Today is the Feast of Perpetua and Felicitas, who continue to remain favourites of mine, although I haven't been able to fit them into my teaching schedule at Marquette in my Introduction To Theology course in the way that I featured them prominently in my high school Church History course. The edited text of their imprisonment, trial and ( Read more... )

My mentor from my Master's work at Notre Dame, Professor John Cavadini, has just had his excellence recognized in a pair of distinctive ways, I just found out from a Notre Dame mailing. The first is the biggie, being a theological position of some significance. The second is more fun, especially for a scholar of - among other cool persons - ( Read more... )

More days of crazy-intensive writing. I rise. Eat. Write. Think. Write. Eat. Sleep. Rise. Write. Eat. Write. And so forth. It's all getting so spinning into one continuous process that it's hard to distinguish the days from one another. But the payoff is concrete: two weeks produced 57 pages of finished research writing, where what ( Read more... )

Late night Milwaukee: it's quiet. The snow has stopped falling after a constant 18 hours or more, leaving only a few inches on the ground, it was so fine or so mild out. The miniature plow/tractors are clearing the Marquette campus sidewalks for tomorrow's business. The wind is still blowing, causing small drifts here and there, but the night is ( Read more... )

My former student and now friend Jessica sent out an email that I just got, wishing a bunch of us a happy Feast of Augustine, as today is the 1579th anniversary of his death in 430. As it turned out, I ran into our great Augustine scholar Professor Barnes this afternoon while picking up my syllabi and so ended up with dinner plans with him, which ( Read more... )

A CNS story on the maintenance of the Christian catacombs around Rome that caught my eye as I just got back in. I enjoyed a long evening tonight with Dan, Amy, and Pat, Amy's mother, turning the conversation away from dissertating and just playing a recent incarnation of Trivial Pursuit, after enjoying a fashion show of Amy's dress purchases from ( Read more... )

Oof. Too burned out to write out replies to comments and mail tonight. So, I jot for my memory a list of the last few days' recent notables:Just got in from dinner over at the famed Miss Katie's Diner with Barnes after hours and hours of theology. Good talk on my dissertation, on the impact on our lives of people suffering from severe mental ( Read more... )

There have been a number of good moments with friends over the last several days. Thursday night I headed up to the Oriental Theatre with Barnes to see Watchmen after we finished up a session of the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Christian Mysticism where Fr. Golitzin winged his way through a review of a text I had never heard of before, in a ( Read more... )

I got delayed at O'Hare for about 3 1/2 hours, arriving in Milwaukee at 7pm instead of 3:40pm, and having to wait for my no-show luggage for over half an hour before discovering that it had arrived on an earlier flight, and that I could just fetch it out of storage. So it was about 830pm before I stepped through my door, after catching a bus and ( Read more... )

In a bit of a brain daze today with regard to the dissertation, so I'm going to finish up a couple of older papers as articles and send them off to journals. "The Odes of Solomon: From Apocalypticism to Merkabah Mysticism" is pretty straightforward and needing little editing, comparatively, before sending it off. Mercifully, the journal I'm ( Read more... )