Huh. I see that architect Bruce Graham has died. Along with being famed for the Sears Tower (now "Willis Tower," if I'm supposed to be believe that that will stick) and the John Hancock Center, Graham was also, if I recall correctly, the architect for Milwaukee's tallest building, the US Bank building.
Bruce Graham, architect of Willis Tower and John Hancock Center, dies at age 84Glancing at Google Earth to see if I can confirm that memory with some of the architectural links/history that can often be found there, I see that it was definitely built by his firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, but that's all I can casually confirm.
I also see that someone or several someones finally went to town adding 3-D building models to Milwaukee, finally. There were a dozen or maybe two for as long as I've been using Google Earth, so that's a few years now. Now there are
hundreds. I wonder if one of the local art or design schools turned it into some kind of project...?
Even
my apartment building is modeled now, and I can see the half-lifted, easily-stuck window of my bedroom as I have it in the summer for the fan. Wild. I see that they also modeled the buildings across the street that Marquette just demolished in order to make way for the new engineering building....
We had a grand dinner tonight in celebration of Michel's birthday. Amy (I think it was Amy – I arrived late) made two entrees: a Greek dish I'd never had before called something like Moussaka, which made me wonder if it was Japanese: that being a mild lamb, eggplant and a whiter sauce. There was also a lasagna, a salad, plenty of wine, and, of course, a birthday cake: German chocolate with coconut frosting with almonds mixed in. I also got to meet his friends from the Voelker family, of whom I had heard but had only encountered the youngest daughter, who came over to the Lloyds' once with Michel's granddaughter Rayna. So that made for a lively evening, with
lots of verbal one-upsmanship at the table, and talk ranging from
Dr. Who to punk bands to language education, and just lots of story-telling – of star-crossed patristics scholars and other tales too ticklish to tell.
I had arrived just as dinner was being announced because I had attended Dr. Franz Posset's lecture “In Search of the Historical Luther—by a Catholic” at the Raynor Library. This was the big event of the semester, or really the year, by the "Luther Studies in a Catholic Context" focus in the department. Markus and Mickey had both been talking it up to me, and it was quite well attended, and not just from the university community. Apparently Posset is the most prominent and prolific of the Department's "Luther Studies in a Catholic Context" graduates, having taken his doctorate at Marquette some 25 years ago under our Professor Emeritus Kenneth Hagen. The lecture really called into question some of the common early Luther biographical anecdotes as later elaborations upon an already-growing Luther "legend," and really pursued Luther's own frequent mentioning and use of
Bernard of Clairvaux as being far more a source of Luther's teaching on justification by grace through faith alone than I had ever heard described. I was most intrigued by Posset's use and frequent mention of
Philipp Melanchthon's biography of
Martin Luther: I had no idea that such a document by one of Luther's closest co-workers even existed. So I grabbed that, recently re-translated into English in
Luther's Lives: Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther, on my way out the door to knock off over the next night or two, continuing some of my current playing-for-fun in the dramatic 16th century. I've been sitting in on Markus's undergraduate Luther course the last few weeks, and Thursday is the last session before Markus flies home to Germany on Saturday, so I'm taking advantage of being able to squeeze in this extra education while I can. As the hoopla will develop over the next few years as we approach 2017's 500th anniversary of the "start" of the Protestant Reformation, it'll be good to be as up on the sources as I can be for a non-expert.
