Next was Nouember, he full grosse and fat,
As fed with lard, and that right well might seem;
For, he had been a fatting hogs of late,
That yet his browes with sweat, did reek and steem

Less than 50 days to go. Am starting to look ahead at the liturgies of the Christmas Octave, wondering which ones I’ll be serving in. We’re scheduling head shots for the assignment announcements and have put in for the number of invitations we need for friends, families, and benefactors. Still no word on the assignments themselves, but I’d expect to hear something in the next week or two. It’s a little crazy-making, but there are plenty of other things going on to keep busy. I have some business travel which will eat up most of next week, and the run-up to the year-end holiday season is about to properly start (to say nothing of the aforementioned liturgical schedule).

For travel reading, I’ve got a backlog of magazines sitting on the iPad and a moderately annotated copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I have not read yet. It’s annotated because it’s one of my daughters' favorite book of all time, and she’s insisted that I read the original 1818 text, and this copy is hers. For the record, she found the latest movie version underwhelming.

So I’m giving the helix editor a whirl. Usually, I write my blog posts in vscode and then use a vibe-coded plugin to push the post into micro.blog, but I’d need to do some pipe-to-a-shell-script thing to accomplish the same thing. The purple color scheme is nice, and the lightweight vim-like feel also feels sort of comfy. The tutorial (which I have not completed) is also well-done.

Last night at OCIA, a catechist discussed spiritual warfare, on which I have some complicated thoughts.

On the one hand, the Bible and the Catechism are clear: spirits exist, and they are either helpful aids to our salvation or adversaries bent on our destruction. Dismissal is not an option, and I have zero problem whatsoever acknowledging this aspect of our faith to myself or anyone else. There’s no whitewashing or handwaving. We should understand them, their nature, their missions, and so forth.

It’s the obsession with the warfare metaphors that makes me a little uncomfortable, because it seems a bit too easy to go down a few different (and in my estimation, wrong) pathways. First, the battle is over. It was over, definitively and eternally, on Easter morning. The idea that, somehow, we’re in a pitched battle on the ground with armies of demons and whatnot elevates the adversary to an entirely unmerited position. We don’t need to be on a constant battle footing because they have no power except what we willingly give them, which brings me to my second point.

The battle, if someone wants to retain the word, is principally interior: the movements of our passions, thoughts, and will are where the attention needs to be focused. This is where temptation happens, and this is where we can lean on the ordinary means of sanctification - prayer and the sacraments, chief among them - to obtain the graces we need to defeat it. This means a lot of sitting quietly, honest introspection, prayerful trips to the confessional, and maybe spiritual direction. If you want to see what spiritual battle looks like, you can’t do much better than St. Anthony the Great, when he was attacked in the tombs:

He lay watching, however, with unshaken soul, groaning from bodily anguish; but his mind was clear, and as in mockery he said, If there had been any power in you, it would have sufficed had one of you come, but since the Lord hath made you weak, you attempt to terrify me by numbers: and a proof of your weakness is that you take the shapes of brute beasts.' And again with boldness he said, If you are able, and have received power against me, delay not to attack; but if you are unable, why trouble me in vain? For faith in our Lord is a seal and a wall of safety to us.' So after many attempts, they gnashed their teeth upon him, because they were mocking themselves rather than him.

Anthony’s confidence lay in the victorious Christ and in the words of scripture, not in any effort or merit of his own. Mocking dismissal is his response, because it’s all they deserve. The battle is won in a place of stillness and quietude - hesychia - obtained from the struggle to release the self from its sinful attachment to passing things. It’s fought with pretty ordinary methods: prayer, fasting, or other askesis, and almsgiving. These aren’t as hot-and-sexy, though, as the constant proliferation of military iconography in our culture tends to encourage, but they surely (to me) seem more in keeping with the example of our Lord.

A Christian anthropology views the human being as the imago dei, damaged and susceptible to concupiscence, but also reconciled with God and given the means to be restored to its rightful telos. Though this struggle takes place in the context of the community (for that is precisely what we are made for), it is undertaken by the individual and it is kenotic, rather than assertive, in nature.

Our formation weekend was cancelled, so the Trinity homilies will need to wait…until the actual Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, when maybe we’ll get a chance to dust them off and use them. We learned that we’ll likely be in our home parishes for the Christmas octave, and that we should “probably be prepared to preach,” so we’ve got that to look forward to. I’ve also been penciled in for a house blessing, too.

Spent the weekend moving our oldest daughter and her family into their new house, which was a lot of fun. Many hands and all that. Getting someone from an apartment to a house is busy, but not a tremendous amount of stuff. Moving from a house to another house is another story and they’ll be on their own for that one. The grandchildren and cats have more space to run and everyone can spread out a little. Everyone’s over the moon, them most of all (as you’d expect).

Bit of travel next week for work, which is fine. I have plenty to read en route and it will be nice to see lots of people in person instead of via Teams and Zoom.

Definitely looking and feeling like Fall. The leaves are changing in earnest and the temps are steadily falling. Still plenty of bugs out and about. There’s been a bit of frost in the morning, but no hard freeze as of yet. The flowers are basically done, except for some scattered asters here and there and a few mistflowers. Right now it’s gray and overcast too, so the vibe is nearly perfect. I wish things were a tad less busy for a minute or two, but here we are.

For our next formation weekend (which is actually just Saturday), we’ll be preaching for…The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. I am reliably informed that this is one the least-favorite days on which to deliver a homily. Fortunately for me, I saw the email about this when I was on retreat so I made some use of the monastery library and pulled a dozen or so sermon collections off the shelf to look some inspiration.

As it turns out, most - if not all - of the homilies I read covered the ground I was already considering, which is:

We really can’t get our heads around this, and it’s no use trying to make it easy. Here’s what we know, and here’s what to do with that knowledge…

In any case it’s nice to know that some of the pressure is off.

Our second homily on the weekend will be short-prep-time sort of thing, topic TBD. We’ll find out when we get there. As for the rest of the process, my final evaluation went well and we had a follow-on meeting to discuss the ins and outs of the assignment process. The main part of this was to give us a chance to discuss anything that they needed to be aware of beforehand - unfixable personality conflicts, insurmountable scheduling, and so on. We met with the vicar general and head of deacon personnel and they were both very gracious and attentive. I still have no idea where I’ll be sent, but I know now that I’m to consider the assignment “stable,” which is to say “we’re not sending you to X for a year before bringing you back to Y. We need for you to invest in the community, keep your eyes off the calendar, and bloom where you’re planted.”

Sounds good to me. I won’t be able to fully relax my brain on this until the question is answered, since it will deeply affect our lives from that point on, but it shouldn’t be much longer before they let us know. Until then: ora et labora.

Speaking of, the monks prayed the most beautiful confiteor as part of their Compline. The temptation has been strong to print it out and stick it in my breviary:

I confess to God Almighty,
To blessed Mary ever Virgin,
To blessed Michael the Archangel,
To blessed John the Baptist,
To the holy Apostles Peter and Paul,
To our blessed Father Benedict,
To all the Saints,
And to you,
Brethren,
That I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed:
By my fault,
By my own fault,
By my own most grievous fault.
Therefore I ask blessed Mary every Virgin,
Blessed Michael the Archangel,
Blessed John the Baptist,
The holy Apostles Peter and Paul,
our blessed Father Benedict,
All the Saints,
And you, brethren,
To pray for me to the Lord our God.

Lots going on, but not much to write about. Work is very busy and things continue to arc towards December 20th with an ecclesiastically deliberate pace. Started Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and am enjoying it. Picked up another one (The Emerging Diaconate) while I was on retreat, but haven’t started it yet. Francis de Sales in bits and pieces.

Things are definitely cooling off slowly outside, though I’m looking at a yard that needs mowing again and lots of weeds vigorously growing where they ought not be. The only vegetation I want to think about right now is the kind that takes place on the couch with bourbon.

Saint Bernard Abbey Church, Cullman, Alabama

Next week, I will be taking my canonical retreat before ordination - five days at a Benedictine monastery down the road a bit. Things look like they’re going to be nice and busy at work up until the very last minute, which, y’know, sort of tracks. Other than knowing that I’ll be out-of-pocket and off-the-grid for a little while, I haven’t given it much thought. I’ll take a few books with me, but don’t have anything planned otherwise.

Our monthly meetings are reduced to a single Saturday now. We spend a couple of hours delivering and writing homilies or stepping through various liturgical things. Last weekend, we learned a bit about serving mass when the bishop is presiding. Our director of deacon personnel was there, and he showed us a cheat sheet for when to get him the mitre and crozier, and I need to ping him to see if he’ll send it out to the rest of us. In the meantime, I see that they’ve published the banns for our petitions, which means that the people of God get three weeks to register their feelings regarding our ordinations. I hope they’ve staffed up the call center.

Our OCIA is busting at the seams. Over 70 at this point in both the English and Spanish sections. We’re honestly out of physical space to hold everyone. This sounds like the opposite of a problem, and it is in a way. People continue to show up week after week, with I heard this was where OCIA is, and we show them where to sit and get them onto the sign-up sheet. I wish we could just split them into separate evenings or something, but it’s not my call, and I’ll likely be gone by January anyway.

Cooling off slowly outside. It’s starting to look and feel a little more fall-ish, but the grass has gotten tall again, and I’ll need to cut it again soon. Still working through de Sales, MacIntyre, and PKD. I just noticed that the latest season of Slow Horses has dropped and am very stoked. Otherwise, it’s old British detective shows for us via Britbox: Lewis and Happy Valley right now.

Volume 2 of PKD’s short stories is underway. Also about to revisit After Virtue. I read it a while back as an e-book, but have been slowly replacing important e-books with actual books. The weather is slightly cooler at night, but the days are still warm, so even though it’s starting to look like fall, we’re not quite there yet.

Nature seems to be carrying on, though - seasonal changes are appearing on schedule, so maybe things are closer than I thought: scolid wasps are out and about, and the late summer flowers (ironweed and others) are peaking or winding down. The starlings are gathering here and there, and the afternoon light has taken on some very subtle changes. The golden intensity of summer is giving way to a hint of chalky paleness. The sky hasn’t turned pure cobalt yet, but it will soon enough. Thankfully, the grass has slowed down, but I bet I’ll be cutting it a few more times before it’s over. One year I was mowing into December.

Formation-wise, still slowly marching towards December. I’m getting a little of homiletic practice at OCIA, delivering short reflections after we do the daily mass readings at OCIA. Meetings and self-evaluations with mentors and spiritual directors are scheduled. Petitions written and signed. My canonical retreat is scheduled in a couple of weeks, and I am very much looking forward to the silence.

I put Rayuela down, probably for good. I’m…sort of bored with it, and my language skills are probably not where they need to be to pick up on the subtleties. I started re-reading a collection of Philip K. Dick’s short stories which included a letter from him to another author explaining what he thinks science fiction is:

We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: it is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society; that is our known society acts as a jumping-off point for it; the society advances out of our own in some way, perhaps orthogonally, as with the alternate world story or novel. It is our world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, our world transformed into that which is not or not yet. This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society - or in any known society present or past

For PKD, setting a story in the future isn’t enough to make it science fiction, and this had me mulling over the dislocation he talks about, which gave rise to more woolgathering, until I landed on a what-if scenario:

What if Eternal September had never happened, and moreover, never could have happened? That is, what if the internet as we knew it in 1993 had remained the exclusive domain of academia, government, and large enterprises?

Remember that at that time, there were bulletin boards, many joined to message-passing federations like FidoNet, and larger private online services like CompuServe. If those had remained the only options for connectivity, what would the world look like in AD 2025?

Just for the fun of it - and fully conscious of the irony - I put the question to both ChatGPT and Claude and got back answers which, to be honest, were a little depressing in that ‘homesick for a place which doesn’t exist’ sort of way. Herewith some of their observations, and it’s pointing out that without the internet corpus, it seems pretty unlikely that LLMs would have emerged at all. AI research would likely have remained focused on things like genetic algorithms and neural networks.

Without internetworking between commercial services and the academic internet, we’d have multiple incompatible digital ecosystems. CompuServe might have evolved into a corporate-focused network with robust business applications, while AOL could have remained a consumer entertainment platform. GEnie, with its origins in General Electric’s timesharing systems, might have specialized in technical and engineering communities. Each would have developed proprietary protocols, incompatible file formats, and distinct cultures.

Local bulletin board systems would have become the primary bridge between these isolated networks. By 2025, BBS networks might have evolved into sophisticated federated systems - imagine FidoNet scaled up with modern hardware but retaining its store-and-forward architecture. Local sysops would function as information brokers, manually transferring messages and files between incompatible commercial services.

This fragmented world might have been more sustainable - each network optimized for its specific community rather than trying to be everything to everyone - but it would have severely limited global knowledge sharing and collaborative innovation.

In short:

• No Eternal September → slower, more elitist Internet, delayed mass adoption.
• BBS-first world → more fragmented, localized, community-governed networks; less centralization; a digital culture shaped more by sysops than by Silicon Valley.

By 2025, you’d probably have a digital world that’s:

• Less commercialized, more community-run.
• Slower and more text-heavy.
• Rich in local cultures, but without a single meme-flooded global commons. Basically, closer to Ham radio + local newspapers than Twitter + TikTok.

I graduated from college in 1993 and used the text-only internet (newsgroups and email) a fair amount while I was a student. I remember seeing one of the guys in the computer lab show us a new program called Mosaic, but there wasn’t much you could use it for at the time. Archie and Veronica were way more useful. Right before graduation, I got a part-time job helping a market research company run consumer tests for a CATV set-top box, which offered electronic messaging, interactive menus, and so on. The big idea at the time was “convergence,” where your telephone and television would all come on a single wire, and the fight everyone was preparing for was whose wire: The telephone company? Or local broadband CATV franchisee?

Good grief, it sounds like a discussion of steam vs. horse now. Still, if the walled garden online services had remained isolated and things like FidoNet continued to develop as a sort of backbone, we would have lost the immediate access to (nearly) unlimited information, but we’d also be spared the global bathroom wall of opinion and invective. As for the internet, it might have remained a B2B sort of thing, or a place for enterprise applications. Websites might be limited to catalog storefronts for large retailers, but maybe they would have cut deals with AOL and GEnie instead. Social media would not have emerged, but there’d still be localized enclaves and cliques. So memes, maybe, but slow-moving and regional at best. Newspapers would probably still be around, and maybe CATV/minitel-like services emerged for the non-computerized households.

When life gives you leftovers, turn them into tacos.

This one hits hard every year.

With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.
— St. John Henry Cardinal Newman

OCIA begins tonight. Last I heard, we had 36 folks signed up, so it looks like it’s going to be another big year, thanks be to God. The deacon who used to work with the program has recently stepped back from many of his ministerial roles as a sort of prelude to retirement, so it may fall to me to lay-lead the Liturgy of the Word at the beginning of class. Although not (yet) delegated to preach, I have a brief reflection also prepared. This is an easy one; today’s Gospel reading is a portion of the seven woes. The discourse continues tomorrow, and since I was already looking ahead in case Father asks me to deliver a reflection, these words have been on my mind for a few days now.

One of the key elements - maybe the key element of preaching is the assembly. Who and where are they? You’d think that a homily would largely remain the same across four or five masses on the same day and without a doubt, it makes zero sense to write four or five separate sermons. The assembly, though, may require a different emphasis. The early morning folks tend to be older; 11AM is family-palooza, afternoon is sometimes University Catholic-heavy, and evening in Spanish. All of them need the Word proclaimed; all of them need something different. In the end, the Holy Spirit will move them according to His will anyway, so maybe the most I can do is try not to frustrate that movement.

