for the Church by more explicitly rooting its unity in its diverse peoples and their spiritual gifts.

I was up early today and was startled by the first light of dawn: the sky over the city was clear, but a great line of clouds were out east over Lake Michigan and the early light of the rising sun silhouetting them made the clouds look for all the world like a great range of mountains in the distance. It was like the last moments of sunset over the Tetons. I'll take the illusion: it was good to see mountains again after a few months.

Not doing the school thing still feels like a bit of the end-of-the-year luxury, and so maybe that's part of why the dissertation is slow to warm up. On the other hand, the project is like getting back together with a girl I've been dating long-distance for awhile: I'm having to re-acquaint myself with the reality of it all again. Especially right now, as I am starting my most theory-based chapter, I'm finding my reading list suddenly moving out into new directions, beyond just the focus on Francis Sullivan's work. I'm starting to go through Karl Rahner's essay on "The Charismatic Element in the Church" right now as part of seeing what has already been thought out regarding an "ecclesiology of charisms." (Again, as I've probably said before, I'm using that terminology rather than "charismatic ecclesiology" simply because "charismatic" has come to mean a pretty limited kind of American phenomenon in American language, and I'm really trying to follow the original New Testament thinking on that matter to its much broader implications.) So Rahner wrote an important essay or two in his Theological Investigations that I'm having to tackle. Leonardo Boff did one, too, but apparently it received an atrocious translation into English, so much so that it's misleading to read, and so I'm going to have to read it in the original Portuguese, which language I've never studied. I think I already have Yves Congar's critical material on the subject, but there's something by Hans Küng I'm going to have to track down. So I'm getting lots of the big names of the twentieth century in right now.

Memorial Day featured a chance to see the gang and to also socialize with Barnes, who was in town after the weekend's North American Patristics Society annual meeting in Chicago, which in my post-retreat cloud I thought was the weekend before, and thus accounts for my not heading down with Mike and Dan to some of the session. However, I received a detailed, if occasionally obscure, update on all things Novatian (Dan's new dissertation focus) from Dan and Barnes. This included a funny account of Barnes having to take some young scholar to task – some guy with a job! – who was using an interesting technique of offering conclusions despite the utter absence of evidence. (He will, no doubt, become famous and well-quoted in the papers.)


And so the conversation ranged from the scholarly to the nonsensical. There was a long digression on Serbian family wine production, as Amy and Dan were expecting a crate of wine from some of her family members who were making their own, which led into some more general talk about Serbian drink that culminated in Amy fetching a bottle of some 10 year-old Serbian plum brandy liquid called Slivovitz, which Dan alleged was largely kerosene-based. Amy poured us two glasses which I sipped gingerly as she then tossed hers down leaving me feeling entirely emasculated by the process, thus peer-pressuring me into re-attacking mine in the same manner, but without the coolly aloof mood she pulled off. Listening to people laugh at me, I suddenly had a strange, déjà vu-like feeling, realizing that I had seen this scene before, but not in real life. Rummaging through my memory for a moment, I realized I had inadvertently echoed a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in a well-done comedic moment between Marion Ravenwood and René Belloq. Nice.

So as the evening moved on, Barnes dropped his granddaughter off at home (she often comes to these gatherings and plays with the other kids) and met us over at the movie theatre, along with another patristics student named Alex, as we all took in the comic book adventure of Iron Man, which continues Marvel Comics' pretty good streak of adaptations. We made vague plans about Barnes' next visit back to campus in July, as his sabbatical year winds up. I'm eager to get my hands on his writing, from this long investigation into the early doctrine of the Holy Spirit, where he is recovering much that was lost from the ancient Church, as I began to understand in the "Holy Spirit From Second Temple Judaism to Augustine" seminar that he conducted a few years back, which ties the record with my undergraduate History of the Renaissance course as being the very best college course I ever took. In particular, I know he has in recent months been working up good stuff in Latin Trinitarian Theology, which was obscured in later generations by the supernova that was Augustine.

Saturday afternoon, I received a last-minute invitation from Dan and Amy to join them and the kids down at the River Splash, the opening festival of the summer here in Milwaukee, "The City of Festivals," which put the kabosh on getting any work done in the remainder of the day, as I would go straight from there to meet Diane for my late dinner plans with her. It was mostly fun to just see the kids reacting to the live music and to listen to Owen point out and name things he was especially excited to see ('big boat," "van," "flag," and the like). When I was carrying Owen around, I suddenly realized he was repeatedly combing his fingers through the back of my hair, and then laughed to hear Amy noting him doing the same kind of thing to her when she was carrying him, except that he kept teasing hers outward as he played with it. I suggested that we paint in a little goatee on him and then he'd look perfectly natural in working on her hair.

I had a student, Bethany, call out and wave from one of the booths as we passed by, where she had had to find summer employment as one of that class of young, college-age, black-t-shirted girls serving drinks. Later on, circling back through that area, I stopped by to say Hi, and to see what was up with the job, as I knew that she had put me down as a reference for one at Alterra Coffee toward the end of the school year. They apparently hadn't gotten back to her, she said, but this gig was something, and if I wanted to go into the club she was working outside of, I could get free drinks by saying I was a friend of hers. I told her I couldn't, that I was down here with– "That family; right, I saw." Keeping a straight face, I said, "My fiancé, actually." Her eyes bulged out. "Wow! Congratulations! I didn't know..." And I said, "The four-year old. She proposed over dinner a few weeks ago." And she laughed as I told her a couple of the funnier moments of Anna's doting on me, which did in fact escalate from her planting one on me when I picked her up to greet her upon my arrival at the house the week before, to her asking me to marry her at dinner while Dan and Amy choked on their food and tried not to worry her by bursting out laughing.

So, they ate their dinner while we sat on the grass, listening to music and people-watching. Amy was excited that the kids were now old enough that the could take them out to things like this, and she was hoping they would be able to take in more of the festivals this year. Dan and I talked about Jazz In The Park and what they might need to do as far as being able to enjoy that, and I heard some of the news of Amy's work trip last week, and the drama revolving around some of that. We walked a bit to try to wind the children down before they headed home for their bedtime, and they dropped me off over at Artasia so that I could meet Diane for our dinner plans.

That was just a night of low-key fun talk. We hadn't hung out since March, when I more-or-less disappeared socially after Spring Break because of the snowballing load of work associated with the course I was teaching. We walked around the downtown a little bit, thinking over a few options, deciding to eat in a restaurant rather than outside. A cold front had slammed through while she was closing up the shop, and while it was still clear out, it was at least ten degrees cooler than it had been minutes before. We decided to try the Hotel Metro's dinner together for the first time. We usually tend to drift over there for dessert and to drink port and talk, but we had never actually grabbed dinner there before. So we caught up on one another's news: some of my retreat business, her and Tim, school stuff, work stuff, all that jazz, before settling into our dinners. During a tangent about hair-stylists, she mentioned how hers had commented upon Tim's resemblance to Ben Affleck, and Diane laughed about the circles she apparently appeared to move in, as our waiter had confessed that he freaked out for a minute and did a double-take with me, thinking I was Adrien Brody. I ended up going with a scrumptious New England Clam Chowder and then a good entrée of White Marble Pork Chops, "Dredged in seasoned breadcrumbs, crusted with shredded potatoes and pan seared. Presented with cinnamon brown sugar apples." And we split a rich, chocolate tiramisù for dessert. I think she had an Eggplant Parmesan, "Sliced thin and lightly breaded, layered with mozzarella and marinara sauce. Topped with Parmesan cheese and baked to a golden brown." But I admit that I cannot quite remember.

It was the saddest, most pathetic thing. At the retreat in Jackson Hole, as I mentioned elsewhere, two nights running, Kevin and I each had somewhere between a third and a half of a bottle of port – each, mind you – without feeling the slightest effect of alcohol from the experience. I don't know if we had eaten something that absorbed it all or what. Last night, trying to have a good catch-up time with Diane, I got completely blitzed – on half a glass of Shiraz. Diane kept laughing out loud as I began to have the hardest time completing my thoughts (Tim is kind of a lightweight in this way, too, I believe, and so she enjoys this show somewhat regularly), and I found myself lost with whatever it was I was trying to say. My sleep cycle is all out of wack the last few days, so maybe that had some bearing on it, as well as an empty stomach, but going from the port story to one glass of Shiraz destroying me felt pretty absurd. I ended up passing on hanging out much later, and on our usual port, and opted to go home by midnight. She insisted that I call her when I get home, just to make sure I was alright, which I think wraps up my whole sad performance in a nutshell.

John Cavadini, my mentor as a Master's student at Notre Dame and now the Chair of the Department of Theology there, has written what Michel Barnes said might be the best thing he's ever written on Augustine. The two of them are both Augustine scholars, and John seems to be here in much the same L'Enfant terrible mode I've seen Barnes and his collaborator Lewis Ayres of Emory University: shaking up the field of Augustine studies by doing something startlingly radical – reading Augustine.

Seriously.

I was shocked to discover from studying with Barnes just how much this field – of the man arguably still the most foundational thinker in the West, even in our secularized thought-systems – has for decades been perpetuating inaccuracies due to the simple fact of scholars quoting one another rather than reading Augustine closely. Augustine was so huge, and so given to being summarized by other thinkers, that the accepted summaries really began to distort people's readings of the text. So the paradigms have been falling of late: Augustine the Neo-Platonist; Augustine the guy who made everything go wrong about sex in the West; and here with John, Augustine the founder of the Western notion of the Self. In Cavadini's "The Darkest Enigma: Reconsidering the Self in Augustine's Thought" in the last volume of Augustinian Studies, John challenged the standard "Augustine and the Creation of the Self" line which I too had obviously ingested over the years. Cavadini's attention to the detail of the Latin text, where I've generally been using the Boulding translation that makes use of the English word "self," was a great caution. There is no equivalent word to "self" in Latin. But the "English Augustine," where that word is written into texts, ends up lending Augustine's language to be related to Descartes and Locke and other modern theorists of the Self. My self. Your self. Our selves. The English gives a possessive note to it, too. And why not? Because everyone translating and reading has been told: Augustine creates this concept of the Self: so we expect to find it.

Enter Augustine: in the Latin, he speaks not of an "inner self," as the translations go, but of an "inner man," possessing five "inner" versions of our same senses. We translate this idea accurately in someone like Origen of Alexandria (d. 254), because we don't expect the "self" idea in him. Rather than concretizing a self that stands apart from the world and our actions, inviolable, Augustine actually portrays the "inner man" – humanity's innermost reality – as created and derivative of the existence of the Triune God who is living interpersonal Love. Flawed by sin, anything that appears to be an independent "Self" is in fact the decaying human beings who cut themselves off from the fundamental reality of God on which all people depend, whether they want to admit that or not. I was very interested to see Cavadini's attention to the program of the De Trinitate (Augustine's still brilliant and pertinent book on the Trinity), which gave me an increasing sense of the unity of the vision of Love in Augustine. That particular unity, I think, is going to be fertile ground for teaching, as a motif that I think students can apprehend and process profitably, that they can use as an organizing principle for Augustine's actual teaching, and use in comparison to other forms of thought or perspective.

