I went to the 9pm Mass at Loyola Sunday night, the last one of the school year, which was a Bluegrass Mass. Leaving the house shortly beforehand, I climbed onto my bike to the gorgeous sound of a nighthawk hunting: the quintessential sound of summer to my northern Illinois-raised ears. The Mass was kind of fabulous. I had to wander a bit, as it ( Read more... )

Heh. I've corresponded with journalist Nora Hamerman on and off for a few years regarding her own interest in Salvador Dali's work, particularly in his The Sacrament of the Last Supper, which I've written about. But it's still funny to see myself cited as one of those "experts" in a news article, as one often sees such experts cited. Clearly, I' ( Read more... )

A sudden solemnity snuck up on me this evening. I was reading, as I like to do, over in the Courtyard of the Fountain in front of the Chapel of Joan of Arc as the sun set. I had been puzzled earlier by the pealing of a bell over at the Gesu Church, one bell ringing rather rapidly. Had it been slower, I would have assumed that it was for a ( Read more... )

A few of the last minutes of conversation over at Dan and Amy's has been rattling around in my head for the last few days. I don't remember how either point came up, whether they actually flowed from the conversation at that point, or whether they were the sort of things that came from some new thought or free association that popped into someone' ( Read more... )

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Dan stopped by tonight after finishing his grading at the library. We took in a game of chess and a few glasses of sherry, which were both very pleasurable. I think we're pretty evenly matched as players, although I took the game pretty handily. I got a knight behind his right flank and ran amok for a while, and the way things played out he was ( Read more... )

When I was a teacher at Saint Joseph's High School, I can remember a long conversation I had one evening with my friend and fellow-teacher P.J. about our generation's jadedness as a spiritual problem. We had somehow gotten talking or had become aware of how our own post-1960s jaded language permeated our humour and our teaching style - that we had ( Read more... )

I've been pretty completely shot all day today, and yesterday, since hearing the news of Chrysogonus' death. He's being buried right about now. Diane was a great help last night, taking me out to a late dinner down at the new place on Kinnickinnic in Bay View, Cafe Centraal, that Tim has been managing for a few months now, since it opened. So we ( Read more... )

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