Mutatis mutandis, the readings today and tomorrow concern internal pieties and external demonstrations of them. The Lord is very clear to his listeners that the first drives the second, and the second is no substitute for the first. In fact, hollow externalities may be worse. We will be known by our fruits, and tomorrow we will be able to contrast superficiality with the fruitful piety of Saint Monica. Her steadfast prayers and concern for rhetoric-bro son (yes) make her a natural patron of parents today, but also demonstrate to all of us what can happen when we let an interior life of prayer become the animation of our actions, large and small. Who knows how many Augustines are among us today?

For the seekers and potential candidates, and catechumens, the message is largely the same, but perhaps with a view closer to 35,000 feet. From the outside (or periphery) looking in, Catholicism must look something like a giant coral reef. Endlessly baroque in some places, occasionally chaotic, but nevertheless giving the sense of a larger order and picture. It may be exactly those external expressions of faith that have drawn them in. Many have told us so in the past - the awe of attending mass for the first time, or a piece of achingly beautiful music or art. The faith is physical, sensual. For us, matter matters. Yet all of these things are means to an end, not ends themselves. They draw us closer to Him, who beckons us to Come, to discipleship. To a radical re-reckoning of the world around us, seeing it with new eyes, everything pointing to a deeper meaning. But also not losing the forest for the trees.

We must let these things lead back to ourselves, back to our hearts, so that we can open them anew to God’s grace. If we don’t, we risk loitering in the lobby rather than entering the feast.

The August formation weekend is behind us, and for my cohort, that amounted to just Saturday, which was nice. We spent the day preaching to each other and going over the finer points of The Order of Celebrating Matrimony Without Mass and then preaching some more in the context of a wedding. Difficulty level: two hours of notice. It probably makes sense to adapt Alec Baldwin’s speech and Always Be Preparing (a homily).

Do you know what it takes to preach the Gospel?

[ holds up a brass rosary ]

Also on the to-do list: I need to write up a final self-evaluation and a petition to the bishop. My wife, for her part, will write a letter expressing her support and consent for the petition. Meetings with mentor and spiritual director. More upcoming practices in September, October, and November. Everything leads to December 20, but everything after that is a gigantic question mark. No idea where or what we’ll be assigned. At my home parish, I’m slowly sort of winding down current ministries in anticipation. OCIA kicks off tomorrow night (36 signed up!), and I’ll need to hand my notes and materials off to someone else. The finance committee met last week, and we’ll need to name a new chair and make some additional adjustments. And so on.

There are a couple of things I avoid writing about. I avoid, if I can, any discussions of work. I like having clear boundaries, and would just rather not get into work stuff. The other topic I stay away from is politics. This one is very much vocation-related.

During my application for aspirancy several years ago, I had a series of conversations/interviews with the director of vocations. One of the things he made clear was that, after ordination, my opinion as such didn’t really matter anymore. In fact, not only did it not matter, it probably ought not exist at all. After ordination, he explained, you will be a cleric of the church. When you talk, you will be speaking as a cleric, whether you’re dressed as one or not. Everything you say or write will be seen as coming from The Church. People will ask you for your opinion, and your opinion no longer matters. If you are the sort of person who likes to have an opinion and enjoys weighing in on the topics of the day, he continued, you may need to reconsider the diaconate.

As a deacon in this diocese, he went on, you will almost certainly have people in the pews who are undocumented, and they will be two pews away from other parishioners who are headed to a Build The Wall rally after Mass. You will be ordained to serve all of them, period.

We can talk about policies and programs, but not people or parties. _If my sister runs for dog-catcher, _ he said, I can’t put a sticker on my car in support of her. This is how it is.

He went on to suggest that, even as an aspirant, beginning the habit of this sort of partisan detachment might be a good exercise, and so I did. As it turns out, this wasn’t particularly difficult for me - I haven’t had a home anywhere in the current political spectrum for some time now, and this conversation gave me a vocabulary and grammar I had lacked to describe why. In the end, though, hewing completely to the Church’s teachings (social or otherwise) gives an interesting sort of new freedom. Unmoored from either party, I can make common cause on programs and policies that comport with the Church regardless of their source. I can likewise take either side to task for their shortcomings. It feels very mercenary and in a way, it is. This turns out to suit my personality pretty well, actually. Nice job on program X, I can support that. Programs Y and Z, however, are bad, and I can in no way defend them. Get your act together. It’s all very surgical.

Are there clerics who weigh in? Sure seems like there are. I can’t answer for them, how they were formed, or how they minister to people On The Other Side of whatever divide they’re on. I can only manage myself, and that’s job enough, thanks.

This doesn’t mean I don’t keep up - I do, probably a bit too much. I have several magazine subscriptions, follow a couple of hundred RSS feeds, and do my level best to gather and glean from across the opinion landscape. As I read, I’m always thinking What is this story about? Who is speaking or quoted? Who is silent? What am I meant to come away with? Some of this is j-school remnants, I think. I never went into the business, but studied journalism as an undergraduate at one of the best schools in the country, intending to go into radio or television news. Instead, I got married, took a full-time job as a sort of junior analyst fiddling with computers, and the rest is history.

In any case, if we’ve spoken in the past and I’ve come off a little hard to pin down politically, good, that’s the point. Because it really doesn’t matter what I think. What I’m trying to think is here and here.

I didn’t get a chance to deliver the reflection I mentioned below, but I did have a chance to try again yesterday, and I am in need of more practice. I tried to cover too much in 3 minutes and forgot the advice about having “One Thing.” I will ask for another at-bat next week. At least I avoided heresy!

Still working through Rayuela. It’s good, but not the most exciting stuff. Lots of Bohemians lying around and discussing jazz, except, you know in Spanish. It’s slow going, and I’m only reading one or two chapters at a time. They’re short, though.

Radio stuff: the N2EME SDR switch, which replaces the MFJ-1708B-SDR arrived the other day and works great. The next order of business was getting sdrpp to act like a proper panadapter and submit (via hook, crook, or rigctld) to be synchronized with the radio. I enlisted Claude to help with several approaches, but none of them worked out, so I turned my attention back to gqrx, which used to work great until suddenly it didn’t and I never could figure out why.

Well, it turns out that somewhere along the way, gr-osmosdr got clobbered and replaced with a version that didn’t support SDRPlay’s API. So I fixed that plus a few other dependencies, rebuilt gqrx, and everything works again. Now I just need to move all my sdrpp bookmarks (JSON) back to gqrx (CSV), which is just going to be some good, old-fashioned text munging.

When that’s done, I’ll be able to get all my apps (fldigi, wsjtx, cqrlog, et al) up-to-date/re-tweaked so I should be back in business radiowise. I should be good to go for the fall and winter. We did a massive closet and garage cleanout a few weeks back, and I found an enormous pile of old CDRs, including Quake and all of my old Valve games (HL, HL2, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, etc). I managed to get keys found and/or recovered via Steam, so they’re all in my current library again, which is just a hoot-and-a-half. I restarted HL2, and I have to say it holds up pretty well. I can only play for short bursts, though; Factorio seems to be more my tempo these days. I started a new playthrough last winter with the new space expansion, but didn’t get very far.

I’m not trying to exit summer too quickly, but I am saying that if the weather were to turn gross tomorrow and all the yardwork suddenly ended, I’d be, y’know, set up for amusement.

Stinging rose moth caterpillar

Our pastor is out of town for a while, so one of the associates (who knows I regularly serve on Wednesday mornings before work) asked if I wanted to practice giving some brief reflections on the readings. We can’t call them homilies, but that’s basically what they are. I will probably take him up on this, but noticed that the first Wednesday out of the gate is on the Feast of the Transfiguration. I suspect he will want to preach this one, but on the off-chance that he doesn’t, my thoughts are swirling around the following:

• Everything that God desires to reveal about Himself is revealed completely in Jesus
• We may find ourselves, like Peter, exhilarated, confused, or maybe even paralyzed by this, and if this is the case:
• “Listen to Him,” in prayer, in five minutes of silence, and in the words of those around us. We find ourselves with Him now in the Eucharist; let us ask for the grace to Listen to what He may have to tell us.

As for everything else:

I finished Morel the other day. The plot was absolutely bananas and it’s hard to believe it was published in the 1940s, especially seeing how well Casares anticipated some of the mind-blowing plots that have shown up in recent sci-fi/prestige shows. I’m going to put more of his stuff in my queue for sure. Rayuela is going well so far, but I’m only a couple of chapters in. I’ve opted for the conventional path; the author has another suggested path that skips around through the chapters in a different pattern and includes ‘extra’ material that isn’t part of the straight-through read. I may do that on a second go-round; we’ll see.

We’ve gotten a nice break from the summer heat this past week but I think we’re ready for the overcast skies to go away. It might look vaguely like fall out there but there’s still plenty of summer ahead. As a measure of certainty, I planted the lavender cuttings and added some monarda that I found at Home Depot the other night. I’d like to add some Joe Pye weed, creeping thyme, and more coneflowers to the mix and am hoping to catch some bargains as summer winds down a bit.

The annual cicadas are getting their last words, and the late-summer field crickets and katydids have joined in the ruckus, which is nice. Goldenrod is starting to show up around here, which called my first beekeeping season to mind - goldenrod honey smells like…well, feet. Or sweat socks. It’s pretty pungent stuff. You could smell it a good distance from the hives and I was happy to let them keep it for their winter stores. Seeing it in bloom is one of those temporal waypoints I watch for in the landscape. The other one is tall ironweed, which should be blooming soon.

I’ve been doing a little work on the radio shack - added some proper power distribution for the Astron to get rid of a rat’s nest of wiring. I added an inline power meter in the process and have been very happy with it. I’m interested to see how it performs under a TX load. I also re-guyed the vertical antenna with some adjustable tensioners while I wait for a new SDR switch to arrive.

Currently reading: Rayuela by Julio Cortázar 📚

Currently reading: Encountering Artificial Intelligence by Matthew J. Gaudet 📚

Yesterday, as part of preparation for ordination, I made a general confession. I had been thinking about it for awhile and my spiritual director encouraged me to continue meditating and praying about it. De Sales’s Introduction was a helpful (and fruitful) aid for this, and a week or so ago I sat down with pen in hand and started writing down everything. Old, new, I-think-I’ve-confessed-this-but-can’t recall, and so on. It started slow but picked up speed, and burning the paper afterward was thoroughly satisfying.

I don’t know if I will do it again but at a major hinge-point of life, it seemed fitting. As for the graces - seeing everything laid out on a list which covered a page was humbling, but also a reminder that God’s mercy is far beyond our understanding. Maybe we can’t understand it, except in tiny glimmers here and there.

My spiritual director (and confessor) related a story about St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. When she was revealing her visions, her own spiritual director sought to test her a little.

During your next vision, he said, ask the Lord to reveal my last mortal sin. At a subsequent visit, he asked if she had managed to do so.

Yes, she said.

And what did He say, asked the priest.

I don’t remember, said Margaret Mary.

Luna moth

Botanic Garden, Oxford

Currently reading: La invención de Morel / The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares 📚

Lavender cuttings. Let’s see how this whole propagation thing goes.

So I managed to remove most of the hydrangea. It was…colossal, and I ended up transplanting an offshoot in a different spot where it’s free to get as crazy-big as it wants to. What’s left is bits of the stump which I’ve painted with a bit of herbicide to make sure I’m not fighting it for the next ten years. I’ve got some catmint rooting in water and will take some cuttings from the lavender and brown-eyed susans a bit later today.

In any case, all I can say is: be careful where you plant oak-leaf hydrangeas. Very careful. They can become uncontrollable monsters.

We visited a couple of botanic gardens on our trip and I’ve been fully won over to the cottage style, particularly in borders. Gardening has always been a mixed bag for us. We’ve generally done pretty well with container vegetables and have had raised beds in some form or fashion for a while. The trouble comes from keeping other stuff out of the raised beds. Our yard, such as it is, was formerly pasture. It’s green and nice from a distance, but up close it is a riotous jungle of stuff. This is good, and exactly what I want in greenery.

The problem is that a lot of the green stuff is bermuda grass, which makes a fabulous lawn but can only be really controlled by splitting an atom. It gets into everything. You go to pull out a small tuft in the raised bed and realize it’s connected to three feet of buried root, any particle of which can start growing an entire lawn by itself if left behind.

So I’ve surrendered the raised beds for now. My last gardening stand is the area along the front of the house. There’s a sidewalk between the yard and this area and I’ve been shifting to drought-hardy perennials and natives - stonecrop, coneflower, brown-eyed susans, and yarrow. I’ve transplanted some (butterfly weed and prickly pear) from other parts of the yard and am going to try my hand at propagating others (lavender, cat mint, and anise hyssop). One thing I’ll need to do is clear out a couple of overgrown oakleaf hydrangeas, and I’ll probably move a few of the perennial herbs from their containers into a spot or two. A sickly climbing rose has gotten the boot; I’m replacing it with a coral honeysuckle (‘Major Wheeler’) which should do well in the full sun/southern exposure and give the hummingbirds something to do.

I’m also attempting to rescue a few of the remaining strawberry plants from the raised bed catastrophe; if they make it, I’ll move them in as well to use as groundcover. Most of this area gets a brutal amount of sun, but there are a couple of small niches that stay in all-day shade. For those, I’ve moved a couple of maidenhair spleenwort ferns from our woody areas and will also take a look at pachysandra. I figure if the hostas can persist there, it’s shady enough. I am also, once again, trying to encourage the Virginia creeper to head up one of the brick walls.

The cottage style has been generally described as:

• controlled chaos
• tall in the back, short in the front
• favor natives as much as possible
• plant thick, allow spread, and let the plants fight it out
• keep opportunistic plants/weeds if they look nice and behave
• edibles throughout - herbs, berries, vegetables

I can get behind all of this, especially the controlled chaos bit.

On one of our walking tours in the UK, we stopped at a 16th century mausoleum that had some interesting carvings and whatnot on the outside, including lots of skulls and crossbones. Our tour guide pointed them out to us and then explained that the skull and crossbones motif came about because of a decree by a pope. As you can imagine, he had my attention.

There was, he explained, a fear by crusaders that if they died far from home, God might somehow miss them in the resurrection. There was another fear that if you, say, lost an arm in battle, you’d be minus an arm in the afterlife as well. This, said the tour guide, was not good for the crusading efforts, so a pope wrote a letter that decreed that only the skull and two femurs were necessary to be resurrected completely; as a bonus, they were also easy to ship home to the family plot. Problem solved - Catholics, amirite?

We covered a lot of interesting ground over the last few years, and some of it tended towards the weird and interesting, but this was a new one for me. With some AI assistance and a whole lot of Googling, I have determined that this story is BS.

As best as I can tell, the decree he might have been referring to was Detestande feritatis, issued by Boniface VIII in 1299 and which specifically forbade a practice referred to as mons Teutonicus. This was the practice of boiling down the recently deceased to remove all flesh and leave only a skeleton behind, which could then be transported to the decedent’s preferred burial site. I haven’t been able to find the text of this online anywhere, but if you’d like to read more, have a look at “Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse” by Elizabeth Brown (DOI:10.1484/J.VIATOR.2.301488) for historical context and some excellent analysis.

The skull and crossbones have apparently been used as memento mori for some time, irrespective of scholastic debates on the resurrection. There are several discussions about bodily integrity and the resurrection in the Summa, but nothing that I could find on Lord’s minimum requirements for work.

Anyway it was fun to root around a little bit.

As you probably guessed from all the pictures, we recently visited the UK. We wanted to take in the sights, of course, but also sought out places associated with favorite writers. What we didn’t necessarily plan were all the encounters with various holy places and things along the way:

• St. John Southworth, laying in a reliquary in the middle of Westminster Cathedral
• St. Thomas More, whose execution site is marked on Tower Hill just across the road a bit from the Tower of London
• Venerable Margaret Sinclair, whose shrine is in St. Patrick’s, Edinburgh
• St. Margaret of Scotland, whose Gospel-book is in the Bodleian Library and has a chapel dedicated to her in Edinburgh Castle
• The Holy Thorn Reliquary in the British Museum
• St. Columba, who cast a monster from the River Ness upstream to the Loch (!) and was subsequently given the land where the Old High Church of Inverness sits now

The Lindisfarne Gospels and Codex Sinaiticus were also highlights, along with all the other beautiful illuminated manuscripts.