My journey to Wyoming was about as I had expected: less than three hours of sleep meant that I snoozed as best I could from the Delta hub in Cincinatti to the Delta hub in Salt Lake City. There I felt refreshed as I ran into Kevin himself, who was on his way back to Jackson from Santa Barbara, where he had been working with a client the two days previous. (This was not a surprise -- which in retrospect would have been amazingly funny and shocking -- Kev had given me the heads-up a few days later that we'd be on the same flight into Jackson.) Last night fulfilled my earlier wishes of a night of long talk, with a glass of wine, my goddaughter Sophie full of life and pleasantly taken with me, a warm fire in the wood stove and Kevin strumming along on his wedding-gift mandolin (which I'd helped Frannie pick, back in 2005) to the music quietly playing in the background. And it doesn't look like everything here is going to be lost in snow! They've taken a turn to the colder (Frannie said yesterday she started in short sleeves and sandals, and it was snowing by the time we arrived), but it doesn't look too bad....

I include below the cut two articles: one on the creation of 23 new Cardinals by Benedict XVI, and the other a news article on the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (a friend of Barnes' and an amazingly sharp theologian), which reports in not-very-substantial news story fashion on his critique of Dawkins' The God Delusion, part of that "new crop" of atheist writing that seems to be a last gasp of 18th-century Enlightenment propaganda more than anything else. If contemporary atheism thinks it's going to engage Christianity on a playing field of evidence and reason, Christianity is going to win handily. The Enlightenment critique only works with the presumption of evidence, reason, and the mystically-invoked "science" as being against "religion," which they dogmatically define, against all actual evidience, as being against reason and the use of evidence....

( Read more... )

One of the things you should try to avoid is having sentences where the verb is the verb "to be." This can lead to passive constructions -- very naughty! -- or just sentences that are confusing or long. Sometimes you write an "X is Y" sentence just to get the thought out, but you should go back and rewrite it. The occasion for this e-mail is what seemed to me to be a clear case of this. [Sometimes "to be" sentences are the best way. :)]

I wrote first

"A low angelology is a doctrine [that] Tertullian insists upon even while he still actively criticizes Christians who teach other otherwise."

Then I looked at it, and rewrote it.

"Tertullian insists upon a low angelology even while he still actively criticizes Christians who teach other otherwise."

Not an overwhelming improvement, perhaps, but I think that it makes the sentence less clunky in style and content: a better flow. I might rewrite it again, mostly because I'm not satisfied with the verb "insists," and I think one should be very careful about adverbs ("actively"). In your rewrite of an essay, you should cut 50% of your adverbs, and probably just slightly less than that of your adjectives. (Later in your career you can pump those percentages up higher.) Remember: getting the idea "out" on to a piece of paper is not the same thing as communicating it clearly and succinctly.

mrb

Barnes writes concerning his upcoming Oxford paper:

I said soon after my first mailing asking each of you for some help with research for my Oxford paper that I hoped I could lay out for you the whole that the diffrent pieces were building up. That's not going to happen soon, but I do have for you a kind of summary of conclusions. (The Irenaeus thing isn't a "conclusion" in the paper, it is something I've just discovered en route that I thought many of you would be interested in.) So, see attached.

The title of the paper is "Other Latin Nicenes of the Late Fourth Century." In it I cover Serdica, the Hilary of his commentary on Matthew (ie, pre-exile), Phoebadius of Agenn, Gregory of Elvira, Zeno of Verona, Potamius of Lisbon, Isaac the Jew, Damasus of Rome, Faustinus, Niceta of Remesciana, and Rufinus "the Syrian." (Seems like there's one other...) Please don't go recalling the CCL volumes for these guys, because I have them here -- except for the Phoebadius/Gregory volume. Omissions are intentional.

A new way of looking at Latin Nicene theologies.

mrb

+++
Latin trinitarian theology is functionally binitarian from Tertullian until sometime in the late 360’s or early 370’s: stated more directly, one can say that there is, during this time, a weak or “low” pneumatology. The same fact is true in Greek theology beginning with Origen.

From the time of Tertullian until sometime in the late 360’s or early 370’s a “spirit-Christology” is the normal anthropological model in the West for the Incarnation. As a corollary, one can say that scriptural passages that had previously supported a strong or “high” pneumatology were, during this time, understood as referring to the pre-existent divine Spirit of the Son. E.G., Luke 1.35-36, Ps. 33.6.

There is absolutely no sign of any presence of Irenaeus’ theology in Gaul or Rome during the third and fourth centuries.

There are a variety of “Nicene” trinitarian logics used by Latins between 358 and the beginning of the fifth century. The most important of these is a trinitarian theology conceptualized and articulated following the logic of power ontology or physics. This power-logic trinitarian theology comes in two forms: the first identifies the Son as the very Power of God; the second finds divine unity in the fact that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have the same one power amongst them. The second Latin “Nicene” trinitarian theology is based upon a logic of substance ontology or physics. Substance-logic trinitarian theology is nowhere near as important as trinitarian theology based upon power-logic, and is surprizingly localized. The third Latin “Nicene” trinitarian theology is based upon a logic of image, resemblance and sight.

The most in-depth and elaborate use of substance-logic trinitarian theology is by Potamius of Lisbon. Although his book on the one divine substance of the Trinity is written in support of a Nicene theology, Potamius spent some time as an anti-Nicene: he was at Sirmium, 357 and signed “the Blasphemy.” (His book on the one substance was written after Sirmium, 357, and consists in part of his rejecting the language and logic of the creed he was previously associated with.) Hosius is the more famous and distinguished Iberian bishop associated with “substance” language for God; he attended each of the three councils that expressed a strong interest in substance language: Nicaea, 325, Serdica, 342, and Sirmium, 357. (Hosius, like Potamius, accepted the logic of the Sirmium creed and thus turned away from Nicaea.) A fact not often noted is that Hosius’ archpriest in Cordova was none other than the famous Latin neoplatonist, Calcidius (best known for his very influential translation of Plato’s Timaeus.) I make this proposal, then: there is an Iberian school of substance-logic trinitarianism, probably drawing upon philosophical sources for its understanding of “substance,” and willing to follow the logic of a substance-centered ontology even when it can be regarded by some as rejecting the creed of Nicaea. (If this last point is true then it would explain the otherwise puzzling identification of “ousia’ with heretics in the western Serdican creed, and indeed draws a line of thought connecting that clause in Serdica with the condemnation at Sirmium, 357, of ousia-talk about God.)

Latin Nicene theologies of the fourth century fall roughly into two groups: in one we see an association of doctrines of a Spirit-Christology, a low pneumatology, and a power theology of the sort in which the Son is identified with the very Power of God. I call this Latin tradition of Nicene theology, “Latin Neo-Nicene” trinitarian theology. In the second grouping of doctrines we see an association of doctrines of in which there is no Spirit-Christology, there is a high Pneumatology, and a power theology of the sort in which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have the same one power amongst them. I call this Latin tradition of Nicene theology, “Latin Pro-Nicene” trinitarian theology.

The advantage Latin theology had from its ignorance of Greek theology as exemplified by Athanasius is that it was free to make statements about a one or common substance that would not have been possible with an Athanasian understanding of homoousios. For Athanasius and the Greeks he influenced, homoousious was a unique and one way predicate statement: one could and should say “the Son is homousios with the Father” but one could not meaningfully or piously say “the Father is homousios with the Son.” Ignorant of this technicality, Latins were free to speak of the Father and Son being of one substance.

One result of excluding Hilary and Ambrose from my treatment of Latin Nicenes is the clear appearance of a methodological and historical question: why exactly are the theologies of Hilary and Ambrose privledged in accounts of fourth century Latin Nicene trinitarian theologies? Because they wrote so much? Because they so neatly fit the dominant narrative of Latin trinitarian theology develops when Greek trinitarian theology pushes it?

________________________________

From: Anthony Briggman [mailto:abriggman@gmail.com]
Sent: Sat 7/14/2007 7:21 PM
To: Barnes, Michel
Cc: Lloyd, Daniel; Novak, Michael; Harris, Michael D.; Lashier, Jackson; Huggard, Alexander; Concannon, Ellen; Lasnoski, Kent; rassly77@yahoo.com; djenkins@leeuniversity.edu
Subject: Re: IT - The Latin THING


I have a question with regard to two of the statements in your summary:

Statement #1: 'There is absolutely no sign of any presence of Irenaeus' theology in Gaul or Rome during the third and fourth centuries.'


Statement #2: 'The third Latin "Nicene" trinitarian theology is based upon a logic of image, resemblance and sight.'

I have yet to find a really comprehensive treatment of Irenaeus' discussion of sight, and particularly how the Son becomes visible in the incarnation, which enables him to reveal (and enables humanity to gain knowledge of) the Father who remains at all times invisible. I believe that I can show that this is not simply an epistemological/revelational comment for Irenaeus, but in fact characterizes the members of the Trinity - that is, to use a later term, visibility is/becomes proper to the Son and invisibility is proper to the Father.

Since you did not discuss which theologians you examined with regard to statement #2, I am wondering if you found the ideas I've mentioned in any other 3rd or 4th century works?

aab

________________________________

In a message dated 7/14/07 9:37:11 PM, michel.barnes@marquette.edu writes:


It is Faustinus, a priest in Rome, writing about 380. I have attached my summary of his trinitarian theology. I can send you the Latin for more (I think), or you can go to the Migne online or the CETEDOC. He is the only representative of the vision/form trinitarian logic I have found. (I take it you see statements #1 and #2 as related in your question about statement #2.)

The idea that the Son is the "visible to the Father's invisible" is a commonplace in Latin theology: Tertullian, Novation, etc. (It has a useful anti-modalist application.) See my article on Mt. 5.8, "The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity [in Augie's trinitarian theology]" for the Latin background to the Son's visibility and how that doctrine plays out in the late 4th century. Among Greeks Irenaeus' idea hits the brickwall of Origen saying, "The Son is the invisible image of the invisible Father" - which becomes normal Greek theology thereafter.

Some busy last few days. I got together for tea with Moon-ju Shin before she takes off for Seoul and spent an hour or two talking, hearing some of her plans for taking American poetry, especially her Emily Dickinson, home to a Korean context, talking Trinitarian theology, and accent and dialect nuances of American and South Korea. She laughed as she surprised me with a gift of a "how-to-dissertate" book she'd found helpful, and a loaf of oatmeal raisin bread which has been very yummy to snack on. Moon-ju was always a kind presence in the Fides group and around campus, and she'll be missed.

Later that evening I met Diane down at Artasia after her Ju-jitsu class got done and we drove around and pretty quickly found a parking space reasonably close to Summerfest after rescuing her car at the last second from being ticketed in the totally-illegal space she left it in while she was fetching me from in front of the store. We worked our way down the length of the festival grounds once we arrived, chattering about things like people-watching, for which opportunities naturally abounded. She was arguing that there was a trend of very stylish and attractive people dating the surprisingly-plain. Idly wondering where one went to facilitate such arrangements, I almost immediately saw a few women dressed to the nines with what appeared to be their auto mechanics or personal computer technicians in tow, and so I had to tell Diane that maybe she was on to something. We stopped by Umphrey's McGee for the latter part of their first set ("All In Time"), and quickly moved on to hear what remained of the B.B. King show.

