L'Osservatore Romano published this English translation of the presentation of the Ratzinger Prize by Pope Benedict XVI to an old friend of mine from my Notre Dame days, Jesuit Patristics scholar Brian Daley, S.J., earlier this week, whose book on eschatology (The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology) in the first several ( Read more... )

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... )

Drat. I just realized that I ought to have highlighted more clearly the significance of The Odes of Solomon as evidencing a "realized eschatology," like the Gospel of John has, in the article being published in Vigiliae Christianae. Like John, and in contrast to earliest Christian literature, the Odes seem not to expect an immanent return of ( Read more... )

Some random bits of life, typed over the last day or two: I had a grand conversation late Sunday night with Dan over Skype, and we talked into the earlier hours of the Feast of my faves Perpetua and Felicitas (and Saturnus and the rest, who never got so much credit). He brought me up-to-date on a wise trimming-down of his dissertation, with Ralph ( Read more... )

I wanted to copy this down from the other day. I noted the passing of the last WWI veteran in the UK some months back, and here, too, I can't help but take notice of these moments where a page of living history is turned, never to be retrieved. That is, of course, the beauty, majesty, and tragedy of every human life, but like everyone else, I ( Read more... )

Enjoyed two weeks of hospitality from family, with Leslie and Jim being generous as ever in opening their place up for a long stay, with Mom pitching in when they needed their space to host Jim's brother John's family. So I got to enjoy all that time with family, and more competitive Wii than I thought possible with my nieces, while also spending ( Read more... )

Pelikan writes in Jesus Through The Centuries, ch. 9, "The Monk Who Rules the World", that: Although the ascetic impulse had been present in the Christian movement from the beginning, having been articulated for example by the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 7:1-7), it is no coincidence that it should have risen to prominence, in the life of monks such as ( 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... )

Oh, bother. Once again, "it never rains but that it pours."

I just found out that I had my Odes of Solomon article accepted back in July, pending a few corrections/annotations, but that the notification went into my spam mailbox. If I didn't keep a secondary mail program up and running, copying everything in my correspondence, I would never ( Read more... )

Life goes on. So many things here and there that I meant to journal over the last month and didn't get to. I seem to be at one of my "low journal-energy" ebbs at the moment, but I have too well learned my lesson that the unjournaled life is the unremembered life, at least for me. So, I guess it's going to be a few compensatory "bullet point" ( Read more... )