As for writers, we visited Charles Dickens' house, scratched our Mary Poppins itch with Kensington and St. Paul’s Cathedral, went to Mass at the Oxford Oratory (“Where Gerard Manley Hopkins was a priest, Cardinal Newman preached, and JRR Tolkien attended Mass”), wandered Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top and Wordsworth’s stomping grounds in Hawkshead. Visiting Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey feels like cheating, but there was Spenser and the rest. Among them was Dr. Johnson; we passed by Boswell’s Court in Edinburgh, which was neat. Greyfriar’s Kirkyard in Edinburgh is said to have inspired a few names from the Harry Potter series, and we spent a morning picking through the riches of ages along Portobello Road.

We were blessed with excellent weather - warm (verging on hot) in London, mostly sunny and cool in the Lake District, and more of the same throughout Scotland. We traveled exclusively by train, foot, and one tour bus. It was lovely to travel and great to get back. By and large we ate pretty well, too. Visited quite a few pubs and drank excellent beer, too.

Codex Sinaiticus, British Library

Fairy Pools, Skye

St. Margaret of Scotland. Her book of the gospels is on display at the Bodleian Library; we were able to see it when we were in Oxford.

European robin

Lake Windermere

Magdelen College, from the Botanic Garden

Possibly the greatest book title ever.

Our Lady of Walsingham, Cathedral of Westminster

Chapel of St. John, Tower of London

A reference to Russell’s teapot came across my feed, and I’ve been ruminating on it for a few days now. I confess at the outset that I used Claude to give me the outlines of a Thomistic response to it, and I think I have my head around it now. It was an interesting exercise, and it’s prompted me to revisit metaphysics a bit. To that end, I have Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God on the way, and it should be here before we leave for some long-awaited vacation time.

In brief:

The teapot is used to argue that the burden of proof for God’s existence lies with the theist who makes the assertion, and not on the atheist to disprove. For finite, contingent beings, this is a reasonable stance to take within the framework of empiricism. If someone says “I saw Bigfoot,” but provides no evidence, you’re not under any obligation to believe the person or act as if Bigfoot existed.

God, however, is neither finite nor contingent, but a metaphysical necessity for everything else that is. The only answer to the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing,’ the only answer which obtains is ‘because of something which is ipsum esse subsistens.’ Trying to use the teapot to somehow disprove God (or the reasonableness of God’s existence) is something of a category error, and so on. God isn’t a thing among other things in the universe, or the question of a reason for existence would still remain - the essence of the third proof in the Summa.

We covered some of this in Fundamental Theology, but that was a while back, and I enjoyed wading back into it a bit, with the added bonus of looking up some of the required vocabulary in Spanish, just in case.

Thus, the reading landscape for my immediate future is as follows:

• Graham Greene’s Complete Short Stories for the nightstand
• de Sales' Treatise on the Love of God for spiritual reading
• Feser’s Five Proofs for ongoing study

This feels like a pretty good set-up, and I’m going to try to maintain a three-pronged approach going forward.

Currently reading: Complete Short Stories by Graham Greene 📚

Carolina ruellia

Eastern whitelip snail

Tal vez sea el evitar la tentación de juntar palabras para hacer una obra. Dijo Claudel que no fueron las palabras las que hicierion la Odisea, sino al revés.

— Ernesto Sabato, “El principal problema del escritor”

Currently reading: El Escritor Y Sus Fantasmas by Ernesto Sabato 📚

Summer mode ☑️

More LatAm lit on the way: Ernesto Sabato, Adolfo Bioy Cesares, and Julio Cortázar (along with the complete short stories of Graham Greene).

Finished 2666, which I liked a lot. Started Como agua para chocolate and am enjoying it. Not entirely sure where to go next. I may go look at more stuff by Yoko Ogawa or John Crowley’s Aegypt books. Blake Couch’s Wayward Pines series is also coming highly recommended to me.

Mexico was nice, though the weather was a bit weird. The wind kept it cooler than expected. The hotel was lovely and the food was excellent. Looking forward to England and Scotland in a few weeks and it will be the longest vacation we’ve taken since…uh…maybe ever.

Wrapped up S2 of Severance and am thoroughly invested. Very interested to see where they go next and how they address a couple of large-ish unanswered questions related to Irving. I love, love, love the visual design of the show, especially the weird dissonance of the props: older cars and retro-tech on the desktops, but also iPhones and whatnot.

Otherwise, we’re slowly transitioning to summer-mode here. Hasn’t really gotten too warm yet, but all in good time.

Climbing prairie rose, one of several wild rambling roses that have taken over here and there.

Yep, it’s official!

Pawpaws. Here’s hoping they make it to maturity!

The next few days are going to be crazy: travel for work, followed by one final weekend downtown for tribunal case sponsorship training and the lector installation mass for the cohort behind us, followed by quasi-business-but-mostly-fun travel to Mexico. A few weeks after that we have our real vacation set: England and Scotland by train.

Still feels weird to know that I’m done with school. It’s generally dominated my brain for the last 4-5 years and all at once, that’s it. Only a couple of us were able to make it to the graduation ceremony this past weekend, but the ones who went said they called out our names, so I guess it’s more or less official.

I’m in (I think) the final part of 2666. It’s been wonderful, bleak, and weird, all at the same time. I don’t know if there are any answers coming, but won’t be surprised either way. The chapter “The Part About The Crimes” was difficult, relentless reading. One bright spot was catching various references the author makes to other Mexican writers - Paz and Rulfo - who I’ve recently read.

Regarding the conclave and election of Pope Leo XIV: hooray! It was great fun to watch the announcement. Very excited to see what’s next.

The weather here has been characteristically spring-ish: warm, then cool, then warm again, then thunderstormy. Most of the pollen has thankfully cleared out and everything is lush and green. It’s not been hot yet, but I think we’re getting into the high 80s this week, which will be wonderful.

Assisting during the Easter Vigil (photo credit: Diocese of Nashville)

Blue-eyed grass

Currently reading: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño 📚

Currently reading: Treatise on the Love of God by Francis De Sales 📚

I just took the last exam of the last class of the last year of our formation and have completed all work required of our MA program. There’s one more session next month to cover best practices when working with the tribunal; otherwise, we’re done.

Deo gratias, alleluia, alleluia.

Coming up for a bit of air after some business travel directly on the heels of a A Very Busy Triduum. I was saddened, but not surprised, when the announcements about Pope Francis hit on Monday. When I saw the pictures of him after he left the hospital, it seemed very much like he intended to die at home rather than in a hospital bed. And other than being found face-down in a breviary (which is how I want to check out), is there a better way to go than on Easter Monday? The next few weeks will be interesting. I pray for the repose of the soul of our Holy Father, and for the cardinals preparing for the conclave. I pray also for our own bishop and the pastor of our parish.

I took a couple days off so that I could jump with both feet into the Easter liturgies and was able to serve on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Vigil. It was exhausting, and I wasn’t even on the hook to come back for Masses throughout Easter Sunday. This will certainly not be the case next year, so I’ll probably plan on taking Monday off as well. It was exhausting, but profoundly moving, to be in the middle of every single bit of it. Probably never too soon to start practicing the Exultet, with apologies in advance to the rest of my family.

This weekend is the last class of our last academic year. If the instructor follows her usual pattern, the exam will post on Monday and I’ll probably do it on Tuesday, at which point I will have completed all necessary requirements. Once this is in the rear-view mirror, we have some travel planned - Mexico, for some work-related stuff which will also be fun, and the UK later this summer which is purely fun.

Reading: Azuela has stalled out a little bit. I took St. Gregory’s Book of Pastoral Rule with me for the trip, but spent the return flight watching Severance instead. Finally getting around to this and so far, so good. For upcoming travel, I have Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (in English) on deck. After that, I have Como agua para chocolate in queue.

Common Star-of-Bethlehem

Field madder

First peony bloom!

Stemless Evening Primrose, Stones River Greenway

Eight-spotted forester moth

Baby kieffer pears (the correct version)

One of our catechumens comes to me before class last week and says “here, I got this for you,” and hands me a beautiful scapular.

My Lady, I can take a hint.

I carried it around for a few days waiting for a good moment with a priest, and was enrolled on Sunday after Mass in the vestry. I should probably go back and revisit some of the books on the Carmelites soon but for now, I just want to linger with her a bit longer in these final days of Lent.

Apple blossom. Now that the pears are done, the apples are going full tilt.

Currently reading: Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela 📚 🇲🇽

Butterweed

Fleabane

Stitchwort, pawpaw blossoms, and a yard shot.

This past weekend was our penultimate class. I’m just waiting for the instructor to post the exam so I can get started on it. Our final course completes our moral theology sequence, covering sexual and biomedical ethics. An assembly of the diocesan deacons and wives was also planned for the same weekend, and we all came together for mass, a brief meeting covering some new things coming our way, and (naturally) dinner with cocktails. A day of recollection was provided for the wives of men in formation, so I wasn’t up there alone the whole time.

Friday morning, our bishop came to our parish to celebrate the school mass. I tagged in to serve and managed to wind up having breakfast with him, our clergy, and some representatives of the student council (one of whom is our daughter). The school masses are always a lot of fun, and I’m glad for the chance to be there for them once in a while. The night of the assembly mass, I was asked about 4 hours prior to serve as cantor, which seemed to go fine. It turns out I have a decent voice for singing, or at least chant. I know this because others have told me, and I frequently seem to get pencilled in whenever our families are attending formation masses or other guests are present. I’m leaning in, as they say. Saturday was the first time I ever had to use a microphone and it seemed to go fine. No one got up and left, and I got several compliments, so there we go. Never too early to look over the Exultet I suppose.

School reading is going to push the leisure stuff to one side for a bit; the biomedical ethics book is pretty hefty. I’m helping our final Lenten Stations of the Cross and will be leading the Spanish portion.

Too rainy for wildflower pics today. We were dodging polygons last night as a front of severe weather blasted through the area around midnight, which set the weather radio alerts on and off for about an hour. All is well, though wet. April showers and all that.

Springbeauty grows in large areas which are beautiful, but also in these little clumps off by themselves. We’re getting close to needing to mow, but honestly I can wait a little longer.

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts

Common blue violets. These grow in the yard but only under one of the apple trees. 🤷‍♂️

Met with my deacon mentor today, probably for the last time before ordination unless something comes up and I need advice. We’ll see each other this weekend (big deacon meeting coinciding with our formation weekend) and will probably cross paths before December. He’s got a great perspective, having been in the role for awhile and at a parish that’s at some distance from all the goings-on downtown.

One of the things I’ve been working on a little is Marian piety - discovering ways to approach the Blessed Virgin in ways that don’t feel forced to me. I love the idea of the Rosary a lot, but it’s never been a go-to for me during times of mental prayer. This has felt like something that needed a closer look, so I made it part of Lenten devotions and as luck (?) would have it, our director of vocations invited many of us to join him in a novena to Our Lady Undoer of Knots. Why? It turns out that the incoming group of seminarians is so large that there’s some concern about where they’re going to be housed. This is a good knot - maybe the very best knot - but a knot nonetheless. So I joined in and managed to make all nine days without missing one, leaning on the Rosary tab of the Universalis app which has the option of including scriptural reflections for every single bead. This forces me to slow down a little for each prayer, rather than letting autopilot take over - hammering out a decade as my mind begins to drift.

I’ve also found it helpful to just ask her to sit with me before the Blessed Sacrament, letting her point me towards Him. Soon I was asking her intercessions before falling asleep. It’s happening slowly but surely. The novena was timed to end at the Solemnity of the Annunciation, which is today. When we draw closer to Mother of God, we also come closer to the humanity of Christ. We also approach Joseph, husband of Mary, protector of the Church, and model of deacons. The Holy Family has much to teach us, even - maybe especially - if all we do is rest quietly in Nazareth for awhile.

Bluets, another backyard native. These are tiny and a little tricky for me to photograph with a phone. They range in color from this pale color to dark blue/purple.

Thai Cashew Chicken from 177milkstreet. Consistent crowd pleaser in these parts and scales well.

American field pansy

I started re-assembling my radio stack this past week, a project that started when I noticed that my main antenna (and everything attached) was suddenly deaf as a post. The problem was simple enough to fix - the lightning arrestor plug had worn down after the recent wave of severe weather, so I ordered a few more and got it up and running again. Something was still not quite right, and I next discovered that the SDR switch (an MFJ-1708-R) had blown a relay, so that component needed to be replaced as well. MFJ is now out of business, so I’m looking at some alternatives (these look good), but in the meanwhile, I got the HF rig back on the air, ironed out some wrinkles with the CAT controls, restored my lost QSL log, and made a few contacts via FT8.

Anyway, this is all to say that as we approach the formal end of studies, a bit more mind space can be returned to hobbies and whatnot, and as long as we’re still at (or near) solar max, this feels like a good time to get back into radio.

Halfway through Demons, it’s starting to pick up some speed. I’m on Paz’s final essay and will probably start Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo afterward. I’m close to finishing Introduction to the Devout Life and would like to stay with DeSales for a little longer, probably with Treatise on the Love of God.

Watching: White Lotus, The Righteous Gemstones. FOMO has gotten the best of me, and now I need to watch all of Severance so that I can speak with the rest of my family.

Virginia springbeauty

Statement of the Bishops of the Province of Louisville on the Feast of the Holy Family, emphasis mine:

The Church recognizes the right of individuals to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their family members. The Church also recognizes the responsibility of nations to control their borders and create migration policies. However, the Church teaches that this right is not unlimited and must be exercised with respect for the human dignity of each person and the common good.

The Church in the United States has long advocated for comprehensive immigration reform that includes pathways to citizenship, family reunification, and protections for those fleeing persecution. It emphasizes the need for just and humane treatment of all migrants, including access to legal protections, and due process. The Church recognizes that basic human rights are based on the dignity of being created in the image and likeness of God.

Mariam Mahmoud calls for a return to The Lost Art of Research as Leisure (h/t HN):

In this fragmented landscape, we need not just diagnoses but prescriptions. How might we rebuild the foundations of culture when our very modes of attention have been compromised? The answer may lie in recovering an ancient understanding of leisure—not as idleness, but as a form of directed contemplation.

Josef Piper, writing at the same time as Eliot, but in a defeated and fragmented Germany, declares leisure the basis of culture. By “leisure,” Pieper does not mean idleness, but the more ancient type of leisure — leisure as the Greek σχολή (scholē), or school.

Pieper’s leisure is a contemplative one—it is, in essence, a style of unconstrained research. Such leisure is not merely, or singularly, the pursuit of knowledge “for its own sake,” nor is it simply “reading for pleasure.” The leisure that forms the basis of culture is a directed and intentional curiosity — it is the practice of formulating questions and seeking answers with a disposition towards wonder, not rigid certainty. Where free time is not used for research — for developing questions, and investigating the answers with an explorer’s spirit — cultural coherence crumbles. For Pieper, without leisure as letters, or “research as leisure,” there is no pattern from which higher civilisation is found.

The corned beef and cabbage became Reuben sandwiches, and what was leftover from that became tonight’s hash.

Keiffer pear blossoms. Last year, a late frost clobbered them, so I’m hopeful that we’ll see some fruit this time.

