Seriously? It's already been another week since I last wrote in my journal? Another brief litany of current distraction:

• I finally became finished-finished with my administrative nightmares from the end of the spring semester. That alone would justify a lost week. I am so glad to be done with it all.

• Dived into some research reading Kevin ( Read more... )

Yesterday was one of those brilliant days where just about nothing went according to plan, and that the whole day was far more fabulous as a result. I went in to the University to pick up a book that a student had borrowed overnight and to let a student take a make-up exam. I was only expecting to be there for An hour before heading back to my ( Read more... )

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This morning over breakfast I idly turned on the television, which I tend to leave tuned to Turner Classic Movies. I got wrapped up in The Three Comrades, which I had heard of somewhere. It's really quite striking for a 1938 movie and some of sensibilities and censorship of film at that time. The screenplay turns out to be an F. Scott Fitzgerald ( Read more... )

Up early/late working on the dissertation, bogged down in trying to work out exactly how much documentation I might need for a section I'm working on, or how much I can simply write from observation in making a generalization. I'm thinking and writing right now about the extent to which I think the Catholic Charismatic Renewal has either lost ( Read more... )

A note: I know I've been letting some responses to my last entry pile up. I don't mean to be blowing off the conversation. I've just had a bit of a sore/strange throat the last few days and been slightly "off." So I can't get to the bottom of your arguments and still remember how you started, which I figured would not be the ideal situation for ( Read more... )

A number of people have been asking me for recommendations regarding reading Thomas Merton since I started reading strongly in him back in November, and posting quite a bit based on that reading. While I hope I've shared some reasonable thoughts on that point, it struck me that something else I've recently found might be worth posting for those ( Read more... )

Before bed: I've been reading today in the Preface to the Japanese edition of Thomas Merton's Thoughts In Solitude, and I found myself really working on this paragraph, which is a particularly rich one in what amounts to a brilliant brief meditation on solitude itself, and the interior integrity which it demonstrates in a human life.
Is it true to ( Read more... )

Last week, as I was reading the relevant section in Michael Mott's authorized biography The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, I had the good luck to suddenly have an urge to look on eBay for a copy of the letters between Thomas Merton and Robert Lax published as A Catch of Anti-Letters. (And I note the coincidence that seraphimsigrist should just have happened ( 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... )