I apparently missed an extended version of a fav gospel tune of mine that he recorded with U2 on Rattle and Hum, "When Love Comes to Town," which would have been interesting to hear him do on his own, along with such faves as "Why I Sing the Blues." But the 81 year-old Master continued belting out soulful and well-hooked blues that kept the immense crowd yelling for more, like "All Over Again" and "Ain't that Just Like a Woman." We were both struck by how incredibly polite he was as he spoke to and thanked the crowd. Compellingly so. It was an example of the kind of forgotten power manners have as well as music, where both these arts have the power to transform their recipients by transplanting something of themselves. We know this with music: our society has largely forgotten it about manners, being too taken with the cheap democratizing or humour of informality or rudeness. His polite speech was, oddly enough, as powerful as his music in persuading the audience to put themselves in his hands.

We scooted back to Umphrey's as soon as King was finished with his long last number, settling in for a long set of the kind of tightly-coordinated improvisation Umphrey's has mastered. There was a fairly vast crowd there for the band, and we made our way into the left side of the mob, and joined into the movement of heads and and feet pulsing to the beat of the band. I was rather curious to see these guys for the first time in years – since they left South Bend, in fact – and they certainly didn't look quite as I remembered. But they were still cheerfully goofy, with farcical moments finding their way into the music just as much as creative and rocking moments did. Not knowing their music in any serious way, I had to look up the setlist on Umphrey's website to see the names of what-all had been done:

Set One
August, The Crooked One* –>
Eat, E.T.I. –>
"Jimmy Stewart"** –>
All In Time

Set Two
Der Bluten Kat –>
Kabump –>
Der Bluten Kat
Cinnamon Girl
Syncopated Strangers –>
Chitlins Con Carne –>
Syncopated Strangers
Andy's Last Beer

Encore
Resolution –>
Wizard Burial Ground

Notes
Donna the Buffalo and Railroad Earth played first
* with One Nation Under A Groove jam; unfinished
** with Soul Food II jam

As with Phish, my inability to get entirely into the style is that the music is hands-down awesome – great improv with progressive rock smarts and incredibly-tight and well-rehearsed changes – but the lyrical quality didn't seem all that strong to me. I had always ranked the Freeks as the more compelling band at Notre Dame because the songs were so strong, as songs. Diane made an interesting point, though, that a more defined set of songs – with clearer narratives, ideas, visions or whatnot – would potentially defeat the kind of community-experience the jam music can build, where the audience are all so easily able to bring their personal content to the music without overmuch content from the band itself getting in the way of the raw, easily-positive experience of the band. I thought that sounded plausible: the exact opposite of the experience of a musician or band hammering you with some politics that you find off-putting, for example. So we, like everyone else, then, were able to just enjoy the raw musical experience and chat happily about it while scarfing pizza afterward. We made it down only to the very last song of Rusted Root, but counted it as not much loss because Umphrey's had been so fun. The moon was rising over the Lake and the Art Museum as we walked back to her car and so we talked about the dramatic look of that, too.

Saturday had me taking in Live Free or Die Hard with Barnes and Harris, which was the fun adrenaline rush one expects. Mike and I should have gotten an hour's doctoral credit for the cool conversation we had in the parking lot afterward. I had followed Barnes' instructions to get him a copy of Justice Society of America #1 at the comic shop before he arrived back in town from Virginia, and I was getting that for him out of Mike's car when we got to talking about the paper Barnes was delivering at the Oxford Patristics conference this year. There's apparently oodles of untranslated Latin, fourth century, reception-of-Nicaea material that Barnes thinks will re-write the narrative of the reception of Nicene trinitarian theology in the West. We also talked a great deal about the vanishing of Irenaeus in the Latin West, and that the use and disuse/vanishing of Irenaeus would make a good dissertation topic in itself. His influence continued for a time in the Greek East, into the third century with the Alexandrians, but his vanishing in the West – even from the Roman church, which could have really profited from his arguments and evidence regarding teaching authority as Roman influence grew – set the Latin church to having to re-invent or re-discover so much of what we could take for granted as having been established in Lyon, in the West, by Irenaeus.

Raynor Library closed at six today and will do so again tomorrow as part of their Fourth of July observance, so I moved over to Barnes' office, which I think I mentioned I'm now babysitting during his sabbatical year. After I gave the plant its weekly watering, I set up and got to work. But I'm surrounded by Barnes' library and all the books are calling to me to come and play. This is the worst place to do the dissertation, because it's all the stuff that I do but that I'm not doing in the dissertation. Temptation is extra sexy when you can pass it off as further work in your area....

Wow! My boss from the other year, the ethicist Fr. Bryan Massingale, was just this past weekend, at the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America in Los Angeles, elected as its Vice President. The Vice President automatically moves on to become President-Elect and then President of this professional association, so this election is in many ways more about being elected the President of the CTSA, which is a fairly big deal, and a great honour for him. Which works, because he's awesome.

John Allen had been covering this year's CTSA convention, which was over this weekend in Los Angeles. The final presidential address I'd been talking over with Barnes, about the CTSA – or just theologians in general – having come to have had an "adversarial role" as the dominant identity-myth of theologians since the Modernist Crisis when the hierarchy got enthusiastically aggressive in its confronting some theologians. That's about a century ago now, but still recently enough to have an historical effect of this sort. I think my generation certainly seems to be tired of that dichotomous view and is looking to move on.

9:51am, 10th June 2007: CTSA: Group should stop criticizing Vatican, bishops, president says
4:21pm, 9th June 2007: CTSA: Latin American bishops flag poverty, ecology and indigenous peoples
12:11pm, 9th June 2007: CTSA: Accountability for bishops takes center stage (Susan Wood is one of my dissertation committee members, and is a sharp ecclesiologist.)
9:36am, 9th June 2007: CTSA: Bishops urged to prudence in public proclamations
9:28pm, 8th June 2007: CTSA: Four bishops on being a bishop: 'It ain't easy'
4:40pm, 8th June 2007: CTSA: Accountability and the sex abuse crisis
3:55pm, 8th June 2007: CTSA: Asians say their interest is mission, not church
12:56pm, 8th June 2007: CTSA: Interview with Bishop William Skylstad
12:04pm, 8th June 2007: CTSA: Lutheran finds "incoherence" in Catholic teaching on ministry, ecumenism
5:18am, 8th June 2007: CTSA: Mahony accents 'autonomy and integrity' of theology
4:37pm, 7th June 2007: CTSA Backgrounder: The pastoral letter on women that never was
4:38pm, 7th June 2007: CTSA: Bishops opt for 'Hallmark card ecclesiology' on minorities, theologian says

The last few weeks saw two dissertation defenses for friends in the program that were kinda kick-ass. I got to see a little of their development along the way, hearing Kari-Shane toss around her ideas and being part of a patristics group Barnes put together to help Bogdan brainstorm out a structure to his work. I thought I'd put the abstracts here as a way of highlighting these cool and very different projects.

Kari-Shane Davis
Abstract
"A Critical Assessment of Michael Novak's Interpretation of Pope John Paul II's Theological Anthropology in Centesiums Annus and Its Impact on Christian Economic Practices"

In 1991, Pope John Paul II became the first post-Cold War pope to issue a social encyclical marking an anniversary of Rerum Novarum. The anthropological claims made by Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus drew the attention of early commentators and sparked significant debate among U.S. Catholics. In his well-known book The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1993), for instance, Catholic "neo-conservative" commentator Michael Novak argues that Centesimus Annus provides its reader with a "classic restatement of Christian anthropology" that successfully responds to questions raised about both the political economy and free social institutions post-1989. Michael Novak's interpretation of Pope John Paul II's theological anthropology in Centesimus Annus has been challenged by a number of other U.S. Catholic scholars. This dissertation will present the work of David L. Schindler, and it will focus on one aspect of Novak's interpretation and the challenges that follow, namely the issue of human creativity in the context of theological anthropology.

It is therefore the aim of this dissertation to lay groundwork for a more fruitful reception of Centesimus Annus regarding human participation in the economic order by lifting up and developing two key issues: 1) the anthropological/ontological grounding for Catholic social teaching that underlies Centesimus Annus that can ultimately be applied to the creation, use, and possession of material goods. 2) the sorts of concrete practices, virtues, and communities that can respond to this teaching. I will do this by way of a two-fold project. Part One of the dissertation (proposed Chapters 1-3) will provide a critical assessment of Michael Novak's interpretation of Pope John Paul II's theological anthropology in Centesimus Annus, focusing specifically on the issue of human creativity. Part Two of the dissertation (proposed Chapters 4-5) will draw on selected resources in recent Christian ethics (e.g. the recent work of Vincent Miller and Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of a practice) to investigate the implications of this assessment for the broader questions surrounding the role of material goods (their creation, use, and possession) in the life-experiences and practices of Christian communities. In so doing, the dissertation will model a perspective that is distinct from the typical "liberal" versus "conservative" way in which debates about Centesimus Annus, and Catholic economic ethics in general, are typically framed.

Bogdan G. Bucur
Abstract
The Angelomorphic Spirit in Early Christianity: Scripture and Theology in Clement of Alexandria's Eclogae propheticae and Adumbrationes

This study brings together scholarly research in three apparently distinct areas. The first is what has been styled "angelomorphic Pneumatology," that is, the use of angelic imagery in early Christian discourse about the Holy Spirit. The second is the Pneumatology of Clement of Alexandria, a topic generally acknowledged as ripe for research. The third is Clement's Hypotyposeis, a writing that has until now been allowed only a minor role in the reconstruction of this author's theological thought.

The surviving Greek and Latin portions of the Hypotyposeis – chiefly the Excerpta ex Theodoto, the Eclogae propheticae, and the Adumbrationes – offer an ideal entry-point into the tradition of angelomorphic Pneumatology: it is here, more clearly than anywhere else in the Clementine corpus, that Clement sets out certain views of the Spirit and the angels that he claims to have inherited from an earlier generation of Christian teachers. Clement's Pneumatology reworks traditions about the seven first-created angels (protóktistoi), and is supported by an equally traditional exegesis of specific biblical passages (Zech 4:10; Isa 11:2-3; Matt 18:10). The resulting angelomorphic Pneumatology occurs in tandem with Spirit Christology, within a framework still characterized by a binitarian orientation.

The complex theological articulation of angelomorphic Pneumatology, Spirit Christology, and binitarianism constitutes an early and relatively widespread phenomenon in early Christianity. Evidence to support this claim is presented in the course of separate studies of Revelation, the Shepherd of Hermas, Justin Martyr, and Aphrahat. With the exception of the latter, these are writings that the Alexandrian master is certain to have read and, as in the case of Shepherd, held in particularly high esteem. On the other hand, there is no literary connection between Aphrahat and Clement of Alexandria, and no literary connection, either, between Aphrahat and Justin, Shepherd, or Revelation. Nevertheless Aphrahat displays an exegesis of the biblical verses linking traditions about the highest angelic company with early Christian Pneumatology that is strikingly similar to what one finds in Justin and, especially, Clement of Alexandria. Moreover, scholars over the past century have raised concerns about the Persian Sage's theology – e.g., Geistchristologie, binitarianism, a certain overlap of angelology and Pneumatology – that are similar to those raised by many of Clement's readers. The witness of Aphrahat, therefore, strengthens the thesis of an early relatively widespread Christian tradition of angelomorphic Pneumatology.