Things I have used Claude for:

1. Write a plugin for Visual Studio Code so that I can compose posts in markdown and publish them directly to microblog
2. Plan an itinerary for a two-week trip to the UK this summer
3. Introduce a novel with a summary of its historical context, the author’s situation, broad themes, major characters, and their relationships.
4. Write a Greasemonkey script that removes all sponsored/paid posts and reaction updates from my LinkedIn timeline, leaving only original posts or reposts.
5. Review essays for grammar, spelling, or structural issues without regard to the content
6. Adjust the style-sheet for Lynx so that it more closely matches my terminal theme
7. Write a terminal/ncurses app to display real-time data from my personal weather station
8. Explain NFL punt return rules
9. Add IR control to the Arduino/WS2811 LED light project that I use for the Christmas tree
10. Lay out the instructions for building a GPS-powered clock, for which I have the parts and now only need some time

Paz on pause for a bit and having another go at Dostoevsky’s Demons. I’ll alternate. Apropos, here’s another use I’ve found for Claude: I have read X and Y; what things should I know before reading Z? It’s nice to have a quick digest of context, setting, major characters/relationships, and themes.

Back home again after another formation weekend. We wrapped up canon law and I have the take-home test sitting here in a sealed envelope waiting for my attention. I’ll probably work on this weekend. Friday is something of a company holiday, so I’ll be off of work, but more or less alone at home. One more bit of travel this week and I’ll be done for awhile. At the end of the month, we’ll begin the final class of formation, which is the second half of moral theology. One weekend of sexual ethics followed by another one in April on medical ethics which (I believe) is the specialty of our instructor. Syllabus reviewed, texts inbound, etc. That our studies are nearly complete still feels sort of weird but in a really good way.

Looking ahead, we have some travel planned for spring and summer, a graduation in May, and I’ll need to make a canonical retreat in the fall. All of it good stuff, praise God. After that? We’ll return monthly for fall liturgical practice, and I think we have a how-to-do-stuff session scheduled with our tribunal folks which should be interesting. Ordination is set for the 20th of December. What happens after that is up to the Bishop.

Things continue to slowly wake up outside. Trees are beginning to visibly bud and the perennials are all sending up shoots, crowns, and other things. Even with the nights still dropping in the 30s, the spring peepers are making a bit of ruckus thought it sounds a little subdued. They’ll be going all-out again soon enough.

I’m having to make a particular effort to moderate my news intake. Scan of the headlines and round up of RSS feeds is about all I can manage these days. Some advice I got in spiritual direction recently was to be mindful of letting the theoretical eclipse the concrete. That is, there are things in front of me right now that require my attention, and other things that are sort of Out There which may or may not happen but are in either case beyond my control. Stay concrete. God bless.

Back from a bit of business travel to Las Vegas. The weather was nice, the time productive, and the trips there and back without incident. Honestly, that’s about all I ask for these days. I’m home long enough to rest a bit before heading to another formation weekend, where we will complete the second half of our canon law course. Then I’ll come back from that and prepare for a quick there-and-back trip to Charlotte. Such is the life of the jet-setting businessman these days.

On the flight out, I knocked out an assigned text (Annulment: The Wedding That Was, by Fr. Michael Smith Foster) and spent most of the flight home reading El laberinto de la soledad, a collection of essays (or one long one) by Octavio Paz which reflect on the roots and contours of Mexican identity, in particular the historical and cultural movements which shape it, or at least as he perceived them in the 1950s. I’m about halfway through it and finding it an easier go than the fiction so far. Somewhere around here I have a collection of his poetry (A draft of shadows) that I need to take another look at too. I certainly have a greater appreciation for a particular Mexican vulgarity after Los hijos de la malinche!

Tracey Rowland exhorts us to recover the weirdness of a sacramental, enchanted worldview as an antidote to “correlationism” (h/t to Bishop Erik Varden):

…pastoral strategists who spent decades promoting sacro-pop music and folk liturgies and modernized prayer books and manuals of ethical behavior devoid of any reference to God, grace, or sacrality, just “principles”, woke up to find themselves surrounded by a generation who want to study scholasticism, attend liturgies in Latin and, in the context of ethics, want to know how this or that act impacts upon their relationship with God.

The very “weirdness” of things pre-modern is part of what makes them different and thus attractive to those of post-modern sensibilities. It’s a little like the difference between going into a coffee shop on some cobbled street of old Catholic Europe, with its not-to-be-found anywhere-else-in-the-world ambience and picking up a coffee at Starbucks. Those who were young in the 60s may have been excited by the proliferation of modern chain stores, replicated in every town in the country, but today’s youth are bored by this. If, for example, it’s the Feast of the Epiphany, they like receiving a little packet of blessed chalk from their parish priest so they can write the initials of the three magi—Caspar, Melchior,and Balthasar and Christus Mansionem Benedicat (May Christ bless this house)—above their doorposts.

Whoever attacks a brother in need, or plots against him in his weaknesses of any sort, surely fulfills the devil’s law and subjects himself to it.

— Blessed Isaac of Stella, Office of Readings, 5th Saturday of Ordinary Time

Thoughts on Pedro Páramo:

I liked it a lot. The narrative is non-linear which made it a challenging read in Spanish. I leaned heavily on plot summaries and occasional AI queries to make sure I wasn’t missing the thread. Will probably watch the Netflix adaptation this weekend while it’s still fresh on my mind and am curious about how they’ll handle some of the weirder stuff. I found myself reaching for the dictionary frequently, but rather than a Spanish-English dictionary, I’ve decided to switch a conventional dictionary (in Spanish). I used the online version of the DLE but have a hard-copy version on the way. It’s shipping from Germany, which I think is sort of funny, and will be here some time in March. Some of the scenes are just indelible in their weirdness, particularly the narrator’s meeting with the brother and sister about midway through. I won’t go into much more detail. If you know, you know.

I’ve started El llano en llamas (“The Burning Plain”), which is a collection of Rulfo’s short stories. I’m finding some of these even more challenging than the novella. I looked up one word in the dictionary and couldn’t find it, so I used Google and nearly all the hits were from people posting the text of the story. Back to context clues and educated guesses. The story was El hombre and the word was “engarruñándose,” in case you’re wondering.

I caught a reference in one of the short stories to Media Luna, which is an important locale in Pedro Páramo. I did some digging and, sure enough, Rulfo set his stories in a fictionalized version of his native Jalisco, along the lines of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, thought without the persistent family stuff. I’ve written here before about fictional geographies and the weird itch that the tend to scratch for me, so it was gratifying to add another page to my mental atlas of “Places That Are Real But Also Not Real.”

I can also tell you that reading stories set in a place which is always warm - where the sun, shadows, and heat play a large part in the mood - as we stare down another cold snap with snow in the forecast has been just terrific for my general mood. And, you know, the pictures of Jalisco I’m seeing online are perfectly lovely…

Currently reading: El llano en llamas by Juan Rulfo 📚

For anyone in TN genuinely curious about the funding and work of Catholic Charities, their tax filings and audits are online going back 20+ years. Pay particular attention to the designation of funds and their compliance regarding the same. Do you know what you’ll find?

From @emilyscartoons

I’m about halfway through Pedro Páramo. It’s slower-going than Borges—I have to check words and phrases more often. The story is also very surreal, with many shifts in time and place. Last night, I noticed that Netflix released a movie adaptation last year, so I’ll watch it after I’ve finished.

Katherine Rundell answers the question, Why children’s books? (h/t AL Daily)

There’s no doubt that reading for pleasure as a child can change your life. It is a key predictor of economic success later in life. But the main reason to help children seek out books is this: if you cut a person off from reading, you’re a thief. You cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years. You cut them off from what we have laid out for the next generation, and the next. It’s in the technology of writing that we’ve preserved our boldest, most original thought, our best jokes and most generous comfort. To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a cruelty – and a stupidity – for which we should not expect to be forgiven. We need to be infinitely more furious that there are children without books.

Will definitely look into this at some point.

St. Frances de Sales on the sin of detraction:

Thus we can never pronounce a man to be wicked without danger of falsehood. If we must needs speak, we must say that he has been guilty of such an evil deed, at such a time he misconducted himself, or he is now doing so; but we should not condemn today because of today, still less tomorrow.

But whilst you give good heed to speak no evil concerning your neighbor, beware of falling into the opposite extreme, as some do, who, seek to avoid slander, praise vice. If you come in the way of a downright slanderer, do not defend him by calling frank and honest-speaking; do not miscall dangerous freedoms by the name of simplicity or easiness, or call disobedience zeal, or arrogance self-respect; do not fly from slander into flattery and indulgence of vice, but call evil evil without hesitation, and blame that which is blamable.

He goes on to add certain conditions, particularly as it becomes necessary to speak in front of others:

When you blame the vices of another, consider whether if it is profitable or useful to those who hear to do so…Above all, you must be exceedingly exact in what you say; your tongue when you speak of your neighbor is as a knife in the hand of a surgeon who is going to cut between nerves and tendons. Your stroke must be accurate, and neither deeper nor slighter than what is needed; and whilst you blame the sin, always spare the sinner as much as possible.

From Introduction to the Devout Life. This comes directly after his meditations on rash judgements. Providentially, this has been my spiritual reading for the last couple of days as I’ve also concluded that I need to maintain a foothold on one or two social media platforms. I do this with extreme reluctance.

For one, I’m not keen on being at the receiving end of The Algorithms. If I let myself go down the Reels rathole, for example, the minor adjustments to the feed because obvious pretty quick and things get porny in a hurry. No thanks. Second, the engagement based on anger or fear works on me just like it does on anyone else and I can function just fine online without using a front-end which monetizes the worst. I have a decent daily rhythm of RSS reeds and other text-heavy sites and can stay pretty well informed as far as news and daily events, but there are plenty of local organizations and groups which don’t publish via RSS and only push out communications on Facebook, Instagram, or X. I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.

On the other hand, keeping up with the constant news cycle puts me alongside everyone else who’s doing the same, and who is it that I desire to serve, anyway? It doesn’t feel like I can just opt out and go completely monastic; that’s neither my station nor vocation. On the third hand, I can’t give what I don’t have, and reasonable peace feels like it’s pretty short supply so I will, once again, try to look into the craziness without wading into the middle of it. Because, let’s be honest, there’s nothing social about it it at all. When everyone’s feed is exquisitely tuned to the viewer, there is no shared experience. A bathroom wall is more democratic; at least we’re all looking at the same graffiti.

THEY PAINT THE WALLS TO HIDE MY PEN, amirite?

Wherefore now, o Poet?

Retreating into the relative silence of text is what I want to do; but this begins to feel like a withdrawal from the world (such as it is) in a way that’s at odds with diaconal ministry. And by text, I mean it: I run a local RSS aggregator called Miniflux and follow daily 160 or so feeds of varying activity. I also skim a handful of other news sites using elinks, and all of this behind a pi-hole for the times that I do use a full browser.

Anyway, I feel obliged to keep up so I don’t think this is FOMO masquerading as concern. I would happily punt it all, smartphone included, but people expect me to know what’s going on and responding with lol idk what that is doesn’t seem particularly helpful.

Unrelated: I went down a long rathole this weekend, guided by the Extropia’s Children series of posts at Gradient Ascendant. Part of this included revisiting the cypherpunks list archives from the mid-90s. I lurked on that list for quite a while but eventually drifted away because of a lot of craziness. One thing that strikes me now is how conditioned the discussions were based on the technology of the day: email. So much time spent obsessing over email: securing, authenticating, remixing/remailing anonymously, and so on. Remember anon.penet.fi? It seems so quaint now, 30 plus years later.

My opinion is that the future will look on a lot of the rationalist/extropian stuff the same way we look at the teeming chaos of 4th century gnosticism. It all seems cut from the same cloth, and will probably come to the same general ends: either death or Christ.

Currently reading: Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo 📚

Moss

I can’t seem to stick with Marquez, so it’s Charterhouse. The portrayal of Waterloo was interesting, for sure. From our hero’s perspective, it’s just chaos from start to finish. He doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know what’s going on, who he fought, or even if it was the Battle of Waterloo. Granted, it’s early days but Julian was a more interesting main character for me than Fabrice is…so far. We’ll see.

In queue, I have:

• El llano en llamas and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
• Como agua por chocolate by Laura Esquivel
• Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela
• El laberitno de soledad by Octavio Paz

Also 2666 by Robert Bolaño, but that’s in English.

Classwise, we’re halfway through the Canon Law sequence. It’s…occasionally interesting but parts of it are pretty dry. The second section - which will focus more on marriage - looks like it will be more practical, in terms of Things Deacons Do Which The Tribunal.

Speaking of things deacons do, a recent episode of The Pillar podcast had a decent discussion about the diaconate in the present moment.

The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them. True devotion does still better. Not only does it not injure any sort of calling or occupation, it even embellishes and enhances it.

Moreover, just as every sort of gem, cast in honey, becomes brighter and more sparkling, each according to its colour, so each person becomes more acceptable and fitting in his own vocation when he sets his vocation in the context of devotion. Through devotion your family cares become more peaceful, mutual love between husband and wife becomes more sincere, the service we owe to the prince becomes more faithful, and our work, no matter what it is, becomes more pleasant and agreeable.

— St. Frances de Sales, “Introduction to the Devout Life”

Frances de Sales has been part of my spiritual reading for some time now. I took a run at Introduction awhile back but lagged after a little while. After reading Phillipe on contemplation and Chautard on the absolutely primacy of the interior life for apostolic work, I picked up de Sales again and am finding it much more resonant. The latter chapters (“Part Second”) are nice and short - perfect for meditative reading and teeing up contemplative prayer.

For leisure reading, I am (once again) tackling Cien años de soledad. It seems to be going faster this time, but I’m not sure if it’s because this is my Nth go-round or I’m just improving. Probably a little of both.

Looking ahead, I asked Claude for book recommendations from the Mexican literary canon; it suggested Juan Rulfo, Mariano Azuela, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Laura Esquivel, and others. Very much looking forward to digging into them soon. I also have The Charterhouse of Parma sitting here on the desk.

Excellent article by Luke Plant summarizing his response(s) to a request to use his content to train an LLM for apologetics (h/t HN):

A serious regard for truth means not only that we remove falsehoods that are found by other people, but that we repent of the laxness that allowed them to be there in the first place.

Now consider the case of using an LLM to write responses to people about Christianity. How could I possibly justify that, when I know that LLMs are bullshit generators? As Simon Willison put it, they are like a weird, over-confident intern, but one that can’t actually be morally disciplined to improve.

To put a bullshit machine on the internet, in the name of Christ, is reckless. It’s almost certain that it will make stuff up at some point. This is bad enough in itself, if we care about truth, but it will also have many negative consequences.

Relic of St. John Paul II I held several years ago. Today I was blessed to receive the Precious Blood from a chalice he had used. Purified it afterward as acolyte too.

Currently reading: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz 📚

Thomas Zak explores the paschal mystery by way of Scorsese (h/t Metafilter):

In truth, the sacrifice of God makes me want to hide, makes me cower in fear at a being who would do that to himself. As I read Book of Common Prayer every day, I find myself ignoring, or glossing over certain parts of the prayers or Scriptures, concocting my own religion, something akin to Hazel Motes’ “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ” in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. I am asking, like Satan guised as an innocent girl in The Last Temptation of Christ, “If he saved Abraham’s son, don’t you think he’d want to save his own?”

Let’s make 2025 the year of the cozy Internet: websites, blogs, RSS feeds, federation of things, listservs, and the like. The Internet was perfectly useable without the big social media platforms in the past and there’s nothing except inertia preventing its return. I’d wager that everyone would feel a whole lot better day to day.

With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.
— St. John Henry Newman

More adventures with Claude: I set it to work on some Arduino code I use to drive WS2811 LEDs. As it is, they just cycle through a set of a half-dozen different patterns. I’ve got ten strands of 50 LEDs apiece and need to inject power every so many strands, so in addition to a large-ish ugly length of LED bulbs, I have 5 separate power leads coming back to a 5V PSU. In short, it’s something of a pain to set up but once we cover all the ugliness up with ornaments, the effect is quite nice.

