Five new junior faculty positions have been listed on the American Academy of Religion website, including an ecclesiology position at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., and a history of modern Christianity position in a Religious Studies program at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The latter is a newish school, but one ( Read more... )

A meditation on Judas' betrayal on Good Friday. My friend Kevin was thinking out loud about some of this stuff, and ran a question by me. After I typed it up, I thought I might as well throw it on the Journal so that it looks like I did something today.

Why is Judas' betrayal worse then Peter's denial? I mean, in Dante's Inferno Judas is in ( Read more... )

Back in 2001, I wrote an article for Notre Dame Magazine, geared specifically to the size and style of the variety of short and casual essays that are published in the rear of the issue by various alumni. I wanted to talk about some of the theological or Catholic themes in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and I specifically used the hype of the ( Read more... )

I found myself breaking from my lesson plan on Wednesday while discussing Augustine's Confessions with the students (Book VIII - the build-up to the conversion scene). We had been discussing the role that other people have in conversion stories or in our spirituality/spiritual formation in general. Augustine's enthusiasm for the example of Marius ( Read more... )

Wednesday after class, I packed a light overnight kit in my bookbag and set out for Chicago to join Kevin for dinner. It was the first time in a year that we'd actually laid eyes on one another, since my last trip to visit him and Frannie in Jackson, Wyoming, and to stand as Godfather for the newly-born Sophia Grace. The semester has already been ( Read more... )

One of the oldest large Gospel manuscripts has been donated to the Vatican Library, which should make it more accessible to the world, given the public treasure that is the Vatican Museums.

American's donation lets pope peruse oldest copy of St. Luke's GospelBy Cindy Wooden ( Read more... )

This is BIG: potentially even conclave-big! One of my fellow theologians just sent me the following news item--the kind of thing I as an historian absolutely lust to hear:

From The Independent:
Eureka! Extraordinary discovery unlocks secrets of the ancients
By David Keys and Nicholas Pyke ( Read more... )

Here are some more notes, perhaps a little harder to follow, from last Wednesday's continuing seminar on the Holy Spirit. Here we were getting into the material in Luke and noting that there existed in Luke a far greater ambivalence regarding the Holy Spirit than is usually understood in a modern reading. It seems possible, for example, that the ( Read more... )

Heading out to visit Kevin Fleming in the morning, meet his fiance and hang with them over the weekend, and then back to Milwaukee on Wednesday. Surgical prep on Thursday, and then under the knife for my entertaining ileoanal reservoir surgery. Then a week to ten days in the hospital, so I may be pretty absent in the immediate future. A last day ( Read more... )

Yeah!
Finished the John paper. For any interested in theology, I have it here without footnotes, missing all of my italicizing and such, so there may be a few bits that read roughly. Any Greek characters are surely gibberish. But this is gonna shake up some of the traditional reading of the Thomas story. I think I successfully leave the room ( Read more... )