Barnes sent us all ("us all" being those interested in Patristics – the study of the writing and theologies of the early church) the following announcement/instructions for this morning's big festivities. Interesting stuff for the secretly initiated. Off to get readin'

A reminder -- or an announcement: this Friday morning, 10-12 a.m.in Alumni Memorial Union 254, Bogdan Bucur will be defending his dissertation, "The Angelomorphic Spirit in Early Christianity: Scripture and Theology in Clement of Alexandria's Eclogae Propheticae and Adumbrationes." This should be fun. If you want a window into the subject matter, look at Clement's "Fragments" and the so-called Excerpta ex Theodoto both in the Ante-Nicene Fathers volumes. The real Excerpta figures here, too, but you can look at the ANF material in less than an hour and gain a good sense of the text(s) and content being dealt with in the dissertation.

MRB

The weekend was full of its fun, as well as the expected work of an end to the semester. After my last class took its final on Thursday – and I have to say that these groups of students have been cooler than cool to discuss this material with – I received the surprise announcement from one student that he'd converted because of the class. Obviously, in an academic context, that not what these courses are about, but the examination of the Jewish/Christian experience carries that possibility. I'd not known that this particular student was at such a crossroads, however, and so after talking a bit at the end of the exam, I was left with the empty room, and a grateful, overwhelmed sense of being in such a place and time where I can have the potential to change the course of someone's life even at unawares. It's an ugly room on the SE corner of the entry floor of the ugly Lalumiere Hall, but I suddenly found myself deeply moved and praying over that empty room in speechless gratitude for the semester. I spent the rest of the evening with Jen once she got free and tried to convey something of the feeling to her as we walked her neighbourhood, enjoying the warm spring night before she left in the morning to go climbing out at Devil's Lake with her crew.

Friday night featured a going-away dinner at County Clare for Moon-Ju Shin, who had defended her English dissertation April 13th on Emily Dickinson's Ecocentric Pastoralism. A bunch of people from Fides – Professor Kurz, Matthew and Elizabeth Sutton, and Maria Keaton – all joined together to wish her well and celebrate her success before she heads back to South Korea in a few weeks. Apropos of her subject, Moon-Ju treated us to a dessert she smuggled into the restaurant: gingerbread made from Emily Dickinson's own recipe. I thought it actually capped my tangy roast pork loin rather nicely.

Saturday was consumed with Barnes' "Patristics Picnic," where all the students even vaguely (like me) associated with the study of patristics gathered together for grilling, conversation, and fun. I had a chance to catch up with a number of people I hadn't run into in a while, and met Barnes' purple-haired French mother for the first time as she made her way from group to group and charmed the lot of us. I even took Anna off Dan and Amy's hands for a wee bit and gave her her first tree-climbing experience, which got her quite excited and even competitive once Renée Harris also joined us. The picnic in time retired to the Lloyds' place and I ducked out around eight as the Barneses arrived once again so that I could get back and grade. That took me until about six a.m. this morning, with grades, as always, being due at noon Monday. After crashing, I got up and began it: the Dissertation Summer. Off to the library I went, laptop in bag.

One bit of festiveness that added to the grading process was that in an idle mood on Friday after dinner I had transferred one of my two as-yet-unconverted George and the Freeks show tapes to mp3 files and listened to that through the grading. This was the first tape I have of the post-Goldschmidt period of the Freeks, the 14 September 1996 show at Corby's Pub (made slightly less than famous in the film Rudy) where a rather unprepared Mark Lang had to quickly step up to lead guitar and learn by immersion. The show also features what I believe to be the premiere of weaklingrecords masterful groove "Wanting, Waiting" and is the first show I have with my personal fave-rave "Gratitude" on it, although I think that one had been premiered at an earlier show. If you know where to listen, you can even vaguely hear me yelling to Doug to continue the band's segue from "Fell" into "Eat Nachos" on into "When I Think of You," which three-part segue became a crowd dance favourite for the rest of the year. Good times.

Setlist for the historians of the obscure:

George and the Freeks: Live at Corby's Pub, South Bend – 14 September 1996

Bittersweet Highway
Good-Bye
Southern Cross (by Crosby, Stills & Nash)
Quinn the Eskimo (by Bob Dylan)
The Search for Aeneas
Empty Space
Wanting, Waiting
Beginnings
I Know You Rider (traditional, as by the Grateful Dead)
Tree
Thoughts/"Starts on F"
Fell -->
Eat Nachos -->
When I Think Of You
Gratitude
Don't Go
Only Beauty -->
Gypsy Moths and Cantaloupe
Gotta Be Good
Dear Mr. Fantasy (by Traffic)
Bouncing Around the Room (by Phish)
Field of Bliss

Encore:
Rosemary (by Lenny Kravitz)

Encore:
Ripple (by the Grateful Dead)

The "second part" of what I've been up to – from my 29 April entry: aren't I focused? – is largely focused on Jen, to whom I've happily been giving my extra hours. I introduced her to family for the first time, among other events, and that always seems a big "step." I've just been having fun, I guess: finishing discussions with my two fabulous and interesting sections of students as they headed into Finals, a birthday dinner out with Uncle Bill and Aunt Helen, and a surprise blast in the movie Hot Fuzz which I went to with Professor Barnes and Dan Lloyd, and which turned out to be one of the funniest comedies I've ever seen in the theatre: if one measures by sheer laughter, I'm trying to think of anything since A Fish Called Wanda that had me laughing out loud so much.

I couldn't help but be pleased at the reception Jen received from my family when she went down to Chicagoland with me on Saturday the 21st to meet my new niece, Sophia Eileen. This was the first time she met Leslie and Jim as well as my Dad, and they all seemed very approving of her. She also made a particularly strong impression with Haley, who spent a considerable amount of time digging in the dirt of the backyard with Jen in tow. It was striking to see how taken Grace was with her new baby sister, repeatedly leaving the company to go silently watch Sophia while she slept, even. Leslie was amused by the sheer amount of instructions Grace was giving her on making sure to report on Sophia's every move. Haley, who has lost the position of "baby," had been understandably more ambivalent about her new sister, but was warming up by all accounts. So we ate our fine steaks – regrettably charred by a grease fire in the new grill Jim was using, which he had yet to master – and celebrated the safe arrival of the newest member of the family, and of her mother's safe delivery. Lots of pictures were taken, of course, and I was also pleased to see how insistent everyone was that Jen join in in the taking of the portraits.

That next week featured my birthday, which Jen had already asked for me to reserve for her so that she could take me out to my favourite restaurant, the Twisted Fork. That being a fine gift in itself, I was a little surprised that evening when she had a bow-wrapped package sitting in front of her as she lounged on my couch before we left for dinner. Before opening it, I found myself suddenly moved by the brief text she'd written in a card that she offered with the present, as though somehow those few words gave me a reassurance and freedom with her beyond what I had yet experienced. The gift turned out to be an import CD, Julie Delpy, that she had heard me mention in passing that I would like to pick up, but didn't because of the higher import prices, assuming that I could find it someday at a lesser cost. It might seem a simple gift, but what struck me again was how generous she was in her listening to me, and noting even such passing comments. She seemed pleased with how pleased I was, laughing about the "stress" of having to go first in figuring out something for the other's birthday. I could have laughed in response that she had set the bar nice and high for me when her own birthday comes around.

The days go by with us trying to see one another as often as we can fit into our various schedules, particularly with her traveling on many of the weekends of late. This weekend I trailed behind her as we went up to the northern Kettle Moraine State Park area so that she could get in a mountain bike workout, and I went walking along the Ice Age trail, enjoying the hilltop strand of evergreens that sounded like a coast of high surf in the wind, and the almost-musty region of bare white oaks with years of leaves strewn around them, centered on a sudden and deep dell that opened up in front of me as I ambled along. I was carrying my copy of Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War, but never so much as opened a page until I had returned from the walk. I had thought to enjoy some reading while I walked – an art I practiced at Notre Dame, where I did my Master's reading as I walked around the lakes – with an occasional pause to look around at the views, but the trail was a bit too rough for that, and, frankly, I am now so rarely in the woods that I couldn't easily tear my eyes away. (The reading itself is of a horrific kind: the French Revolution in all of its perversity: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Genocide. I really got a much happier, American-democracy-compatible version of it in my high school world history class: I suspect it's remembered more in that way, as part of the foundation of our modern, secular egalitarianism, than the democratic totalitarianism it was.)

The next day found us sitting outside her neighbourhood hamburger joint, with her happily scarfing her cheeseburger, as we just enjoyed the sun. Kids yelling and talking in a large clump after getting out of school led us into conversations about education and social policy, and all the like, which she's quite expert in. She is in the midst of creating her second specialized school for the Milwaukee Public School system, and I find myself amazed – being someone who is pleased to pull together a good lesson – to hear the seeming ease with which she creates institutions that serve some hitherto-neglected segment of the student population of the city. And last night just had us walking after sunset, smelling the blooming trees of Bay View, the occasional lilac bush, and then sipping drinks and talking quietly on the cool comfort of her front porch, sharing old stories and secrets. Quality time.

Holy Freaking Moses! Barnes just forwarded to me the link to this article from The Times of London about about a proposal to explore reunification issues with the Roman Catholic Church in the most explicit way I've seen any Protestant or separated church do so since before the death of Martin Luther. This is particularly interesting as the Anglican communion struggles with its interior unity to the point of schism.

From The Times
February 19, 2007
Churches back plan to unite under Pope
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

Radical proposals to reunite Anglicans with the Roman Catholic Church under the leadership of the Pope are to be published this year, The Times has learnt.

The proposals have been agreed by senior bishops of both churches.

In a 42-page statement prepared by an international commission of both churches, Anglicans and Roman Catholics are urged to explore how they might reunite under the Pope.

The statement, leaked to The Times, is being considered by the Vatican, where Catholic bishops are preparing a formal response.

( Read more... )

I have got some glitch going the last few weeks that is making writing in my journal more tedious than pleasurable.  I cannot figure out what the problem is – the main symptom for you on the inside being that I cannot Update in Plain Text mode – and have written to the LJ gurus in frustration.

As a guy in the "intellectual sciences," I am actually very careful and even painstaking in determining what it is I actually think and believe about any given idea.  On some things I spend more time and care than others, so there's a constant work of tending and shepherding my own mind in trying to avoid sloppy thinking, particularly in those areas I give less attention.  Then there are some flaws that are just there, that I cannot seem to get rid of despite my best efforts.

One of these seems to be an Irish peasant belief in luck, which more amuses me than annoys me, that even though I know it's nonsense, my mind just jumps straight to certain assumptions.  In particular, this belief is manifested in the negative idea that anything good "will have to be paid for."  Given Ireland's history, it's perhaps not surprising that, for the Irish peasant, the old saying would actually be expressed "Every silver lining has its cloud." 