Anyway I wanted to have some more control over it, so I had the AI iterate over some wifi-enabled options but I think my wifi hat is flaky as it tends to drop its connection randomly (which I noticed awhile back when using it for some DIY weather station experiments). I dug around in the Arduino starter kit and came up with an IR sensor and remote and had Claude write code to, first, record the various codes sent by the remote and, second, add the control functions to the code. It took a little tweaking, but the end result works great and I have 2 strands wrapped around a lamp in my office running the patterns just for fun. It even showed me how to make the simple breadboard connections required to link it all together. I have to say it’s been great fun using it chase down various “hey, what if…” tech scenarios that pop into my head. It feels a bit like the first time I used the 3-D printer to make a custom part for something which otherwise would not have existed: from brain to Tinkercad to tangible object. A little magical if I’m being honest. I start looking around thinking “what else can I use this for?”

The snow days have been nice. Everyone was home yesterday and everything was cancelled today so we’ve spent Saturday lazing, reading and tinkering. Tonight: more Factorio. It’s looking like things will generally be normal on Monday; the kids who’ve gone out and about report that the streets are fine, though I guess concerns about buses on secondaries might keep the county home one more day. We’ll just have to see.

Thoroughly enjoying Little, Big. I like it’s generally cozy pacing and the writing is just gorgeous, particularly descriptions of warm outdoor spring and summer days!

They closed schools tomorrow so…

Currently reading: Little, Big by John Crowley 📚

So I just had Claude.ai iterate a few times over a custom extension for publishing to microblog directly from vscode, which is nice. This is the second bit of useful code that I’ve been able to generate from AI; the first was a dumb little ncurses app for displaying ‘live’ data from my weather station. I used ChatGPT for that, but had Claude add a few refinements. If you have an Ambient Weather Station and want to take a look at it, it’s in my github repo.

Pretty nice. I am, at best, a decent shell and perl scripter. I know enough python to hurt myself badly, and that’s about it. Either of these would have taken more time than I would have wanted to spend and I actually learned a little bit about vscode extensions in the process. Here’s the brave new world and all that.

In other news, the snow is looking more and more like a sure thing for this weekend. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t close schools in advance of Friday. Since we usually do our grocery shopping on the weekend, we got ahead of it and stocked up last night. Oh and I pulled the trigger on the Factorio expansion. Bring on the weather I say.

Edit: I also put the vscode extension into github. If you run into any problems and need help troubleshooting…uh…ask Claude!

On games

For the last few years, my go-to game for wintertime has been Factorio. It scratches a very deep itch for me, and I am very careful not to start playing until the decks are completely clear of work or other responsibilities. This happens most often in the winter when yardwork is on hold. Since complex mechanics seem to be a thing for me, I decided to give Dwarf Fortress another try, this time via Steam. So far…it’s ok. I’m slowly - very slowly - getting a sense of how deep it goes in terms of complexity, but it hasn’t quite gotten ahold of my nerd-nerve like Factorio’s optimization problems did. Plus, you know, there are rail networks to automate.

I’ve managed to keep my first Dwarf Fortress alive for a year of in-game time, which I know is barely scratching the surface. The population has grown a bit, and I can sort of see the farming, hunting, crafting, and defense management cycles forming. To be fair, I’m starting on a nerfed world with low-aggression monsters and whatnot. I’m nowhere close to kicking it to the curb, but I may restart it again on normal settings across the board and see how it runs without the training wheels. But I also just applied the 2.x update to Factorio and am eyeballing the Space Age expansion. The weather this weekend is looking grody, and we may be sort of locked in for a day or two. Pity.

Anyway, PTO is over, so the daily routines are more or less back in place. Paradoxically, with the holidays behind us, things feel a little more relaxed. I got a lot done and am in good shape to resume classwork towards the end of the month as we enter the homestretch. Some business travel is coming up, but I’ve got plenty of reading, so we’re good to go.

Currently reading: The Religion of the Day by University of Mary 📚

Currently reading: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa 📚

Last day of PTO, and I spent it doing all of those fiddly things that I never have time for during the rest of the year: rearranging and cleaning a bit of the office, planting seeds I want to germinate outdoors, running stuff to the dump, that sort of thing. All the other to-do stuff got to-done. The only thing I didn’t get to was the garage, which can wait. Still enjoying Absolution and we are having a lot of fun with Bad Monkey. Lots of weird/gonzo Florida in the air around here in the dead of winter, which seems about right.

A low-key NYE for us: served at the vigil mass, lots of tacos, and a colossal bonfire which has become a tradition. A toast at midnight, then off to sleep. Puttering around with house cleaning today and catching up on the horrible news out of New Orleans. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis

We pledge that the Catholic Church in Kentucky and Tennessee will continue to accompany and serve migrants with every possible resource. We will continue to advocate for your just treatment and dignity as our Catholic Social Teaching instructs in every way that we are able to do so.

The Church recognizes the right of individuals to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their family members. The Church also recognizes the responsibility of nations to control their borders and create migration policies. However, the Church teaches that this right is not unlimited and must be exercised with respect for the human dignity of each person and the common good.

The Church in the United States has long advocated for comprehensive immigration reform that includes pathways to citizenship, family reunification, and protections for those fleeing persecution. It emphasizes the need for just and humane treatment of all migrants, including access to legal protections, and due process. The Church recognizes that basic human rights are based on the dignity of being created in the image and likeness of God.

from “Statement of the Bishops of the Province of Louisville on the Feast of the Holy Family,” 2024

Santa keeping things full throttle for me this year

Currently reading: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer 📚

Currently reading: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 📚

Essays on eschatology and salvation turned in. Need to do one more small project to close out another class and I’m done until late January.

Somebody figured out the connections in the Beatrix Potter story universe and the graph is just delightful. (h/t MetaFilter)

This post is a round-up of tools and tidbits that have been useful to me over the last four years of formation. If you are in discernment for the diaconate or in the midst of aspirancy, some of these things might be useful to you. Diocesan programs can obviously vary from place to place.

If your formation program includes access to a library - especially a seminary library - take the time to become familiar with the various databases available for access. Many times, things that are not available in one database are actually sitting in another one. Some of them will give you online access to complete books, though the path to getting there might not be immediately obvious. My first go-tos tended to be Atla, JSTOR, IxTheo, and the Oxford eBook collection, but access and mileage varies according to your particular institution.

We had a “get acquainted” session with the librarian at one point early on, but I don’t think I really got the hang of online research until I was in my third year. Our librarians can also get scans of physical texts if they’re in the holdings but not online and can usually turn around requests very quickly.

Familiarize yourself with any in-house style guides. The individual instructors will tell you in their syllabi what, if any, formatting expectations they have, but it’s very good to know what the institution expects as well. St. Meinrad’s in-house guide is largely based on Turabian, with some important deviations peculiar to theological texts, biblical citations, magisterial documents, and primary sources. In some cases, they defer to the style guide used by Liturgical Press (abbreviations and so forth). Refer to these guides early and often as you’re writing, particularly anything around citations. Get used to doing things according to the institution’s way, and life will be easier.

If it’s been several years since you’ve been in school (and who among us, amirite), find a blank MLA template for Word (or LibreWriter) and use it for all your short-form stuff. If you’re a weirdo, you can find MLA templates in LaTeX. I nearly wrote my closure papers in LaTeX, but I couldn’t work out some tiny quirk with footnote formatting, so I dropped back to LibreWriter

For formal papers, getting a handle on citations is a must. There will be lots of them, and I found Zotero invaluable. If you’re familiar with Mendeley, you should be able to pick up Zotero pretty quickly, and the price is right: it’s free. Both are databases for tracking research sources. You can annotate PDFs in Zotero, which connects to Word and LibreWriter for inserting citations and auto-generating bibliographies. Once you get the workflow down, using it is a breeze. I have saved almost everything I’ve read for school (as well as all the books I’ve bought) in my Zotero database.

Grammarly has been invaluable in correcting some bad habits. I have also used Claude to review papers for flow and structure. A prompt I used recently went something like this and turned out to be very useful in tightening up a few things.

This essay is for a masters-level theology course I am completing as part of my preparation for ordination to the diaconate. I would like suggestions regarding structure, flow, and any minor grammatical or spelling errors. I want to leave the text as intact as possible, so please do not suggest substantive changes beyond structural/organizational, or the grammar errors I have already mentioned. If you have other suggestions beyond what I have specified, inquire first before showing them to me so that I can opt to decline seeing them.

Quizlets are useful for generating flash-cards and practice tests. Basic, limited access is free. We also used Google Docs to collaborate on study guides for tests.

If you need to suss out a piece of music real quick, but can’t read sheet music well, Sheet Music Scanner might be worth a look. Take a picture of the music, give it a second, and it plays it back to you. This has been especially useful for the weekends when I get assigned as cantor for mass.

Happy Memorial of St. Nicholas, who allegedly decked Arius' halls at the Council of Nicaea.

One of the papers I wrote for my closure project was an analysis of City of God as a template for the modern apologist. Augustine didn’t mount a courtroom-style defense of the faith like Justin Martyr, nor did he use the language of statesmen like Tertullian. Instead, he met pagan arguments on their own terms, without appealing to external authority. In fact, the authority he quotes most often is Varro, who tried (and generally seems to have failed) to systematize pagan belief.

The lesson for the modern apologist, I think, is to survey the landscape around us like shipwreck survivors and make use of the things lying around the shore. It’s almost a commonplace these days that the world is slowly careening into the darkness of a post-Christian era. You’re either lost to the zeitgeist or hunkered down as part of a vital remnant. I’m not sure that either of these views is particularly useful. The deep yearning for the transcendent hasn’t gone anywhere, and neither have the urges to worship or at least make use of the forms of worship and ritual (see Charles Taylor). This ought to give us tremendous hope and optimism as evangelists and apologists. An alternative to the immanent frame will have to be proposed from the highways and hedgerows, not the doorways of the narthex (see James Shea).

Just asked Claude for book recommendations based on things I’ve enjoyed in the weird/magic realism genre…this is what it came back with:

1. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
2. Little, Big by John Crowley
3. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
4. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
5. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

We got our grades back for the last exam, and I’m satisfied with mine, so I’ll pass on the corrections opportunity offered by our instructor. All that remains is a pair of essays; he sent the prompts for those just now. Those aren’t due until early January, but I’ll probably start working on them this week. S̶t̶i̶l̶l̶ w̶a̶i̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ o̶n̶ g̶r̶a̶d̶e̶s̶ f̶o̶r̶ m̶y̶ b̶i̶g̶ p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶s̶.

[update: they came in, and I crushed them]

In other news, we came through Thanksgiving weekend just fine. It may snow a little tonight, but nothing dramatic. Looking forward to some time off again later this month and closing the (calendar) year out.

My formation cohort is about a year away from ordination, and we all seem to be hitting the ‘ready to be done with academic work’ wall about now. At the same time, it’s clear to me that once all of the school overhead has cleared away, I’ll need to come up with some other self-directed plan for continued (but lighter) study and hopefully more leisure reading. I’d like to go back and dip into a few things we touched on over the past few years - books that were required but from which we only read selections, that sort of thing. First test will come this spring - we have some travel planned, and by then, everything should be wrapped up and done. Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer is at the top of the list for certain.

Currently reading: The Once and Future King by T. H. White 📚

Turkey: seasoned. Grill: cleaned out. Served at mass this morning then took care of some year-end admin stuff for work. Everyone seems to be laying low, as it should be. Another wave of cooking will start later. Tomorrow morning is the Turkey Trot, followed by food & football. God bless you all!

Another formation weekend is behind us, and all that remains of Trinity and Salvation are a couple of papers to submit sometime before the end of December. Plenty to think about, especially the stuff on eschatology.

Our next class is a Liturgical Practicum, and the various rituals have been sitting here for a while now. We just need to review all the praenotandae and any general instructions beforehand. The final for that one will be to record an instructional video on some facet of what we’re studying, which will wrap up the semester. Looking ahead, our final semester will be Moral Theology and Canon Law, two weekends apiece.

This past weekend was one of our potluck sessions. One weekend per semester, our families join us for Sunday mass, bring a covered dish, and then we all get together and eat. It’s all great fun, and for our kids, it’s one of the highlights of the year. I came home from that, lazed on the couch a little, dipped into Four Quartets, napped, and watched football. Grandkids and in-laws rolled in a bit later and a good time was had by all.

Georgia won yesterday, so life is good. Regarding pro teams, I’m kind of non-committal. I’ll watch whoever is on. The kids root for the Titans, which makes sense, and the Vols, which does not. My wife and I both went to Georgia. None of the kids go to UT, though several go to MTSU, which is having a dismal season as usual. We were a house divided when the Dawgs ran roughshod over Tennessee last weekend.

So this morning, for the first time, I preached (or more accurately, ‘delivered a reflection’). It went well and I avoided heresy. Got several compliments and good feedback from Fr. Last night at OCIA we discussed the liturgical calendar and I went way too deep on the dating of Christmas.

I spent last week in Las Vegas for work. The event was fine, but I’m not big on the whole hotel/casino/resort thing. I get it: the business is gambling, and all things are ordered to it, but that means there’s nowhere to chill inside without betting on something. I get it; just don’t like it. 2/10.

The forgiveness of particular venial sins comes about only through an act of fervor in the charity already possessed habitually. Aquinas rightly points out that this movement of contrition does not always occur. He writes, “it can happen that after someone has committed a venial sin, he will not actually think anything about abandoning the sin or holding to it, but he thinks perhaps that a triangle has three angles equal to two right angles; and in this thought he falls asleep and dies.“²⁷ Obviously, according to Aquinas’s argument, this geometer has not yet been forgiven for his sin. The guilt remains. Nevertheless, because he maintained the love of God, he would ultimately still be destined for the beatific vision.

— Fr. Luke Wilgenbusch, Saved as Through Fire: A Thomistic Account of Purgatory, Temporal Punishment, and Satisfaction

The clear takeaway is that excessive, habitual thoughts about math are not necessarily good for your soul. The footnote references Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences, lib. 4, dist. 21, q. 1, a. 3, qc. 1: “Potest autem quod aliquis postquam veniale peccatum commisit, nihil actualiter cogitet de peccato vel dimittendo vel tenendo; sed cogitet forte quod triangulus habet tres angulos aequales duobus rectis; et in hac cogitatione obdormiat, et moriatur.”

Christian life on earth is eternal life already begun. Sanctifying grace and charity endure eternally. St. John of the Cross speaks thus: “In the evening of our life we shall be judged by our love for God and neighbor.”

— Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.

Tiny nest. Hummingbird, maybe? I found it in the grass under one of our trees.

Un nidito (posiblemente de un colibrí) que encontré abajo de nuestros arboles.

Estoy empezando a soña en español como era joven y estudiante en la universidad. A veces practico en mente, describiendo cosas o conceptos teologicós, y por eso puedo contestar cuando hay preguntas sobre, por ejemplo, las ultimas cosas (el juzgo particular, etc). Esto pasó anoche en OCIA cuando terminamos la clase. Las otras catequistas ya saben que estoy preparando con estudios formales y frecuentemente refirén a mi las preguntas difíciles o complicadas. Bueno - aqui puedo tambien practicar como escribir (y lo siento si me falta acentos o otras marcas - no he configurado los caracteres…corto y pego desde otra terminal).

I subscribed to the paid version of Claude and want to give it a run for a bit. So far I like it. I had it review some stuff I had written and it came up with some pretty good suggestions and (probably not accidentally) a couple of compliments. Grist for the mill, so to speak. One thing I appreciate is the disclosure straight out of the gate that it won’t try to give precise citations (“which question in the Summa addresses XYZ,” for example). For larger, complicated issues it seems to do a pretty good job of breaking them down and some occasional serviceable synthesis of ideas.

I pasted the full text of a Wikipedia article that I was having some trouble parsing. It confirmed my unspoken hunch about some bias and provided what I thought to be an ample theological response.

In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home. It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart.

