I do hate it when I wake up aforetime and cannot get back to sleep. I woke from a dream that seemed to be reviewing moments from 2001, particularly the pre-release images from Peter Jackson's then-forthcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings. I had been commenting on my interest in the films to students from when I started ( Read more... )

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The end of the recorded journal from the Europe Trip 2006 through Geneva, Venice and Florence.

Tuesday 25 July 2006
3:42pm
Sitting at the gate in Newark right now, waiting for the flight to Milwaukee to start boarding shortly. The last day closed fabulously. What is it today? Today’s the 26th, so yesterday was the 25th. So I think the last ( Read more... )

Tuesday 25 July 2006
8:57am
Now it’s Thursday … Thursday?! No. Tuesday. Tuesday morning. I suppose getting toward 9ish. I’m sitting on the steps of Sacré Coeur, just past where the Rue Général-Dufour breaks off from the Boulevard Georges Favon, that I've been walking down. It's just a little ways down the street from the synagogue here in ( Read more... )

Monday 24 July 2006 ( Read more... )

Holy Freakin' Moses: Google Earth is one of the coolest things ever! I've been geeked out on it for hours tracing my footsteps through Illinois and Wisconsin, Notre Dame/South Bend, Ireland, Geneva, and Carthage. I'm going to go pass out now.

I feel like I made a huge breakthrough today in organizing my thoughts about. or approach toward. the dissertation on Francis A. Sullivan, S.J.. I think I've really put my finger on a unifying theme throughout his work - a theology of charisms, which I've been suspecting for a while - and have come to see how that can really form the core of my ( Read more... )

In brief, I was fairly pleased with how the Introduction to Theology classes opened. I had ended up, in the few hours before class started, in a prolonged e-mail debate with Erik in Geneva about the best way to deal with the problem in our culture of the negative baggage students can have toward religion or theology as they come into the topic. ( Read more... )

Friday 21 July 2006, 8:40pm ( Read more... )

Wednesday 19 July 2006, 5:36pm (local)

So much craziness already. I'm at the airport in Newark, and today has not been my day. The first thing was, I had to wait half an hour for a bus to show up: any bus. So my plan to get to the airport on time already seemed to be off to a bad start. This got worse when it turned out that after transferring ( Read more... )