So that's where I am tonight.  I've felt absolutely crummy all day.  I rallied up to talk with my class about Christian worship, comparing Justin Martyr's description of the Mass in his First Apology (I can't remember right here when exactly it was written, somewhere in the 155-165 AD range, I think) to the way Mass is celebrated today.  I was actually surprised at how many students were present instead of having ducked out for early travel, our four-day Fall Break having begun.  But that took all my energy after a night of poor sleep and strange dreams (swimming with whales, Gnarls Barkley singing "Crazy" from a whaling boat, and I'm not even going to tell you about the strange parts!), and ended with me almost staggering by the end of the second session. 

This comes after some great moments with friends, punctuating the rest of my time that is consumed by lesson planning and grading.  Friday saw the celebration of Bob Foster's passing his Doctoral Qualifying Exams.  He had spent the week staying with Dan and Amy, so we gathered over there in the afternoon, before he would return to Michigan on Saturday.  I was razzed a bit for gravitating to the "Mother's talk" around the kitchen table rather than the guys talking shop out in the living room, even by Pam Shellberg, who kept the students' side of the crowd from being exclusively male.  Later, when everyone had settled into the kitchen, I was treated to a withering imitation of myself from Bob, who related a story to everyone that I didn't really remember.  I kind of love it when I hear a story about myself that I don't know: of some episdode that failed to lodge in the faulty trap of memory. 

Bob was relating our watching Grand Canyon the other year back in my apartment at the Abbottsford, where I insisted that he had to see this ensemble work of Lawrence Kasdan's.  What I was only finding out now in the telling of the story was that Bob had been haunted for years by a learnéd allusion made to a scene of Danny Glover's in the film that had been made years earlier during his undergraduate by the leader of an intellectual crowd at his university to which Bob really wanted to belong, by a student who now regularly writes complicated books on postmodernism and that sort of  thing.  Apparently when that particular scene played – and here Bob gave the imitation of me that had everyone laughing – as Danny Glover intoned the apparently deeply-symbolic words, "I was never here... and this never happened.", I sat watching the screen, stroking my chin and nodding sagely, saying, "Ahh.  Of course."  And this, all the while unbeknownst to me, Bob sat next to me silently shrieking, "WHHHAAAAATTTT????!!!!!!  WHAT IS IT???!!!!!   WHAT DOES IT MEAN???!!!!!!"  Myself, I have no recollection of the scene in any detail, or of what deep commentary about the postmodern situation it offers, but you can bet I'll be looking the next time I watch it.  And trying to make a point of not stroking my chin and nodding sagely.  So there was a certain amount of laughing at my and Bob's expense, but it was all good.  We ended the night with another tension-filled, babbling-during-the-commercials of the second episode of this third season of Battlestar Galactica, which was especially a treat because Bob has been the isolated member of the fan circle, talking with us about episodes via email, but never being able to actually watch it live and in the same place as the rest of us. 

Saturday had been a source of vague movie-watching plans with Barnes, to see this Clint Eastwood-directed WWII pic that was coming out, only to discover that it hadn't been released to Milwaukee yet.  He was adamant in his desire to not see The Departed, which was the other thing on most of our lists', with my Dad just having given a pretty enthusiastic review of it to me.  And since I was feeling a little punk that night, too, the guys – meaning in this case Mike Harris and Dan Lloyd – opted for a third idea, and came over to my place to "warm up" for Scorsese's gangster picture by watching The Third Man.  This, of course, is one of the absolute all-time greats, and I hadn't seen it in maybe eight years, so that kept things very fresh for me, too, since only the Very Famous "Harry Lime-suddenly-revealed-in-the-light" and "'Cuckoo Clock' speech" scenes were pressed into my memory.  The DVD of the restored version is a real treat, too, with the Graham Greene screen treatment being included, as well as radioland adaptations of both The Third Man and one of the Harry Lime "prequels" that became a popular radio show after the release of the movie, this included episode, "Voyage to Tangiers," I think it was called, being written by Orson Wells, too.  So that was so visually entertaining that I am almost doubtful of going to see anything else with that as the "warm up." 

Julie Riederer came over on Monday night to share a bottle of wine and talk, which is quality entertainment in that we have similar style of gabbing with colossal digressions, which we find enjoyable rather than annoying.  I decided that as an entertainment option, I would put her to work this time, and get her to help me build my still-incomplete bookcase (which the guys had made fun of me for on Saturday, as I'd unpacked the pieces in August and had still not gotten around to putting together).  This made conversation a bit rough at first, because we found that it was actually difficult for us to build and converse at the same time, which I think came as a shock to both of us.  But as we got more into the rhythm of it, things flowed more easily, although of course that could have just been the Chianti.  As she's starting to sort out her graduate school options, though, I was really struck by the "vocation" or "calling" language that was coming out for her interest in Psychology.  She has more of a pure research bent than Kevin and Erik tend to display, and so her language is somewhat different than what I'm used to from the two of them and their adventures in the field.  But it seems to me that language of "calling" or "vocation" is different than what most people feel toward their professions, and is a very great gift to have and to experience.  That is, a lot of people have jobs, but it isn't on the level of calling, of that one thing that you have to do or all your life is incomplete without it.  I've long known that teaching was that calling for me, although I have a hard time distinguishing "teaching" per se from the dual subject matter of Theology and History.  To hear Jules talk about the field in that way gave me a different take on what her experience of the work is, and that still seems strong and striking to me through what is a fairly wine-clouded memory of the night. 

With lots of fun talk with Erik last night over me proofreading a "Tell Us About Yourself" essay for him that he's having to write for his internship applications, I have had lots of good "friend time" the last few days.  And that's why I'm sick now.  That, and because I'm an Irish peasant. 

After being jumped on for my apparently less-than-exact political groussing, I will stay closer to my own expertise for this entry. In fact, it will be so much so that I don't know if hardly anyone will get the proper smile from this, except for Seraphim, of course.... :-)

While at the library tonight, I got some good emails, including a gracious one from my Doktorvater who is settling into his retirement in the Jesuit community at Boston College, next to the fellow on whom I'm writing the dissertation he's directing, and one from Tom Near, who was once long ago with me one of the bad boys of the Department of History at Northern. After discovering me online after not hearing from one another for a decade, he sent me one of those cool "catch up" letters that are so much fun. His current location leaves me more than impressed: he's a new professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale.

Lastly, I received from my advisor this little gem. Hysterical. Really. It is. You have to believe me! :

Subject: My Favorite Zizioulas Joke

Last weekend at a conference in Cambridge (UK) Zizioulas was forced to admit that a theologumenon he said was Gregory of Nyssa's was in fact not something Gregory ever said: quote,"Well, yes, Gregory did not say this, but it is what he would say if he were alive today." He then proceeded to say that according to GregNys and Maximus it is the case that through the Incarnation we become part of the Trinity (which set Kallistos Ware off like a bomb.)

I was going to try to plug away at the travel journal some more, but I think I'm too tired for tonight. I finished my last minute last minute preparations for the first day of class tomorrow, and finally committed to printing out and copying my Course Description/Syllabus for the students.

I knocked off another childhood favourite: King Tut's Game Board, by Leona Ellerby, which I had picked up used on Amazon a few weeks ago. I'm glad to read there that there looks to be another printing (it's a tragedy that it's not for sale with the museum exhibition: it really is a fun historical fantasy for a kid). For some reason, I'd never bought a copy as a kid, perhaps because a hardcover cost so much more, or because it was so readily available at our library. You see, not only was it popular for tapping into the craze of the first visit of the Tutankhamun treasures to the United States, it was also written by a local author. Mrs. Ellerby was the librarian at the high school and was also married to William Ellerby, the exceptional teacher of American history and government who "sealed the deal" in steering me toward history in college, and was the classic Teacher Who Made a Difference for me that I mentioned some entries back. In our small town, there was an extra aura of cosmopolitan excitement to my mind as a kid to know that we had an Author in our midst. When I arrived in high school and got to know Mrs. Ellerby a little bit, I was able to express how much her young adult adventure, with its love for antiquity, meant to me in Jr. High. This ended up a particular treat, as she eventually loaned me the typescript of her unpublished sequel to the first fantasy, which my brother Joe and I then got to share as something of secret between us. Having that kind of "access" as a kid seemed all the more exotic....

We had a fine hurrah to warm ourselves up for the semester over at Dan and Amy's yesterday. The usual suspects: Mike and Donna Harris (I got to meet baby Bobby Zeke for the first time, who was very red-faced), Crip and Lisa Stephenson, our married doctoral-student couple/future Theology Power Couple, and Professors Barnes and Orlov. Barnes brought granddaughter Rae again, who was like a completely different person from the last time I had seen her (she off for kindergarten and told Michel on the way over "I'm not shy anymore." That's the truth). Barnes paid me off for the back issues of Green Lantern I've been hunting down for him, and gave me a poster with a cool icon of Augustine on it for the "Reconsiderations II" conference he's going to at the end of September (which would be totally cool to go to). We went very late, for the Lloyds, I think busting up around 1am or 1:30. The pork roast and chicken kebobs were first-rate, and I think Dan said that we had seven bottles of wine, and that's with the Stephensons not drinking, although I'm a little fuzzy on those details. Just lots of long, fun, and increasingly-mellow conversation on the patio.

My paper proposal for the "Modernity: Yearning for the Infinite" conference at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture was accepted. That'll be one more thing distracting me from the dissertation-writing....

I'm jazzed to kick off the class tomorrow. Introduction to Theology is considered perhaps the most difficult course in the Department or in the field to teach well. I'm excited to start trying to figure it out, even though I fear (for these students) that it will take me a few semesters to really get in the swing of it. After several nights of noise and parties, the campus has been very still tonight: you can feel the anticipation. It's a new year.

Funniest line in my email:

Whenever history passes you by, you should say, "Thank you, Jesus."

– Professor Michel René Barnes, 24 August 2006

Ijust read an interesting note from Dan Lloyd on our recent work on this article Professor Barnes has been working on for years, one part of which deals with the fact that it is very common for people to make the mistake of reducing "religion" merely to "morality." That is, many people seem to think that the only content of religion is a moral content, and that there is nothing more to it, or that that is its only "use," whereas the fact of the matter is that – to put it in more classical philosophical terms – morality is always the result of a metaphysics. That is to say, morality is only seen in light of a description of the way things are. That is the part of "religion" that has always interested me much more than morality: what is the truth about things; what system of thought or knowledge gives the most accurate and complete description of humanity and reality? That is the real motive that lead me eventually through the sciences and humanities to Christian theology.

So, Dan's note addresses our earlier meetings on this subject, by drawing attention to an observation made in a classic historical text about early Christianity in the Latin West, of such formative writers as Tertullian, Hilary of Potiers, Marius Victorinus, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great, among others:

Thought this was interesting in light of all the thoughts/conversations concerning said topic.
From the postscript of Danielou's Origins of Latin Christianity (1977) by the editor, John Austin Baker:

"Finally, we must draw attention to a notable feature of this period which is far less likely to attract the modern Christian, and that is its moralism. It would be unfair to apply the term without qualification to the writers of our period since their faith is very far from reduced to morality and nothing more. Nevertheless it is perhaps the nearest single label to mark their overmastering tendency to see the substance of Christian living as expressed almost exclusively in moral conduct. Mysticism or meditation on Scripture to attain divine truth for its own sake--both elements of great importance in the East--are largely ignored. Everything--sacraments, prayer, grace--gets drawn into the one frame of reference of right behaviour; and one of the main duties of the bishop as pastor is to define this in considerable detail and to impose penance on those who transgress. There is no need to spell out how this has been a salient feature of Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, ever since. It undoubtedly owes a great deal to both the Roman and the Stoic mental pictures of human life.