This profound core, present in every man and woman, is not that of the soul, but of the entire person in his or her unique psychosomatic identity. Everything finds its unity in the heart, which can be the dwelling-place of love in all its spiritual, psychic and even physical dimensions. In a word, if love reigns in our heart, we become, in a complete and luminous way, the persons we are meant to be, for every human being is created above all else for love. In the deepest fibre of our being, we were made to love and to be loved.

Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Dilexit Nos, par. 20-21

Class this weekend was good; I’ve summarized it below. iykyk.

I was not expecting a Herman Hesse reference in tonight’s reading.

Then came October full of merry glee:
For, yet his noule was totty of the must,
Which he was treading in the wine-fats see,
And of the ioyous oyle, whose gentle gust
Made him so frollick and so full of lust:
Vpon a dreadfull Scorpion he did ride,
The same which by Dianaes doom vniust
Slew great Orion: and eeke by his side
He had his ploughing share, and coulter ready tyde.

We are in the maddening time of the year when the outside looks like fall but feels like summer. The leaves are changing, there’s been frost in the morning but we’re still getting into the 80s during the day. I’ll rue these words come February, but I need autumn and winter to step on it.

Speaking of dreadfull Scorpions and the like, I noticed on Seek that Joro spiders have a couple of spots in Tennessee now, near Chattanooga and in a few other locations well to the west and east of here. This does not please me. I had been hearing about them from my folks in Atlanta for a while and got a chance to see them up close when I was down there a couple of weeks ago. I’m a live-and-let-live sort of person as regards spiders and whatnot, but these things are gross, and their webs are disgusting. I have not spotted any in our yard yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Papers submitted. They’re out of my hands and commended to Almighty God and the instructors who will grade them. I will use my remaining brain cells to finish Gilles Emery’s books on the Trinity before class in a couple of weeks. I’m still on my long Borges kick and am revisiting the short stories in English but occasionally bouncing back to the Spanish versions too. Not sure what I’ll look at next, to be totally honest. The end of our formal studies is slowly coming into view, which means reading and study will return to (mostly) self-directed, though likely along three parallel tracks: leisure, ministerial/study, and spiritual. Speaking of:

Chautard on the interior life was exactly what I needed, and I recommend it to anyone else who is looking for the how and why of developing a habit of contemplative prayer. My spiritual director seems to be a fan of French spirituality; prior to Chautard, he had me reading Frances De Sales and Jacques Phillipe. Something about Chautard reminds me of Evagrius, though I’m unsure why. I think it’s the close association he makes between contemplative prayer and active charity and the absolute necessity of the former to carry out the latter. In any event, my morning prayer routine looks something like this:

1. Office of Readings
2. Morning Prayer
3. Spiritual reading 5-10 minutes
4. Contemplative prayer, 20 minutes
5. Final prayer of thanksgiving and intent before wandering over to the office

I recently increased the time for contemplative prayer from 15 to 20 minutes; my goal is to get to 30, and I don’t think it will be terribly difficult. I use a timer to make myself accountable - originally to keep from quitting too soon. Now it serves to make sure I don’t stay in the chair too long! I can maintain this schedule just about every day of the week, though parts occasionally shift around if I’m serving mass early or, to be frank, feeling lazy on Saturday morning.

No nerd news for now. With a little more in the way of spare time I may start dipping back into radio stuff. I also promised myself a new game for the wintertime once schoolwork was done. I was weighing Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress and am leaning towards Rimworld right now. It seems easier to dip in and out of, and an online friend of mine who has played both agrees. I’m going to lay Factorio aside for now, though the new space expansion looks absolutely fantastic.

Currently reading: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges 📚. Bouncing back and forth between English and Spanish versions for language practice.

All three papers for my concluding exercise are done and in the can! I am well ahead of the 11/14 deadline and may peruse them one last time, but I’m generally satisfied with them. I feel so Augustinian at the moment I can’t even describe it.

Katydid

The first paper is in the ‘revise and editing’ mode and hopefully close to done. Two more to tackle and am considering a slight pivot. I expected this would happen and think there’s enough time to pull off what I have in mind.

I took this in Costa Rica years ago but didn’t realize until later that day that this howler monkey was holding her baby. It’s become one of my favorite shots.

Currently reading: The Soul of the Apostolate by Jean Baptiste Chautard 📚

I gave this talk the other night to a high school youth group and was asked to supply the notes or a recording. All I had were crib notes, so I committed to writing everything down while it was still reasonably fresh. Here it is.

​ ​Why do we want the things we want? We want food when we’re hungry and water when we’re thirsty. We want shelter from the weather and other things along those lines. The thing is, nobody needs to tell us that when we’re hungry, the right thing to want is food. We already know this. It’s built-in. Ditto for water, shelter, and the other essentials of life.

For nearly everything else, however, we have to learn what to want, and we learn this by watching other people. We see what they want, and then we learn to want it too. The Greeks called this mimesis, which is similar to mere imitation but conveys something deeper, more complete - something trying to be perfect. Mimesis is neither good nor bad. It’s just a description of how we tend to act and learn to do the things we do. ​

A French thinker named René Girard​ spent a lot of time studying literature and mythology and he began to discover some patterns that he put together into a theory. His theory turns out to be pretty useful in understanding ​the way people act today and as more people have begun to discover his work, his ideas are getting a lot of traction. I won’t go into all of them in this talk but will focus on two of them which, I believe, are important for the ways we approach technology generally, and social apps in particular.

His first idea is that human desire has three parts: me, another person, and the thing we both want. It may be that the other person already has this thing, or maybe we’re both competing for it. If you’ve ever watched toddlers playing, you’ve seen this level of desire in action. Everyone is occupied with various toys until one child reaches for something that no one else is playing with. All of a sudden, that particular toy is the center of attention. Everyone wants it, even if nobody noticed it before. The room erupts in noise. Girard says that this is mimetic desire at work. The moment I see you wanting something, I want it too.

If you think about it, this idea makes perfect sense. It’s the reason athletes get big endorsement deals and advertisers use celebrities or other aspirational figures to kindle our desires. It’s the basis for the entire influencer economy online. ​

But, like the crowded playroom, it doesn’t take long for tensions to start rising. People who desire the same thing begin mirroring each other. I begin modeling myself on you to get the thing you have. You, in turn, begin modeling yourself on me because of what I want. You’ve maybe seen this in friend groups, where two people are on the outs because “so and so does nothing but copy me!” These tensions continue to rise and spread through the entire group or community, and will come to a point of crisis where they threaten to tear everything apart.

Girard’s second idea concerns what happens next. In many cases, the group, without realizing it, makes use of a escape valve to let out the tension. He called this the scapegoat mechanism.​ During this period of crisis, someone - usually someone who is somehow set apart from the others - is identified as the cause for the crisis. Things were going along just fine, someone says until so-and-so came along. After that, everything went to pieces.

Then a second person agrees. You’re right, they say. Things were pretty good. Then a third person joins, and a fourth. Can you see what’s happening? A group of people who were all fighting with one another a little while ago…are all suddenly on the same side. The tension starts to vanish and people begin feeling better. The only thing left to do is get rid of the person somehow and finish the job. In the stories Girard studied, this usually meant killing the person, but at a minimum, it meant exiling them from the community. When it was done everyone was sure that they had done the right thing. The cause of the crisis had been identified and removed, and see? Everyone feels good again, and everything is fine now…or at least until tensions begin to rise again, and the cycle is repeated.

You now know everything you need to know about the way the social media economy works, so now we can talk about your phones.

Nearly all of you raised your hands when I asked about mobile phones and applications: TikTok, Clash of Clans, Spotify, Instagram, and so on. Let’s take Spotify for a minute. If you’re a subscriber, you’re paying ​so much per month. You can run some rough math and figure out, based on the number of subscribers, how much they might be making. In reality, it’s a little more complicated than that, but we’ll keep it easy and just stop there. What about the other apps that were mentioned? It’s safe to say, I bet, that you’re not paying anything for them. Yet these companies are worth billions and billions of dollars. How can this be?

The ​simplest reason is that you are not the customer, since you’re not the one paying them. You’re the product. You’re what the company is selling. Everything you do, see, pause over, like, comment on, and share. Everywhere you go, everyone you talk to, and everything they like and share. All of this information about you is worth more than gold, and it’s the reason these companies are making so much money. They only make money while you’re using the apps, so they have very smart people - some of the smartest in the world - making sure you keep using them. You should probably know that even if you’ve never heard of Girard, these folks have. They know his books very well​, and ​they use his theory to make a lot of money off of you. Google “rene girard silicon valley​” and see for yourself.

They do this by doing the two things we’ve already discussed: giving us more things to want, keeping us angry and in a state of memetic crisis, and making it easy to find a scapegoat to release the tension. Tech generally, and social media in particular, remove a lot of the friction that might otherwise slow down the scapegoat mechanism. It’s one thing to accuse someone face to face; it’s quite another to do it via a DM, tweet, or Insta comment.​ We’re embodied people - we exist in real life, and authentic communication and relationships require an embodied element. Absent that, and we’re very quick to say the worst of things, pile on someone else, and kick them out of a group. Look around online at large social media sites and suddenly, it’s all you can see: groups fighting with one another over fault, or destroying themselves by infighting. The memetic crisis is perpetual online.

To be clear, it’s perpetual offline as well, but it tended to move a bit slower because embodied relationships have a certain thickness to them.

So now what? As a father, I’d love nothing more than to dump the whole mess into the deepest part of the ocean, but it’s simply not practical. This is the water you swim in, so I have a responsibility to be in it with you. But if you know what’s driving the mechanics of this whole thing, you can use it a little more wisely. So here are a couple of tips:

First, choose your models carefully! Imitating a friend or co-worker because you’re competing for the same thing can - and often will - lead to tensions and hurt, but mimesis needn’t be a bad thing. If your friend is trying to be a saint, “copying” them is no threat at all! Why not? Because she can’t use up all of God’s grace and leave none for you! Competing for something inexhaustible is the way to go.

Second, keep an eye on the rush to find the scapegoat. Now that you know about this, don’t be surprised if you start seeing it in action everywhere. I’d wager it drives most (all?) online drama these days. We want to make sure we don’t habituate ourselves to it, and bring the worst of the online world into our real, human relationships.

Here is a list of resources for learning more about René Girard and his theories. His books are not very long but can be somewhat challenging to read. He was an academic writing for other academics and built his theories over time and not as one grand, unified system. The two collections below are a good way to get started. Luke Burgis has studied Girard extensively and writes very well about navigating the world in light of these theories. And nobody discusses these ideas better than Bishop Barron.

• René Girard and the Social Media Swamp, by Bishop Robert Barron​
• René Girard, Church Father, by Bishop Robert Barron​
• Wanting: The Power of Memetic Desire in Everyday Life, by Luke Burgis​
• All Desire is a Desire for Being, by René Girard​ (essential writings edited by Cynthia Haven
• The ​Girard Reader, by René Girard (edited by James Williams)

Was asked to speak to our high school youth group tonight about smartphones. What I think they expect is a screed about the evils of the internet, but what’s coming are the broad contours of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and how both are accelerated and intensified by online disembodiment.

Green frog

Alan Jacobs writes about the diaconal charism rooted in the call of the first deacons:

So we see here the very common injustice that arises from people preferring members of their own cultural group to “others,” not realizing, or not accepting, that such distinctions are erased when one enters the Body of Christ. And when I consider what happened to David French in his family, I think: Every church needs deacons to do precisely what the first deacons did — that is, to give comfort and support to the people of God justly, that is, with no regard to differences in culture or race or politics, because, as Peter says a little later in Acts, “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).

The key - the indifference he writes about - is, I think to be found to have its roots in another constituent part of diaconal spirituality, which is self-emptying (kenosis). I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few days, especially as I worked through spiritual reading suggested by my director and others over the last few years. Many of the books have been written by priests, and a few of them assume that the reader is also a priest. And so the advice and guidance in the book make perfect sense for a priest, but maybe not exactly for a deacon who is also married and holds a secular job.

This is not to say that the advice is misplaced, or that the reading can’t bear tremendous fruit. It does prompt the question of whether (and in what ways) the spiritual life of a deacon differs from priestly, monastic, or episcopal spirituality. Of course we should pray frequently and heroically, striving for a certain amount of consistent contemplative prayer. I also have a household to run, children to raise, and performance reviews to begin at work. Full acknowledging that priests have wall-to-wall schedules and endless demands of their own, it’s also fair to point out that the particular demands of married and family life are objectively different. It makes a sort of sense that the spiritual practices in support of them are also different, but I guess I’m not entirely sure how yet.

This could be just me overthinking again, though. Like the proverbial bee sampling from every flower along the way, I’ve fruitfully pulled bits and pieces from nearly all of the traditions I’ve studied. Maybe there isn’t one and, like everyone else, we have to sort out spirituality on our own. Feels like it might be worth a book or two, though.

OCIA team meeting tonight. It was good to get the band together to debrief last year and hash out the coming round. I’ll be alternating between the English and Spanish sessions so I can continue working on language skills and hopefully run some interference for our Spanish-speaking catechist who has been flying solo up until now.

Finished S2 of House of the Dragon last night. Afraid I have to join the chorus of “meh,” though I suppose this means S3 will be a real barn-burner (so to speak).

You dolphins and all water creatures, bless the Lord.

The weather at the beach turned out perfect, so the grandbabies ran completely amok, and of the three things I had planned - read, drink, work on papers - I only made any progress with two of them and you can probably guess which ones. Stendahl is a lot of fun so far. The painting is one of the ceiling panels in the chapter room of St. Meinrad Archabbey. This was apparently part of the original cloister and not originally open to the public. It’s still in use whenever the community meets in chapter for general monastery business or to elect a new abbot. The other panels are birds of the air, beasts wild and tame, hosts of the Lord, and so on. Moving from one end of the room to the other, you retrace The Song of the Three Holy Children.

The weather is not looking great for the upcoming beach weekend, but I’ve got an iPad full of sources to annotate and no concrete plans for much of anything else. For fun, Stendahl and a fair amount of liquor. Also unplugging from all the socials. RSS feeds and text alone.

Church of Our Lady of Einsiedeln, Saint Meinrad Archabbey

For those about to smoke…

Enjoying a bit of liminal time between classes and coursework. Next week we’re hunkered down for a week of Homiletics and I’m going to use some of my time at St. Meinrad (hopefully) peeking at sources for my fall papers. A few thoughts came to me during a recent run and I think I’ve got a good approach for them. Grabbed onto another good angle last night, so the percolating phase of paper-writing is well underway. The rest of the month is shaping up to be busy with weekend trips here and there and August will be here before we know it. I already ordered the books for the upcoming Moral Theology class when our next (and final) year begins next month. Definitely looking forward to reading more for leisure when this is all done.

On the nightstand: a collection of Carson McCullers short stories which I picked up last year at the unclaimed baggage place in Scottsboro, AL for $5. I haven’t read any of her stuff since college and had forgotten how good her stuff is. On deck is Stendahl’s The Red and the Black.

Onscreen: Just finished up S3 of The Bear. Working through The Gentlemen, which is fun so far.

Currently reading: Collected Stories of Carson McCullers by Carson McCullers 📚

Same energy

Currently reading: Oedipus the King ; Oedipus at Colonus ; Antigone by Sophocles 📚

“Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take out their anger on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.”

— René Girard

Deep in Girard again, and I’ve been thinking about ways the Internet accelerates or intensifies mimetic crises and their attendant scapegoating. First, groups obviously can (and do) form a hell of a lot faster, but without the “thickness” of embodied relationships, I suspect this means they’re more brittle. We can sort ourselves - or have ourselves sorted - much more easily, and the engagement models and algorithms of social media are going to guarantee an intensification of desire which means an acceleration towards crisis all the quicker. The release valve - scapegoat - will also be identified all the faster, but instead of relying on physical differences, the group has no choice to but seek performative aberrations or deviations from some tightly defined orthodoxy. The disembodied nature of online relationships has to give way to text and pictures, and at this point in time, most everyone has accumulated oodles of both.

