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How neglectful have I been with my journaling over the last month or so as things have gotten ultra busy and even chaotic? So much so that I've been working on putting together the material and bones of new journal entries for nearly three hours, now, and yet this is the first few sentences I've actually written. So, since I really want to get ( Read more... )

A great line in Christoph Cardinal Schönborn's God Sent His Son: A Contemporary Christology, which I'm currently reading with my students in my Jesus course:Indeed, the development of Christian art is comprehensible only on the basis of the Nicene Creed, for if the Son were only a creature, albeit the first among creatures [and not, of his very ( Read more... )

I'm tired as I come to the end of the week. Mari wanted to go check out a burlesque show tonight, but I had to draw a line as to what depths of New Orleans culture I really wanted to get involved with. Besides, after teaching until 4:30, office stuff after that, walking my bike home from campus so that I could continue a conversation and see some ( Read more... )

It's been the usual whirlwind with end-of-the-semester business. My students with their term papers for the Experience of Grace course have been asking for last-minute meetings, and those have been great fun for me as I get to glimpse previews of what they are doing with the various books that they selected for their more independent project. I ( Read more... )

Leslie and Jim celebrated their 13th wedding anniversary yesterday, and I called in the evening to give them my congratulations. She laughed to describe the girls' interest in seeing their wedding video, laughing at Dad's striking a Travolta pose as the couple came in to the Bee Gee's "Staying Alive," or keen on seeing the differences between ( Read more... )

An idea for future development: I'm reading chs. 9-10 in Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth right now in preparation for class tomorrow. In ch. 9, he's talking about the texts of Peter's confession of Jesus as Messiah/Christ and the Transfiguration, and the connected texts in the gospels about Jesus' prediction of the Passion, with Ratzinger mentioning ( Read more... )

It's been an interesting few days of time-traveling back to the first century. I've been re-immersing myself in The Odes of Solomon, a set of later first century song lyrics that comprises one of our earliest (perhaps the earliest) Christian texts that we possess outside of the New Testament. I've had a thing for these since I discovered them ( Read more... )

More "taking care of business" today. Getting my alumni card (one of the benefits is a 58% discount on interstate moving with one particular moving company, which could shortly be useful), rescheduling a hair cut with my stylist who left early for feeling ill today, returning more overdue library books and scanning through others in search of ( Read more... )

Thursday night featured a bit of extra entertainment with a dinner invitation from my Uncle Bill and Aunt Helen, who live nearby. They treated me to a dinner at La Merenda, a sort of Italian/Tapas place, although it's really much more diverse than Italian. Call "Italian" something more like the restaurant's starting place or inspiration, that ( Read more... )