"At present Western society is going through a phase of revolt against this ethos and is striving to shake free of it; and many in the Christian churches are, as always, being drawn by the spirit of the age to modify, sometimes drastically, their traditional rules and mores. Whether this phase is temporary and there will be a swing back to a more disciplined and less self-regarding set of standards in all departments of life, or whether the present trend will continue and infect larger and larger proportions of the population, it is impossible to say as yet. But unpalatable, and in some senses undesirable though this may be to a Church which has learned a good deal in this century about making morals more humane and less unthinkingly rigoristic, the time way well be drawing near when the Christian Church will have to say once again, 'If you are a Christian, there are certain things you do not do, whatever the world may say.' This was found indispensable in the early centuries of the Church, and has proved recurrently so ever since; and here too the Latin Fathers of the first three centuries have guidance for us that we neglect at our peril" (476).

I just got this from Michel Barnes, our Augustine scholar and my advisor/fellow geek culture enthusiast, who got it from his friend Lewis Ayres, who together are rocking their field. It highlights an absolutely gross dishonesty in the smarmy side of scholarship:


Forwarded for your edification:

From: Ayres
To: Barnes
Subject: Re: Daily Telegraph

This letter was in the Daily Telegraph a couple of months ago, I missed
it until now. lovely. very lovely INDEED.

L.

Sacred Mysteries
By Christopher Howse

A funny thing happened to me last week. Like a drama reviewer who makes a remark such as "hardly sparkling" and sees it on the billboard outside the theatre as "Sparkling", I discovered that two words had been pulled out of a book review I had written and displayed in lonely beauty.

The words were "refreshing originality", and they now appear on the cover of the paperback edition of an appallingly bad biography of St Augustine of Hippo by a militant anti-Christian called James J O'Donnell, of Georgetown University.

The context in which I used the words is the following:

"The first big surprise is that he spells 'god' with a small 'g'. That is, he says, to 'remind readers' of the risk 'of assuming that we know just what Augustine meant' by the word. The exercise immediately leads to difficulties, for in English the word 'God' is used as if it were the proper name of God. So it does not take the definite article. We say 'the dog is in the yard', but 'God is in his temple'. Out of similar motives of refreshing originality, O'Donnell always translates 'dominus' (referring to God) as 'master'. So he retranslates 'I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord' (Psalm 32) as 'I shall declare against myself what I have sinned against my master god'."

See? Professor O'Donnell's attempt at "refreshing originality" just made him come a cropper. I discovered that other reviewers had similar criticisms. "It is difficult to see why this book is called Augustine: Sinner and Saint," wrote Lucy Beckett in the Times Literary Supplement, "since it quickly becomes clear that neither word means anything to O'Donnell beyond their use as public relations signals, negative and positive.

"The word 'God' means even less to him, so he writes it as 'god' throughout. He says this is to 'remind readers' to avoid the danger of thinking they know what Augustine meant by 'God', but Augustine himself was acutely aware of this danger, and all 'god' does it to remind us constantly of O'Donnell's own perspective."

"It is to be hoped that no one will read O'Donnell as their first book on Augustine," Beckett concludes. "Towards the end, O'Donnell recommends 'the wisest' reader to 'go away from these pages to read Augustine unmediated', but presumably in the hope that confidence in him will have been sufficiently undermined for him to be regarded as no more than a historical and psychological curiosity. One would, however, back the Augustine of the Confessions roundly to defeat in a new reader's mind O'Donnell's preposterous claim that in that book Augustine 'undervalues the human personality'."

That is not all that Professor O'Donnell claims about that autobiographical classic, Augustine's Confessions. He claims they are intended to deceive, and he discounts them entirely in his own biography. Professor O'Donnell is not ignorant; he edited the Confessions in three volumes for the Oxford University Press. He just hates Augustine.

"Augustine was the first to admit his many shortcomings," noted G W Bowersock in a review in The New York Times, "most notoriously in the great chapter about his youthful arrival in Carthage, where he found himself in a cauldron of sex and loved nothing more than to be loved. O'Donnell's 'frying pan' for cauldron is a silly effort to be different. The real force of the Latin word 'sartago', normally rendered 'cauldron', is that it is a smart pun on the name of the city, Carthago." I can't see any publisher pulling out the words "silly effort to be different" for the dust jacket of the next edition.

"Sadly, O'Donnell rarely evinces the remotest sympathy for his subject's spiritual aspirations," wrote Murrough O'Brien in The Independent on Sunday. "In fact, he just doesn't seem to like him much. The title Saint and Sinner seems to hint that the 'saint' is going to get very little airtime. Augustine is seen as invariably self-serving. It can't be as simple as that."

No, it isn't. A recent unsilly view, from a scholar of North Africa in ancient times, is St Augustine by Serge Lancel (SCM, £25). I found parts badly translated from the French, but the odd linguistic hiccup is much to be preferred to constitutional perversity.

As I wrote in the opening of my last entry, the last few days have been hectic. The pace has not let up. It seems no sooner am I showered and breakfasted than I'm out the door, not to return until around one the next morning. I'm afraid I haven't gotten much work done. Thursday evening was taken up with going to see Over The Rhine with Mike Harris. (I kept an eye open for beyondthewell, since I thought that this might tempt her back to town for a visit.) For the first time since I've been in Milwaukee, they've finally played here, despite this being home to their label: Backporch/Virgin. They still were sticking to the setlist from their Drunkard's Prayer tour, particularly as it is represented on Live From Nowhere: Volume 1. (Only a few copies left before they "break the mould!") I was annoyed to realize that I had no pen on me and so I couldn't take a setlist. This is what I think I remember, not necessarily in the right order, with "*" being the presumed title for new songs introduced that are currently being recorded. After an uncomfortably vulnerable set of songs coming from a period trying to get their marriage back in balance and prioritized over their music, Karin confessed that these new songs were utterly light-hearted and fun in reaction to that period.

Faithfully Dangerous (One of my long-time favs, up near the top of my iTunes "Most Played" List)
Born
Lookin' Forward (I can't remember if this was in there, or I'm just too used to it from Live From Nowhere)
Jesus In New Orleans
Drunkard's Prayer
Little Did I Know
Trouble/Five O'Clock Shadow*
On A Roll*
Fever
Moondance

There might be one or two others. But it was a disappointingly brief set, only 60 or 65 minutes before they left the stage at 9:05 to let the set-up begin for the following group, who didn't take the stage until after 10. But Mike had never seen them live before, despite being a fan, like me, all the way back to the days of Patience, so that was especially fun to be able to share with him. They were in a fairly quiet mood, it seemed, with a drummer and upright bass player (the names escape me) who lent themselves more toward jazz interpretations of some of the songs. Other than Linford on keyboards, there was no other instruments other than Karin on guitar once or twice. It was stripped-down and intimate in that respect, but nicely-apportioned for moving into the occasional jazz stretches, for which the trio was fulsome. Mike finally got something of what I've described as their energy on stage together. Before going into the last song – I'm always a bit disappointed to end on a cover, no matter how good or original the take – Karin finally introduced all the players with a kind of lazy drawl in her voice, saying of her husband, "Linford Detweiler, my partner in crime. He has a dirty mind." The way his keyboard carried on with her during the sexy, soaring "Moondance," we could all accept that.

We wandered off to Wilco's set after that, which had packed out the Miller stage. I had last seen them at Summerfest in 2003 with Mark Lang and the results were the same: while I can appreciate what they are doing musically, I still haven't achieved any kind of devotion to their songs. It's probably time for another immersion, just to check it out again and see if I'm taken now in a way that I've not been despite so many trying, including drea's sending me Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Thursday was given over to hanging with Dan, then, centered around seeing Superman Returns with him. It still wore well after a week, and the effects were still awe-inspiring, particularly when calling for some kind of high-speed Kryptonian multi-tasking. There was a great deal of talk afterwards, until he left for home around 1am, much more Superman-centered than theologically-centered.

Friday achieved more of a balance. After Dan had left Thursday night/Friday morning, I was up until dawn working on this unfinished article of Barnes' I mentioned previously. It's all a hush-hush project, of sorts, so I guess I can't relate too much of it. But it has in many ways to deal with the problem of the popular – and professional – reduction of Christianity to morality. For many students, if you took away Christianity's role as a speaker of moral imperatives or instruction, they would think there's nothing to it, and are baffled by any idea of what Christianity is supposed to "do" other than being a personal and social guide to ethics. That's the issue of the loss of metaphysics: we have little or no science of existence today. But any schoolkid in the Medieval period, which our culture so reflexively sneers at as a primitive era, could tell you that you cannot have ethics without metaphysics first: that only once you know what and how things are can you then go on to say with any reasonableness what one ought to do.

This reading took me 'til morning light. I stepped outside to put something in the mail before heading to bed, and ducked in quickly to Starbuck's to say "good night/good morning" to Donna Harris, who is still working the morning shift there after having moved out and up to the north side, and despite being in all the glory of the eighth month of her pregnancy. She had mentioned at the 4th of July cookout that as she drove to work she'd look up to see if my lights were on and wonder what I was up to. So, since I was on the street anyway, I made a point of letting her now. When I mentioned having to finish the article for discussing that afternoon, she said she now understood why Mike had come to bed so late.

First off on Friday afternoon, though, was a meeting with Barnes and Mike Harris about planning the syllabus and lessons for our Introduction to Theology courses. Barnes ended up with an Intro course for the fall, which he hasn't taught in years. So we worked together on ideas since we all had a strong belief that the students needed a greater grounding in the Scriptures than they were often getting in Intro. Without that knowledge, even merely on a literary or historical level, Western Civilization, art, literature, music and politics will always be more opaque and misunderstood. Barnes was taking a different tack than I had been, with more specific arcs of readings than just a straight chronological drive through the Old and New Testaments. So, for example, on Monday we could read the key texts on Abraham, on Wednesday we could look at later Jewish Scriptures that interpret and make use of the Abrahamic story: how the Jews inherit the land promised to Abraham after the Exile, for instance, and on Friday we could look at Christian uses of the same: Jesus' claim to be known by Abraham and as the fullness of the promise to him, Jesus and Paul's de-emphasizing the Jewish covenant as one of mere blood descent from Abraham but one built on having the same faith in God. This was an approach I hadn't considered, and so we spent some time arguing and testing its virtues.

After this and a quick Jimmy John's run, we ended up in the Thompson Room at Raynor Library to debate Barnes' paper, along with Dan and Crip. This was hard going. The paper started out with a deep immersion into 20th century hermeneutics, and such philosophical and theological questions of the philosophy of interpretation. When he moved into more specifically historical theology, I didn't have any trouble with that, but the first section is just past my limits at this point, having just started to play with this material in my reading on Modernity. There was a lot of disagreement about whether he could accomplish what he wanted in the scope of an article. I suggested that a tight group of perhaps five essays published in paperback form would both increase the possibilities of circulation and allow him to more fully develop the astonishing variety of points that he was trying to make at once. I'm all vague since I can't tip his hand in discussing specifics.

