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... )

I received a kind of cool compliment today, particularly in light of my recent embarrassing moment of being asked to watch my language while I teach (a bit too casually Irish-American for some tastes, I'm afraid!). The Chair, Assistant Chair, and Director of Undergraduate Theology have asked me to lead a discussion for undergraduate Theology ( Read more... )

My neglected journal lacks summaries of the following fun and interesting adventures. (Part One)

• Cancer surgery - and recovery! Does life get any more exciting than ugly skin thingies on the side of your nose? For over a year I lived with this unsightly hole, and I'm obviously lucky in that this was really so much of nothing that I can just ( Read more... )

Havin' me a standard late night. I got in yesterday evening from the weekend's Novak Family Reunion in St. Louis and through myself into the rest of the night in digging up comparative texts for today's lesson in the Moral Law/Tao - that universal phenomenon of some sort of independent and transcendent moral code to which all human cultures seem ( Read more... )

This entry copied from arisbe's journal. I'm glad he pointed this out for us. Von Balthasar's Love Alone Is Credible, which I think is the best introduction or overall summation of his work and approach, is once again in print and currently available from Amazon. If you want to treat yourself to a wonderful piece of spiritual reading, this is your ( Read more... )

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Got my Balthasar paper back from Fr. Gawronski, with lots of interesting and helpful notes. I think he was generous with me, giving me an AB (which is Marquette's way of avoiding quibbling over A-/B+ -type distinctions). He was very sensitive to my presentation flaws, which is where I knew would be the real Achilles' heel of the piece: it took so ( Read more... )

'Nother late night reading, including a six-hour uninterrupted binge at the library, and I still can't read Von Balthasar fast enough! The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church remains a challenge, though, as I mentioned a few days ago. I'm starting to feel that there's a bad exegetical component to it, though; that he's so reading the ( Read more... )

This is cool.

From Von Balthasar's Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. III, Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ, pp. 457-458 ( Read more... )

Over in the basement of Cudahy Hall, 4:30am, taking a brief break. I finally realized what has been nagging at me about this place as I've spent the last week doing my reading over here since the library is closed nights during the break: it kind of reminds me in its layout of the Novice Quarters in the White Tower on Tar Valon in Robert Jordan's ( Read more... )