Spent the day reading over at the Brew Bayou, since the semester's playing out in such a way that I really need to use my break to keep up with the seminars and the projects. Took time off last night to have dinner and lots of talk with Kari-Shane and to go see the premiere of Starsky and Hutch, which was cheerfully goofy. Always good to see a ( Read more... )

You know, there's something really kind of stunning to see a campus full of people wearing crosses of ashes on their foreheads. Or to look around the church and see it packed with faces you recognize from the street or coffeehouse; faces that somehow seem surprising to see, when you blink and say, "Oh, you're a church person, too?" Seeing ( Read more... )

The main things I'm getting from reading Hans Urs von Balthasar right now ( Read more... )

An interesting essay by Laird Nathaniel Hannan at Blackfriars, Oxford on Moltmann, and some thoughts I had in response can be found here.

My own work this last several days has been on John and the Temple and Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics. I'll provide some summary thoughts later today, but I include here below my detailed ( Read more... )

Sorry. I'm bowing to international pressure to do an immediate update: I've been overwhelmed since Wednesday night working on preparing my presentation for my Von Balthasar seminar tomorrow. So I didn't do an update about what happened last week theologically, much less what I was doing now. Sometimes I feel absurdly thick. We are reading a 170 ( Read more... )

VI. Love is necessarily revelatory, because it necessarily conveys itself. This is seen positively in the unity of Christ's teaching and his life, particularly in the Passion. The love of Christ--Jesus in his whole life--becomes an icon of the Trinity itself, of the Love which is God. The kenosis of this love in our lives propels us forward in ( Read more... )

"The real saints wanted only one thing, the greater glory of the love of God: that is the one condition for all their deeds, and to imagine one knows better and to regard their actions as performed for their own glory, is to contradict them flatly. They are hidden in God, have no foothold of their own. They grow in stature, not round their own ( Read more... )

Sat for eight hours over in the Brew working on Von B. Other than a brief break to talk to a friend--oh, and another to randomly help a student who recognized me from the Theology Department with their letter to the editor of the Tribune--I worked continuously. 40 pages. 8 hours. My butt was sore ( Read more... )

Working on Von Balthasar's Love Alone over the last few days and into the weekend, along with outlining an exegesis of John 7: 14-31, where Jesus heads into the Temple and starts to raise a ruckus where people are trying to figure out just who this guy is.

The first two chapters of Love Alone are an interesting project. Von Balthasar is ( Read more... )

Mothers and Philosophy
"Now man exists only in dialogue with his neighbour. The infant is brought to consciousness of himself only by love, by the smile of his mother. In that encounter, the horizon of all unlimited being opens itself for him, revealing four things to him: (1) that he is one in love with the mother, even in being other than his ( Read more... )