We talked until 20 or 30 minutes after the library closed at six, standing in its shadow and trying to still have our say on various points. We finally had to say good-bye as he needed to go get ready for his departure back to Virginia for the rest of the summer and we needed to get to Dan's. The trade-off for getting to have this time at school in this hastily-arranged seminar was to give Amy and Donna a "girls' night out." So we got back to Dan's where Anna and Renee were just in the process of having an evening bath before getting put down for the night. Crip and I made a run for burgers and such at Kops', and we sat long into the night talking about Barnes' paper, fading to Rahner (where the girls came back) and ending on my being asked to hold forth (since Barnes, the only other likely authority) on why super-heroes – even from their beginnings in the 1930s – wore spandex/tights. At this point we found out that Dan had fallen asleep on the floor of his living room while we thought he was in just getting another bottle of wine, and so we decided that it was time to call it a night. I only then realized that the moon had moved almost entirely across our field of vision to the south in the time we had been talking. Time to call it a night, indeed.

Wiped out. I've been running hard the last few days with expected and unexpected social stuff particularly taking long chunks out of my schedule. I got a cool letter from Katie Ellgass on Sunday and have yet to reply. [Dumb. Stops. Replies.] Okay, now I feel less stupid for having mismanaged that. Correspondence has been tricky for me for some reason this semester. Mail that seems extra important gets put aside for "when I have more time to concentrate on it." This turns too easily into "never" as I dramatize it. Anyway, I'm trying to get over that. (Sorry, John! You've been the particular victim of that!) Katie was the best of the best of the students I worked with at Saint Joe in South Bend and is now in her third year rotations in Indiana University's medical school. She'll probably be "Doctor" before I am!

So, a last-minute call to dinner, X-Men 3, and drinks and talk at Caffrey's from Tony yesterday, and spending the whole day today at Dan and Amy's, with Mike and Donna, Crip Stephenson (minus Lisa who is visiting family), and Barnes. I loaned Barnes all the Green Lantern material he wanted, and threw in Identity Crisis because he should read it. We all received copies of a Battlestar Galactica teaser comic from him as something of a gag gift, and also received a couple of tuition-free hours of instruction on the state of contemporary systematic theology and its relation to the state of metaphysics. This just made me feel dismally sub-educated. At one point, where a joke was made about recording things, I reached into my bag and slapped my digital recorder on the patio table and started recording that part of the conversation. I don't know if he really believed or understood that's what I was doing. So maybe I'll post that 50-minute file here later on.

So. Fireworks or gunshots? I wonder sometimes at what's going on out my window. Okay, no screams.... And 2am: I suppose everyone's just leaving the bars? Are they open tonight, with the holiday and all? I'm not sure. Still, we raised a glass to John Adams somewhere during the course of the evening.

So. Again. I just got an email from Barnes with a copy of a paper he's been working on for a decade – "Burn Before Reading" the file instructs – that I've been nagging him for for a couple of years now. He's been working on a metaphysical critique (among other things, if I understand correctly) about contemporary Catholic systematics, and while we've gotten some of this as sidebars in his historical theology seminars, I've never felt that I was understanding the core of what he was saying, at least in parts regarding things like Geist metaphysics. So after dealing with this material again today in long conversation, with a small party of us interested as he's actively working on it again, he sent this out to us and I'm arranging a conference room in the Raynor Library for Friday for us to gather and discuss it after we've all had a chance to read it. It might be appropriate to the Modernity conference at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture that I've touted before, so I'm sending him the call for papers on that. Okay. I'm wiped. Off to bed.

Oh, and Over The Rhine is going to be playing here tomorrow at Summerfest. They weren't on the list earlier: I only just saw them listed a few days ago. Ecstasy. This husband-and-wife team write the most beautiful – and I mean that word exactly – songs of anyone I know today. I've not seen them since my disasterous "I just crawled out of the hospital and shouldn't even be standing" trip to see them on a cold Madison night with beyondthewell two years ago, for which I'm still clearly mortified at what awful company I was: and that was my first "meet an LJ friend in real life for the first time" moment! So, since Over The Rhine's label is based here in town, I've been dismayed that they've not passed through in my years here. Mike Harris is a fan, and so he got permission from Donna tonight to go, so that should be a blast. It looks like it's going to be a gorgeous night for music under the stars.

There's been a lot going on. And yet somehow I've also felt like I've managed to do very little. aristotle2002 came by on Wednesday, on his High School Spring Break Tour. I was impressed that Nathaniel even prepped for Professor Barnes' seminar on Augustine's De Trinitate, and flowed right into our conversation on Book VII. (By the way, Nathaniel, you left your De Trin on my coffeetable--tell me where to mail it back to you.) A dinner down at Mo's Pub was supposed to be followed by a late Ash Wednesday Mass, but I think that the fish did something funny to me. We got in the doors for the readings and I had to get out, so we gave one another Official Theologian Dispensations and called it even. I thought we might crash before too long, but conversation kept rolling on until past 4am. With a weblink handy from the couch for occasional fact-checking, we managed to dive through a number of topics, whether the Augustine of the day, natural law arguments, personal stories like the origin of his friendship with Tristan Engelhart, John Paul II's significance, more about BMWs than I could have guessed, teaching theology at the college and high school levels, and who knows how much more. Good times. We hadn't actually seen each other since August 2004, other than the fly-by-night get-togethers at the Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame, so this was a big-time treat.

Thursday featured the longest, slowest bus ride through Milwaukee's transport system, ever. After a hurried chat that I couldn't afford with clerk/friend Diane, who just started reading Merton's Thoughts in Solitude with her husband on my recommendation as an intro to spiritual reading (I was thrown and amused by the fact that she really liked it until she said she was thrown when "God" showed up. I'll have to find out more about why this was a problem or a surprise.), I made it back to campus a full half-hour late for the reading/presentation of the first chapter of Barnes' book on the Holy Spirit, the "Spirit as Creator" business that I mentioned was available for download on the website of our ongoing Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism. Deirdre Dempsey was just starting her response, but took time to make fun of me as I was creeping in through the door. As Deirdre looks/sounds/acts like she could be one of my Irish aunts, the being-made-fun-of was brief, to the point, and effective. I nodded in chagrined guilt as everyone had a good laugh while I sat down. Her criticisms of Barnes' approach were sensible ones. She had a few questions about dating, or about what she thought tenuous lines-of-influence, such as a connection between Genesis 1:1-3 and Job 26:4, 27:3. It was a very large and packed crowd, for the Seminar at least, meaning that it was about 30 whereas usual attendance is about 12-15 at any given session. There was a lot of interchange picking up after Professor Dempsey was done, and I even jumped in on a clarifying point after an exchange between Barnes and Prof. Mueller. It seemed to me that the talk was starting to assume that "God" in Genesis 1 was beginning to be distinguished from "the Spirit of God" who only appears in Gen. 1:2. Granted that Gen. 1:1-2 may be of a different origin than the rest of Genesis, it still seemed clear to me that in its final edited version, "God" and "the Spirit of God" were being identified as the same actor by the editor of the text. I was afraid that in the snowballing conversation of original source speculations that that simple fact about the text as it stands was being forgotten.

After the session, Dan Lloyd cornered me and appeared absolutely frisky for something to do, even though we had plans for the following night. Amy Lloyd and Donna Harris were off at Mayfair Mall with the little girls, having dinner, and so it seemed an opportune time to do something festive. When I mentioned that I was going to go over to see Julie's improv troupe, the Studio 13 Refugees, open up for a few stand-up comedians as a fund-raiser for Habitat for Humanity, that seemed just the ticket for Dan. Mike tagged along. As it turned out, the Refugees were finishing up as we walked in ten minutes late after a very brief opener for the two guys. They were definitely more beginners at stand-up, but did all right and so it wasn't a total loss. I talked to Julie for a brief moment afterward, met her other female troupe member and a friend of hers and recent MU grad visiting for the weekend who turned out to be a friend of Meg Rothbart's that I'd met last year. Dan, Mike and I drifted over to Caffrey's Pub afterwards for a drink and some talk.

Friday featured a turkey dinner/feast over at the Harris' where I consumed vast quantities of wine and sherry, at least for my normal standards. I tend to mix it up with enough non-alcohol that I have no unpleasant aftereffects, but I came out with a bit of a headache the next morning. Dan pawned Renee off on me early on with the assurance to her that I loved to read The Cat in the Hat, so much so that I became the default reader for the rest of the night, which I think the parents loved, or at least welcomed as a relief from the duty. While I get the benefit of fun with the kids and then get to hand them back, I admit that I was pleased to discover that I could turn 10 or more pages at a time without Renee being the wiser. I also developed great hopes that the wonderful rhythm of Dr. Suess would result in bringing back a love or preference for the rhyme and meter in classical forms of poetry for the kids. BSG was another classic episode from the fellow who directed "33" and "Water" and so loud conversation cut off with a snap whenever a commercial break ended.

The weekend featured the classic annual Hollywood Oscar party over at the Smiths' and that capped off a run of several days in which I managed to do virtually nothing on my dissertation outline. Tonight is being similarly lost in that regard, to TA duties. In other news, I got a tentative confirmation on teaching afternoon sessions of Intro to Theology today from the undergrad scheduler, so that's all to my preference.

Well, my email just brought me my Valentine's Day plans: how... non-traditional. :-)

I do have to say, though, that having this public presentation of the first chapter of Barnes' forthcoming book on the Holy Spirit from Second Temple Judaism through Augustine (from which our incredible seminar last year drew its name and focus) is doing to be pretty freaking cool. Getting other faculty and grad students to respond is going to be fascinating as the context of the text start running the gauntlet of other scholars' expertises. (I've actually been invited to respond with my friends Mike Harris and Dan Lloyd at the next session, but I'm not sure that I'll have something specific enough. And the session following that is one I'm the speaker for, anyway.) I brought this research into my doctoral exams as my specifically historical focus, so I'm already pretty sold on the topic. A link is included to the first chapter on the "Jewish Roots of Christian Mysticism's" already-incredible webpage, for anyone who might be interested in reading some work on the very "cutting edge" of historical theology. It's an exotic flavour, maybe even an acquired taste, but you won't be disappointed.

JEWISH ROOTS OF CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM

Tuesday, February 14, 5pm, AMU Ballroom C

Dr. Michel René Barnes

Veni Creator Spiritus:
Early Theology of the Spirit asCreator

Respondent: Dr. Deirdre Dempsey

Dr. Barnes' chapter is already available in electronic form:

http://www.marquette.edu/maqom/spiritus.pdf

Two things:

I just finished a great night of talking with Dan and Mike and Professor Barnes here after we saw Batman Begins. The conversation ranged far afield, as it will, although I definitely steered it to spending some interesting time on the Catholic character of the University. But I'm too fried to remember much or to report it here. Barnes said something incredibly funny though, right as they were just leaving a few minutes back, that I knew I had to quote here for everyone: I can't remember what it was, though. Mostly I'm just feeling really good about having been able to host anything for the first time in three years, because I absolutely couldn't when I was back in the studio apartment.