At the same time, the anonymity, or perception of it removes one more obstacle to the scapegoat mechanism - the friction of “the first stone.” The cost to call out the scapegoat has dropped to near nothing, but the cost of an in-grouper to stand idly by has soared tremendously, so pile-ons happen faster and spread wider - past the in-group and into adjacent groups and clusters. It’s come up on at least one podcast I listen to (Blocked and Reported) that perhaps Twitter’s general decline has attenuated the pile-on tendencies a bit since many folks have migrated to other platforms. Getting data for something like that would be tough. It feels plausible, but it could also be that the cancel- and callout-culture zeitgeist has shifted. The mechanisms for them are still very much at work, though perhaps on a more diffuse scale. Neither desire nor the mimesis and conflict it causes will be going away any time soon

It’s the season for weird clouds, tall weeds, and blackberries.

Currently reading: All Desire Is a Desire for Being by René Girard 📚

Giant Leopard Moth

Was on a vocations panel for high-schoolers last night with our pastor, 2 Dominican sisters, and a pair of newlyweds.

Question: do you watch movies and what kind?

Father: there’s a TV in the rectory but we don’t watch it much. I might go to a friends to watch soccer.

Sisters: we don’t watch much TV, occasional movies

Couple: Only stuff like The Chosen

Me: We watch an absolute dogpile of movies and discuss/fight over them forever. There are factions.

Currently reading: An Introduction to Philosophy by Jacques Maritain 📚

Currently reading: Time for God by Jacques Philippe 📚

The rooster is the last survivor of our chicken-keeping days and since there are no more hens to watch, he just hangs out with the dog all day. She doesn’t seem to mind.

Today I repaired an appliance, got a haircut, and watched the grandsons. We grilled hot dogs and sweet corn and, having swam all day, they’ll leave here exhausted. We will also be exhausted, but the good kind. Tomorrow I’m slated to serve at two masses. Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

Pear, elderflower, and pawpaw

Today we were instituted as acolytes! Preparation continues - this weekend’s intro to homiletics was a tee-up for a week at St. Meinrad for more intensive study in July.

I was visiting my 96-year-old grandmother in the hospital yesterday. She’s not doing well; I was able to see her receive the Anointing of the Sick and receive communion. She’s said that she’s ready to go and I’m inclined to take her at her word.

Every so often, a little tune would play over the hospital PA system. I had a hunch and asked a nurse. Turns out I was right: a little lullaby plays whenever a baby is born in the maternity ward. I think I heard that song a half-dozen times or so. On the drive back to Nashville I was on the phone updating my wife. As I told her about this I just started bawling.

Served Mass this morning with our pastor. There have been a couple of boys serving on Wednesday mornings too, but today it was just me. Prayed for the grace to be attentive and to fittingly serve and everything went perfectly. Even had to readjust the missal before holding it up - the ribbons for the Collect and whatnot were in the wrong spot. Again, smooth. The usual small group remained after for Morning Prayer and the Office of Readings. Since this Saturday we’re to be instituted as acolytes, I asked Father what, if anything, would be changing.

Oh, he got the biggest smile. Everything, he said. After Saturday you will wear an alb, not that (pointing at the cassock and surplice). You will no longer be an altar server. Then he ran through the basic duties of the acolyte - purification of vessels, simple exposition, EM - and the need for a bit of catechesis with the others on the role and responsibility. Here I had been worried that maybe Saturday was going to pass unnoticed, but apparently not. I think this last Sunday may have been my last time sitting in a pew for a while.

Aurora borealis in TN!

Hello cicada!

Dcn. Bill Ditewig writes about re-thinking the idea of “permanent” and “transitional” as they pertain to the diaconate:

First, we must immediately retire the use of adjectives to describe a deacon as either a “permanent” deacon or a “transitional” deacon. For decades now, scholars and bishops have pointed out that there is only one Order of Deacons, just as there is only one Order of Presbyters and one Order of Bishops. All ordinations are permanent, so calling a deacon a “permanent” one is redundant, and calling a seminarian-deacon a “transitional” deacon is sacramentally wrong. All deacons are permanent. We do not refer to a presbyter who is later ordained a bishop as a “transitional” priest!

I’ve thought about this a fair bit, actually, and it makes a lot of sense. Dropping the terms would be easy enough. There’s only one diaconate, so qualifying it one way or the other seems kind of dumb. Disconnection from the cursus honorum also makes a tremendous amount of sense. Seminarians aren’t discerning the diaconate; they’re discerning the priesthood. The two are formed in different ways for the two very different vocations.

Feeling a little fried. Just wrapped our class on the Eucharist, for which a paper and oral exam are still pending. Beyond that, there’s the reading and prep for an upcoming weekend on Homiletics (which is a tee-up for a week-long intensive at St. Meinrad in July). Hovering over those are the reading and planning for the closure papers in the fall, but directly in front of me are the notes for tomorrow night’s OCIA mystagogical conference on the laity. And of course, family, household stuff, day job, &c.

St. Catherine of Siena, pray for me.

Peony bloom

Pawpaw covered in blossoms. Here’s hoping they set some fruit!

On Free Choice of the Will…

This image may be a bit too large; here’s a link to it instead.

Currently reading: Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky 📚

Let’s get things started.

I wonder what it would take for the Holy See to start posting PDFs of encyclicals and other ecclesial documents with proper formatting along the lines of a text-to-LaTeX-to-PDF workflow. I just converted two (Mysterium Fidei and Ecclesia de Eucharistia) because I couldn’t find any versions online that didn’t look terrible. Now they are beautiful and ready to be marked up and annotated in Zotero. The biggest hassle, frankly, was moving the citations from the endnotes to footnotes on each page.

Isn’t that pretty?

Bishop Erik Varden of Norway delivered the Navarra Lecture recently and every bit of it is worth reading. Such beautiful stuff.

Theology is the intelligent, humble, praying engagement with the deposit of faith handed down in the Church, nothing less. When the Church tries to keep up with passing fashions, she is bound to fail. She will always lag a few steps behind. She risks cutting a sorry, even comical figure, like late-middle-aged parents who attempt to adopt the dress code of their teenage children. This fact reveals the fragility of in-sub-culturation. It teaches us that Catholic engagement with contemporary culture must touch the still waters of the depths, not the flotsam washed up on beaches.

Backlit stained glass in the chapel

After ditching FreshRSS and riding with just plain old newsboat for a while, I’m giving MiniFlux a go as a self-hosted RSS aggregator. It set it up on the old laptop running the GOES terminal and barely registers a blip in load. The presentation, moreover, is minimalist and clean. It also renders well on phones and various tablets. Some clients are available (newsboat, for one), but the browser UI is so nice and snappy I tend to just use it. You can tweak the CSS for it and customize it if you like. My feed count is hovering somewhere around 145 right now and growing, and it’s nice to have a consistent, centralized place to corral them all locally. Every so often, I back up the OPML file in case the thing goes toes-up.

Class this weekend on catechetics, and some rumination on the capstone project that lies ahead of me. There are several options available, but I’m leaning heavily toward a trio of textual analyses from the list of books provided. Though the papers will be standalone and graded by different instructors, I plan to link thematically, at least for my own purposes. I hope this will give me a larger framework for the semester’s worth of work, drawing from the others as I treat each one individually. Some texts by Augustine are the main contenders, but I have some time to decide. Originally I had planned to do this in the summer of 2025, but we’re thinking about doing some traveling then, and I’d like to have the decks cleared completely for that. This means doing it sooner, which will overlap with ongoing coursework.

I hope everyone is having a good, peaceful Lent. Last night at RCIA, I led the discussions on contraception, IVF, and other related topics. I’ve run with this one for several years now, and every group receives it a bit differently. There weren’t many questions or surprises. My theory is that this year’s cohort - mostly young adults and new families - has probably already Googled all of this. At the very least, they got to hear it live and in person. Next week starts the period of purification and enlightenment, then the downhill run to Holy Week. On the other side of that, I take over full time for 7-8 weeks of mystagogy.

I’ve managed to sneak into - assume myself - into serving at the 7:00am Wednesday mass. Last year, I noticed that the priest was alone, so I offered to help the following week and then just stuck around. I’ve spread the word to the other parish men in diaconal formation in the event they want to trade off with me, and we’ll make it A Thing. Everyone else is working then, so it’s just been me so far. I don’t mind the at-bats, though, and I greatly appreciate the chance to assist. Interesting to see up close the tiny differences and quirks of each priest in their particular styles - one moves quickly and efficiently, another a bit more slowly and reflectively. A third is newly ordained and still very careful. By now, I’ve internalized enough of the mechanics (“do this, stand here, go there”) to participate more in the liturgy rather than thinking two steps ahead about What Comes Next. It’s been a privilege and a blessing for sure.

De Sales' Introduction to the Devout Life has been very fruitful for morning prayer. You can’t go wrong with de Sales if you’re still looking for some Lenten reading. Read one chapter/meditation in the morning and let it sit with you throughout the day. It’s wonderful stuff.

God bless!

I’m in San Jose for work at the moment and remembering being here for a conference in 1996 called - wait for it - Internet World. I was wondering if anything from that period survived online and I came across a CNN article reviewing bits of the event:

To completely understand the interactive TV concept, you need to be familiar with the latest acronym in an industry awash with acronyms: VRML, short for Virtual Reality Markup Language. “It’s really cool,” says Silicon Graphics' John McCrea. What is it? 3-D, for one thing.

McCrea says VRML describes what happens when a Web page comes to life. “Things are spinning at you. Logos, product shots, that’s just the beginning. Exciting, cool content is what’s going to make VRML take off this year,” he said.

I took a closer look at Pi-hole’s administrative tools and set up per-client domain blocking. One of my Lenten goals is to disengage with social media altogether, and this configuration will keep me from reflexively opening Twitter and the like during the first few days. Seems to work pretty well! I’ve included my phone, workstation, and tablet. My devices have on-demand VPN connections enabled, so I’m always connected to the home network for ad filtering and remote access to the various odds-and-ends I have running at home. It’s been working so well that I went ahead and enabled it well ahead of Ash Wednesday.

I thought I had been doing a pretty good job of moderating my usage, but a recent local news event had me checking feeds frequently for updates, and before I knew it, I was in it all the time.

In other news, I’m working on a short paper to close out a history class and have been deep-diving into Guatemalan history and the Catholic Church’s role therein. The particular diaconal focus is on gaining some insight into the spirituality of Guatemalan Catholics, particularly newcomers to our parish. I have some upcoming business travel, so I’ve gotten some excellent texts squirreled away on the iPad and a couple of short books on Blessed Stanley Rother and St. Pedro de San José Betancur. Both of these are in Spanish and on loan to me from a Dominican sister at our parish who spent some time in Guatemala recently for language classes.

Still plowing through Taylor’s A Secular Age. So far, it’s going a bite at a time. I can say that reading about Taylor was easier than reading Taylor directly. Maybe it’s just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but I’m seeing his name pop up everywhere these days. Even in articles about polyamory. He came up in lectures over the weekend as well. Very weird.

My spiritual director suggested I read An Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Frances de Sales, so that’s a chapter a day as part of my morning prayers. One of the things I’m sort of groping towards is a diaconal spirituality that draws from the sources I’ve engaged with over the last few years - Desert, Benedictine, Carmelite, and Dominican. It won’t be presbyteral and certainly not monastic. It will have to be something else entirely.

The de Sales reading and renewed time for daily contemplative prayer will hopefully provide some space and silence for listening. Quieting the dull but somehow piercing idiocy of social media will also help. And the Breviary, of course. Always the Breviary.

This past formation weekend was very fruitful. God spoke through spiritual direction, homilies, and (most importantly) prayer in the wake of some recent difficulties. The class and instructor were also good, and it’s always a blessing to spend time with my cohort.

Pondering Taylor’s formulation of porous vs. buffered. In the first, meaning is carried by the things themselves, independent of the individual. Not so in the second. The buffered individual is required to determine meaning and do so in isolation. I’m glad for Smith’s overview of this book before diving in. Having Taylor’s basic ideas in place has made it much easier to savor as I go along.

Other things in my brain: continued preparatory reading for the upcoming course on American Church history and the latest seasons of Fargo, Slow Horses, and What We Do in the Shadows. Also working through The Last Kingdom. Multitudes amirite?

Currently reading: A Secular Age by Charles Taylor 📚

Everybody say cheese!

And here it is, in situ. Initial tests show a beautiful, strong signal with practically no errors at all.

Antenna for GOES imagery. Got the whole kit (including SDR and amplifier) for Christmas. Will work on the rest tomorrow, hopefully have some pictures to share soon-ish.

This years book haul. Another Girard book is on pre-order and will get here whenever. Plenty to occupy myself with in the meantime.

Burning down the year’s accumulation of brush on NYE. This is way more fun than fireworks and I will not be entertaining further questions.

I’m now midway through the third year of formation. I submitted my final assignment for the last course and still have a fair amount of runway for the next course’s assignments. Reader, I am enjoying a nice break. Yesterday was my birthday, and I spent it the best way possible: mostly laying on the couch and reading. I started the day assisting at the 7AM daily mass, and ended it having dinner with my wife in an excellent little restaurant.

Reviewing the last few years of studies - I seem to come across one Big Idea every year. Some writer or concept that is mostly (if not entirely) brand-new and also sort of splits time into ‘before I knew this’ and ‘after I knew this.’ In the first year, it was René Girard’s theory of desire. In the second year, I went deep into Cassian’s Conferences and Institutes, and came away with a much deeper appreciation of the psychological insights of the desert movement. This past year, it was Charles Taylor’s work. One of my classes used James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) to be Secular, a whirlwind tour of Taylor’s A Secular Age. I received a copy of Taylor’s full book as a gift and can’t wait to get into it. There are apparently other books delayed but en route so I think my (leisure) reading time is pretty covered for a while to come.

The remainder of this academic year will cover the Church in America, a second round of catechetics, and the Eucharist. That last one will be taught by our vocations director (who has an STL and is now working on his JCL tl;dr, he’s wicked smart). He led our sacraments class, and to say it was rigorous is putting it mildly. I expect the same in this next class.

Currently reading: Wanting by Luke Burgis 📚

The Council of Ephesus, 431

Seasonal Auden

When the final dish matches the picture…

Currently reading: Dominican Life by Walter Wagner 📚

Advent is here, which means that it is about time for the annual reposting of William Tighe’s article Calculating Christmas:

It is true that the first evidence of Christians celebrating December 25th as the date of the Lord’s nativity comes from Rome some years after Aurelian, in A.D. 336, but there is evidence from both the Greek East and the Latin West that Christians attempted to figure out the date of Christ’s birth long before they began to celebrate it liturgically, even in the second and third centuries. The evidence indicates, in fact, that the attribution of the date of December 25th was a by-product of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death and resurrection.

How did this happen? There is a seeming contradiction between the date of the Lord’s death as given in the synoptic Gospels and in John’s Gospel. The synoptics would appear to place it on Passover Day (after the Lord had celebrated the Passover Meal on the preceding evening), and John on the Eve of Passover, just when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Jerusalem Temple for the feast that was to ensue after sunset on that day.

Solving this problem involves answering the question of whether the Lord’s Last Supper was a Passover Meal, or a meal celebrated a day earlier, which we cannot enter into here. Suffice it to say that the early Church followed John rather than the synoptics, and thus believed that Christ’s death would have taken place on 14 Nisan, according to the Jewish lunar calendar. (Modern scholars agree, by the way, that the death of Christ could have taken place only in A.D. 30 or 33, as those two are the only years of that time when the eve of Passover could have fallen on a Friday, the possibilities being either 7 April 30 or 3 April 33.)

The end of the article references The Origins of the Liturgical Year by Thomas J. Talley. I can also attest that it is excellent if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

TL;DR Christmas was not borrowed from pagan Rome; evidence strongly suggests it was the other way around.