The other thing. I've just discovered that I erased, on both my hard drives, no less, all of my personal photographs for the last two years. I erased all of my personal photographs for the last two years. Words fail me.

I just came home a bit ago from seeing the last new Star Wars movie I'll ever catch in a theatre. After a 28-year run from my cousin Steve talking it up and getting me to beg my Mom in a hyper, incoherent stand-up routine consisting of my re-enacting R2-D2 being shot and captured by Jawas--all on the basis of Steve's description of that central event--to tonight's viewing with Dan Lloyd and Professor Barnes, well, after that long, I think I have to request a moment of silence for Mr. Lucas in gratitude for helping define the wide imaginative boundaries of my childhood. In some mad, operatic way, I'm sure that it played its part in leading me to this strange role I've taken for my own real life.

In Europe, despite how woefully secularized it's become, one tends to find that media writers on religious matters have Ph.D.s in their specialized field. Like with any science, the presumption is that education in the subject gives you a capacity to both speak about it skillfully and to ask sensible questions of other specialists in the field, as the occasion demands.

I'm finding that I rather doubt that that's the case in America.

Michel Barnes sent a quote a little while ago that tends toward the same kind of observation:

"We don't expect the secularalists who dominate our intelligentsia ever to understand how a man rooted in orthodox Christianity could ever reconcile himself with modernity, much less establish himself on the vanguard of world history. But many years ago, when the same question was put to France's Cardinal Lustiger by a reporter, he gave the answer. "You're confusing a modern man with an American liberal," the Cardinal replied. It was a confusion that Pope John Paul II, may he rest in peace, never made."

ARRRRRGGGG!!!! I just had Mike Harris return an earlier phone call which ended up in him reminding me that I missed the kick-off meeting of "Reading is Fundamental," the name we've given the new reading group that Professor Barnes has offered to lead for us. We're going to be reading the fundamental philosophical texts that are the basis of modern theology, starting today with Descartes' Third Meditation on God. I have been looking forward to this for over a month. But I got so caught up in the vigil for John Paul that I completely forgot about it, and since I neglected to put it into my computer calender, my computer didn't tell me to go, which is help that I often require. I am now totally completely pissed at myself. And I know it's not that big a deal, in a way, compared to our "big news," but I've still been looking so forward to this, and I think that it's one of the most important things happening here theologically. ARRRRGGGGG.

Edit: Oh, and I altered a few minor details in yesterday's pictorial biography of John Paul II for accuracy's sake.

Finally was able to make some headway today and write a decent bit of commentary on the passage from Hilary of Poitiers' De Trinitate that I mentioned back on the 14th. Huh--nine days to really feel like I had a real handle on it! It looks like that Augustine mimicked the passage by way of correcting it: that Hilary in his attempt to understand what it meant that Jesus was "anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power" had inadvertently written the Holy Spirit more-or-less out of the program. What he's left with actually reads in a fairly binatarian way: that all we're really dealing with is a relationship between the Father and the Son. Augustine, in working on the nature of the Holy Spirit's relationship to the Father and the Son, realizes that the Spirit's role is actually central to not only who Jesus is but also to who we become in union with Christ, and sharing something of the same anointing. Augustine is able to give an intellectual or ontological, or even personal (Personal?) warrant for Christian spirituality--well, human spirituality--that Hilary has failed to perceive.

Dug around in the library to find that no one ever seems to have noticed what I've found in Augustine here, and only redeemed my time by possibly helping out classmate Lorelle of the Philosophy Department in realizing that one of our philosophy professors had been the recent translator of Augustine's letters. This was potentially useful because the apparently non-existent critical edition that she was looking for--or any version of such a beastie that might exist--could be in his possession, here conveniently on our campus.

Time to get out of town and go visit Mum for the holiday.

BOOYAH!!! Just when I thought I was done with looking for a relevant source for my Augustine passage in Hilary of Poitiers' The Trinity, I hit absolute paydirt: what seems to be a flat-out parallel passage, even if set in a different context and far more complex than Augustine's. This means absolutely nothing to y'all out there, of course, but for me it means that I'm onto something in my quest to re-construct one sliver of the intellectual/theological mindset of Augustine.

Now I just have to figure out what it all means....

For those of you bored and surfing, feel free to compare this passage from Augustine's De Trinitate, XV, 46 (c. 420AD) to what I just found in Hilary of Poitiers' De Trinitate, XI, 18-20 (c. 360).

Augustine:

That is why the Lord Jesus himself not only gave the Holy Spirit as God but also received him as man, and for that reason he was called full of grace. It is written of him more openly in the Acts of the Apostles, that God anointed him with the Holy Spirit, not of course with a visible oil but with the gift of grace which is signified by the chrism the Church anoints the baptized with. Nor, to be sure, was Christ only anointed with the Holy Spirit when the dove came down upon him at his baptism; what he was doing then was graciously prefiguring his body, that is his Church, in which it is particularly those who have just been baptized that receive the Holy Spirit. But we must realize that he was anointed with this mystical and invisible anointing when the Word of God became flesh, that is when a human nature without any antecedent merits of good works was coupled to the Word of God in the virgin's womb so as to become one person with him. This is why we confess that he was born of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary. It would be the height of absurdity to believe that he only received the Holy Spirit when he was already thirty years old--that was the age at which he was baptized by John; no, we must believe that just as he came to that baptism without any sin, so he came to it not without the Holy Spirit.

Hilary of Poitiers:

(18) The times or the ages do not cause a difference in the Spirit, so that there is not the same Christ Himself in the body who dwelt in the Prophets by the Spirit. When he declares through the mouth of patriarch David: ‘God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows,’ He did not say anything different according to the mystery than He said according to the dispensation of the body which He assumed. He who now confides to His brethren that their Father is His Father and their God His God, then declared that He was also anointed by His God above His fellows, so that, while there is no fellowship with the only-begotten Christ the Word of God, we realize that there is a fellowship with Him by that assumption in which He is flesh. That anointing did not procure any advantage for that blessed and incorrupt birth that abides in the nature of God, but for the mystery of the body and for the sanctification of the manhood which He took upon Himself, as the Apostle Peter testifies when he said: ‘For of a truth there assembled together in this city against thy holy Son Jesus, whom thou hast anointed.’ And again: “You know what took place throughout Judea; for he began in Galilee after the baptism preached by John: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power.’ Jesus, therefore, is anointed in the mystery of the flesh that was born again. And there is no difficulty in regard to the manner in which He was anointed by the Spirit and by the power of God, since at that moment when He comes up from Jordan the voice of God the Father is heard: ‘Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee,’ in order that the anointing of the spiritual power might be recognized through this testimony of the flesh that was sanctified in Him.
(19) Moreover, since God the Word was in the beginning with God, the anointing rejects any cause for or any description of His nature, about which nothing else is made known than that it was in the beginning. And certainly it was not necessary for God, who is the Spirit and the power of God, to be anointed by the Spirit and the power of God. Hence, God is anointed by His God above His fellows. And if many were anointed according to the Law before the bestowal of the flesh, then Christ, who is now anointed above His fellows, is later in time, although He is preferred before all of His companions who were anointed. Finally, that prophetic utterance revealed this later anointing when it declared: ‘Thou hast loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.’
A consequent and later cause is never made retroactive so that it becomes first, for to merit anything follows upon the existence of Him who is capable of meriting. To merit belongs to Him who is the cause of acquiring merit for Himself. If, therefore, we attribute the anointing to the birth of the only-begotten God, and this anointing has been granted in recognition of His love for justice and His hatred of iniquity, then it is to be understood that the only-begotten God was not born, but was brought forth by the anointing and now He will be made perfect as God through an increase and gain, since He was not born as God but was anointed into God because of His merits, and now He will be the God Christ as the result of a cause and the cause of all things will not be through the God Christ. What, then, is the meaning of the Apostle’s words: ‘All things through him and unto him, and he is before all, and in him all things hold together’? God the Lord Jesus Christ is not God because of some things or through some things, but was born as God. And He who is God by birth did not develop into God after His birth through some other cause, but because He was born He is nothing else by His birth than what God is. If He is anointed as the result of a cause, then the benefit of the anointing does not refer to that which does not need to grow but to that which needs the benefit of the anointing through an increase of the mystery, that is to say, through the anointing our man Christ appears as one sanctified. IF in the present instance, therefore, the dispensation of the slave is also pointed out by the Prophet because of which He is anointed by His God above His fellows, and accordingly He is anointed because He loved justice and hated iniquity, why will not the Propet’s words refer to that nature of Christ which we share with Him by His assumption of the flesh, since the Spirit of prophecy has exercised particular care in this way, that, while God is anointed by His God, He is His God in the dispensation of the anointing and He is God in the nature? Consequently, God is anointed, but I ask the question whether the Word that was in the beginning with God was anointed? By no means! The anointing is later than God. Since the birth of the Word was not anointed, because it was in the beginning with God, then that must have been anointed in God which comes afterwards in the dispensation, in so far as He is God. And since God is anointed by His God, then everything pertaining to a slave that He received in the mystery of the flesh is anointed.
(20) Let no one, therefore, desecrate the mystery of godliness, that was made known in the flesh, by a godless interpretation, and let no one place himself on an equality with the Only-begotten in the substance of the Godhead. Let Him be a brother to and sharer with us in so far as the Word made flesh dwelt among us, and in so far as the man Jesus Christ is the mediator of God and man. Let us as slaves have a common Father and a common God, and let Him be anointed above His fellows in that nature in which His fellows were anointed, even though He was anointed with a special privilege. In the mystery of the mediator let Him be a true man as well as the true God, the God Himself from God, who has a common Father and God with us in that fellowship by which He is our brother.

Still trying to finish up the work from last semester, but since my ability to sleep is still being messed with by my need to exercise my intestines, I'm finding that I tend to stare at my computer in a vegetative state far more than I would like. I've got about half of my "The Odes of Solomon: Apocalyptic Literature?" paper completed, where I'm trying to discuss how I've found that these end-of-the-first-century song lyrics that are very joyous and praising of the recent advent of the Messiah are also highly coloured with an apocalyptic world-view, not so much in an end-of-the-world kind of way, although there's bits of that, but even moreso in the kind of transformational spirituality that characterized a lot of apocalypses. My point in all the jazz is to show that if we can relate the Odes to this other genre of literature, our reading of the Odes themselves will become much more nuanced.

Once done with that (I'm shooting for the weekend), I owe Barnes a detailed commentary on a Holy Spirit passage, which I haven't picked out yet, although I'm inclined to play with something in Origen's work. I've never done one of these "dense readings" for Barnes, so I'm not sure how long that will take. And in the meantime, I'm sitting in on two seminars as I mentioned before, which I've neglected to summarize thus far. 'Cause I'm braindead and never thought of it.

Man, what I'd give for a night's uninterrupted sleep. I've not had one in six months now. I guess it's like being a new parent. Except without a baby. No, I'm the baby. Crap.

In better news, I applied today for the sublease of the apartment in the Ardmore that I want: that would get me in this summer, now that the Abbottsford is being converted to undergrad housing. It would be great to get back to a one-bedroom: having everything jammed in an efficiency--with no ability to have public and private space--has been like living in a storage closet the last 2 1/2 years. I'm ready for a bit more space, even if it's just a bit.