Little sundog

Almost time to drop the bird…

Can’t resist one more.

Having some fun with Bing and Dall-E. It doesn’t do well with text, these were the least-gibberish it produced.

Big pot of feijoada to feed a crowd tonight. Been going for about 5 hours.

The pears out front are putting on a real show this year.

It’s been a hot minute or two since the last update. First, the big news: another grandson! He was born on Monday, and everyone is - as you would expect - properly bonkers. His older brother - at a hoary not-quite-2 years old - was a little neutral at first but seems to be warming to him fast. Everyone is doing very well; praise God from whom all blessings glow.

A few of us are in the homestretch for this online Evangelization and Catechesis class, which has largely focused on the cultural landscape. This section’s readings have focused on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, which struck all sorts of chords when it came out a while back. Victor Frankl is on deck next, which wraps up the readings so we can pivot to final projects. As I was stretching at the end of a run the other day, my project idea came all at once, and I had to hustle to the car to get it down in an iPhone note before I forgot it.

Our in-person class next weekend concludes a Christology/Mariology sequence. The final presentation and paper are both in the can, so I can focus on studying for the written exam. And I ordered the books for next month’s liturgical practicum - the Roman Missal and Rite of Baptism for Children. This one is taught by our vicar general, who we love because he is awesome. I think we also have him for canon law next year.

Finished Loki. Started The Last Kingdom. Still working through Absalom, Absalom and a few other things. There’ll be a bit of a break as we head into December, which I will use to get caught up on personal reading and maybe fit in some Factorio or OpenTTD.

I hope and pray that you are well. When I pray the morning office, I always add two extra intercessions - one for the Church at work in the vineyard of Nashville and another for my family, friends, co-workers, and the larger community. That’s you, the one reading this.

It is possible that we will never meet this side of the veil of death. No matter. You were remembered this morning and will be again tomorrow and again the day after that. If God wills my ordination, I will carry you with me whenever I approach the altar or lift the chalice. If you pray, remember me and my brethren as well.

Bill-a-palooza continues….currently reading: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner 📚

Finished reading: Snopes by William Faulkner 📚

Annular eclipse beginning here…

Sunday studies…

Smoking some briskets, drinking beer, and sitting around the pool listening to Jimmy Buffet. He made it to the Labor Day weekend show. 🏝️🍹🍔🦈🌴⛵️🎶🍺

Guilty, defiant, and ejected from the pool…for their own safety since the salt and chlorine will do them in. Back to the wild with you.

Must be time for another permanent #deacon formation weekend. #nashvocations #coffee #diaconate

Annual Cicada, rescued from the web of a bored spider outside my office window.

Enjoying the last bit of relative calm before classes resume this weekend. I’m ahead of the game on the reading and am very keen to stay that way. This will be the last time I will have to double up with an online class in parallel with in-person courses. After this semester, things will be serial-only and life will be good.

I wish I had more hours in the day. The preparatory reading for one class takes a glancing blow off of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and as much as I’d like to read it in its entirety, I don’t have the bandwidth at present for another ~900 pages. Perhaps over the holidays there will be some downtime. For the other course, I’m getting familiar with the role of supportive counseling and its associated models and goals. This one should be interesting.

This past weekend, we had a chance to meet the incoming cohort of men who are beginning their formation. It was a little weird being the “upperclassmen,” but there you have it. They seem like a good group and I look forward to getting to know them all.

Please pray for us, and for all who are discerning vocations of any kind.

Eastern Fence Lizard

Our parish celebrated our patroness today with a procession - this is one of the designs our students chalked on part of the route. A hot but joyous day!

Big shelf cloud action heading our way.

Currently reading: Snopes by William Faulkner 📚

Rickhouse, Nearest Green Distillery

#catholic #iykyk

Warm sidewalk lazy dog cross post test

Reading Girard and then hitting the whole plankton zoo of socials.

Finished Selected Short Stories last night. On deck: Snopes by William Faulkner 📚

I've been thinking a lot about fictional geographies lately. I don't mean fantasy or sci-fi worlds - Middle Earth or Tattooine. I mean fictional places which are meant to exist in the real world.

A few years ago, I re-read Conrad's Nostromo and found myself looking more and more at the weirdness of its setting, the fictional South American country of Costaguana. Plot aside - and I confess that Nostromo is not my favorite Conrad novel - something about the setting always seemed sort of off to me. Distances to places are not terribly consistent, making for occasionally odd timelines. His occasional use of Spanish is also not-quite-right. The whole package feels very much like what it is - a novel written by someone who had heard and read a bit about the area and then decided to write a novel set there. This was annoying at first, but then I came to consider that - at least in terms of Costaguana's geography - the topographical fluidity was more of a feature than a bug. The country sort of wavers between minimalist set-dressing, like the production of King Lear, in which the action takes place solely in and around a mockup of Stonehenge, and a sort of mythical landscape along the lines of Toto's "Africa" I thought about this for a long time, and dreamed of producing mock-vintage travel posters in the style of the Pan Am glory days advertising Clipper service to Sulaco.

Costaguana hovers in the back of my mind as I'm starting to dig deeper into Faulkner's works, most of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, MS. Comparing the two geographies is probably grossly unfair; Conrad set a single novel in South America and it's not clear if ever personally set foot in Colombia or Venezuela, the likeliest inspirations. Faulkner based Yoknapatawpha on his native Lafayette County, substituting Jefferson for real-life Oxford and setting nearly all of his intergenerational novels and short stories there. He lived there, and other than the place names and general topography, the descriptions of the landscape, trees, and birds all have the ring of truth that only an eyewitness can give. The county itself feels like an additional, silent, omnipresent character. I also find myself developing deep attachment to particular places and maybe that's one reason why Faulkner's attention to location/place has gained such mental purchase with me. The general region of northern Mississippi isn't far removed from our home in Middle Tennessee. There might be less limestone in Oxford, but the pine hills, cultivated fields, and river bottoms are about as universally Southern as things get. When he writes about "a grove of locusts and mulberries across the road," he might as well be describing the front quarter of our yard.

A wee Eastern Narrow-mouthed Toad, which is actually a terrestrial frog and not a toad.

Rainy day rabbit vibe

Science we can all get behind.

One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation’s most influential department of nutrition.

Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result

For 20 years now, I have been heading from my native Vermont to the American West—Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Southern California—to hike and camp in the desert. Or, as the New Testament would have it, the eremos. That is the ancient Greek word for wilderness, a lonely place of naked rock, blazing sun and humming silence. And maybe, if you pray and pray, if you genuinely open yourself, it is a place of divine presence, too.

Camping with the Desert Fathers, Leath Tonino

Overheard in the frozen food section of the supermarket today:

Little boy: Oh! Do we need ice cream?
Dad: Nooo we do not need ice cream. pushes cart faster

I nearly interrupted with “Young sir, at our house, in accord with divine law, there is always a need for ice cream. Please select one, stash it in our cart, and drop by later today to help eat it.”

Grand Isle, LA

Currently reading: Selected Short Stories by William Faulkner 📚

I finished The Gulf last night, and it was great. I felt like I was reading the history of an old childhood neighborhood - so many familiar places came up, and now I've got a quiet urge to go see the Texas part of the Gulf Coast and punch the last few places on the ticket. The last few sections on oil spills, industrial pollution, mindless development, and estuarine degradation are depressing as hell, but the recovery/restoration success stories give me hope.

The apples are coming along nicely. These are either Gala or Liberty, I can’t recall which. We have a couple of Arkansas Blacks but they’re still small. Even so there are a few fruits on each of those too.

St. Charles St

Killing time poolside while the smoker smokes…

St Peter & Royal

The road trip was lovely. We set the GPS to 'avoid all highways' and took our time meandering down to  Gulfport, MS, then to New Orleans for a few days before heading north to Oxford. We ate and drank well,  stomped all over the Garden District and French Quarter, drove out to Grand Isle to see some of the delta,  bought a pile of books, and came home to find the house still standing. It was hot and steamy, and we had a great time. We've never been to Oxford, and it was the perfect end to the trip,  both to prime the pump for more Faulkner (pics below) and to visit with a dear friend of my wife who teaches there. After Oxford, we trekked across southeastern TN back toward home, which included a  substantial stretch of the Buford Pusser Memorial Highway. Friends, I maintained the speed limit just to be safe.

I am enjoying the downtime before my studies ramp back up in August. I'm heading into my final online class, which means this is the last time I'll need to juggle multiple classes at once.

Currently reading: The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis 📚

Currently reading: New Orleans Sketches by William Faulkner 📚

Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home

Faulkner’s grave

Roadside lunch from Harry’s Po-boys, Larose, LA

Summer reading: A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Nicomachean Ethics. For Spanish practice, still working through El Aleph (Borges) and Introduccion al Cristianismo (Ratzinger). We’re about to do a bit of road-tripping through Louisiana and Mississippi, so a couple of audiobooks are also lined up. The plan is to head south to the Gulf coast, then westward to New Orleans, loiter a bit, head to Oxford, and then home. Outside of picking out a few potential restaurants and arranging the hotels, planning has been pretty minimal, which suits both of us just fine. Loosely-structured slowness is the point after the absolute insanity of the last few months.

I am still unpacking the treasures of the class on desert spirituality, which I just wrapped up. My copies of Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences are now heavily marked up. Great stuff and certain to be fruitful in the years to come.

Currently reading: St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns On Paradise by St. Ephrem 📚 #books #catholic #theology

Currently reading: El Aleph / The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges 📚 I absolutely loved Ficciones and am looking forward to savoring this one, too.

Still the Sears Tower, no matter what.

I think these are fruit sets on the pawpaw tree. I found a few others too. Here’s hoping they survive!

Charlotte

Anole

Currently reading: Cien años de soledad / One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez 📚

Currently reading: Introducción al cristianismo: Lecciones sobre el credo apostólico by Benedicto XVI 📚

My Carmelite deep-dive continues with The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila Vol 2 by Saint Teresa (of Avila) 📚

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

— Henry Beston, The Outermost House

Currently reading: The Carmelite Way: An Ancient Path for Today’s Pilgrim by John Welch OCarm 📚

Here’s a nifty fact for you: the Catholic diocese of Orlando includes the moon.

Why? The diocese of Orlando includes Cape Canaveral, and the 1917 code of canon law gives him pastoral responsibility over any lands ‘discovered’ from that point. OTOH, a claim can be made that the military ordinariate has responsibility instead, but I’ll let the canon jurists sort that one out.

Currently reading: Carmelite Spirituality in the Teresian Tradition by Paul-Marie of the Cross 📚

Pollo borracho, or “drunken chicken.” I think every country has a version of this. Black beans and rice on the side. 🇨🇺

Would you like to hear what happens when AI versions of Werner Herzog and Slavoj Zizek converse? Of course you would! https://infiniteconversation.com/

Today I learned how to have 2 apps open at once on an iPad. Probably old news for everyone else, but fairly mind blowing for me. 🙃

First week in my attempt to go paperless for classwork. Marking up docs and articles in Zotero has been flawless and I’ve been impressed with the OCR in the Nebo app for note-taking during lectures. I have the Obsidian integration working at home but am not syncing vaults so I can’t get to my notes remotely. I found some instructions for syncing to a local git repo, which I could host on the NAS. As I’m always connected to my home network for Pi-hole, this should work a treat. I just need another few hours in the day. :/

Currently reading: Carmelite Spirituality by Cardinal Anders Arborelius 📚

Pawpaw

Cambridge MA

Trying something new: feijoada, a black bean stew with pork and beef. It’s smells ridiculously good.

Is your library fully equipped?

Currently reading: The Trinity (Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century) by Saint Augustine 📚

Boreal chorus frog, according to Seek. Also showing a bit outside its normal range.

Pivoting between two piles of reading this evening: Origen on martyrdom to one side; articles/sources for a paper on Augustine’s De Trinitate to the other. So anyway, where’s the nearest desert?

Today was a strong-cocktail-before-dinner sort of day. This is a Boulevardier, which is basically a Negroni with bourbon. Dinner is a cassoulet of Italian sausage, gnocchi, and copious amounts of the garlic we harvested.

Tonight’s food pic is an Asian-style mushroom omelet, also from Milk Street. There’s supposed to be some green in there but we’re out of scallions and cilantro. :/

I should probably credit the website - both of these were generated by Stable Diffusion.

One more bit of AI-artwork in honor of St. Meinrad Archabbey. I also thought these turned out beautiful.

AI-generated artwork is occasionally amazing stuff.

How much fun is a mobile in a math classroom? Too much! Too much fun! Beautiful artwork from #AtomicMobiles

Having some fun in the kitchen as I’ve recently taken on main dinner duties. This is harira, a Moroccan beef and chickpea stew. The recipe was in the recent issue of Milk Street.

What a bunch we are! Beautiful Mass and an important step along this path. Can’t do it without the support of our families.

Breaking retreat silence to ask for your prayers - for me and all of the other men here with me likewise preparing for the Rite of Candidacy tomorrow!

Currently reading: Citizenship Papers by Wendell Berry 📚

Hackberry Emperor

Currently reading: Understanding the Diaconate: Historical, Theological, and Sociological Foundations by W. Shawn McKnight 📚

It’s been awhile but we’re getting back in the saddle tomorrow!

These pork shoulders about 5 hours in; probably about halfway there.

Enjoying a short summer break in classes before things pick up again in late August. There'll be a retreat that ends with our candidacy Mass, then we're back in the thick of it the weekend after. The shift from aspirant to candidate signals an end to the period of discernment even as we begin more intense study and practicums.

Accordingly, the booklists have landed, and here's what's on tap. First up is Early Church History, which I'll be doing online through most of the Fall:

• The Confessions, St. Augustine
• Early Christian Writings
• The Early Church, Chadwick
• On The Incarnation, St. Athanasius
• The Life of Antony and Letter to Marcellinus, St. Athanasius
• Origen's basic writings
  

The in-person semester starts with Ministry of Deacon:

• The Deacon at Mass, Ditewig
• Theology of the Diaconate, Cummings, et al
• The Deacon Reader, Keating
  

Neither of these lists includes the raft of articles and PDFs that have also been posted. For myself, I'm forcing myself into some downtime: catching up on some magazines, occasional video games (these days that means Vampire Survivors and Factorio), and I may even dust off the radio kit. 

Mystagogy has wrapped up, so I'm going to pivot our neophytes into an 8-week bible study, portions of which we used when I was in class a couple of weeks ago. We tried to launch some small groups a few years ago, but Covid put an end to them about 2 weeks in. We've been trying to emphasize intentional discipleship these last few months. My prayer is that this group lectio will help us all to draw closer to Jesus, which is the essential prerequisite for...well, for basically everything else we do.

Red Spotted Admiral

Currently reading: Ven Espíritu Creador: Meditaciones sobre el Veni Creator Prólogo de José Cardenal Ratzinger (Mística y Místicos) (Spanish Edition) by Raniero Cantalamesa 📚

Currently reading: The History of Black Catholics in the United States by Cyprian Davis 📚

Currently reading: On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Restoring God’s Vision of Race and Discipleship by Fr. Josh Johnson 📚

Currently reading: From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age by University of Mary 📚

Class is going well; we're covering a lot of ground but it's a small group (7 folks total), and Fr. Josh is a very engaging teacher. Having picked up a bit of SMA merch, I'll need to swear off any more visits to the bookstore. The to-read pile is fairly well set for the next few months. The gift shop, which is elsewhere (and too far to walk in this heat), is another matter. Will try to roll by there on the way out of town.

St. Meinrad Archabbey Church. Here for the week.

Currently reading: Tu palabra me da vida by Raniero Cantalamessa 📚

Just finished the last class of the year - a two-month session on the Old Testament. The teacher was great and I think a lot of us came away with our heads spinning from all the new material.  I'm heading up to St. Meinrad's in a couple of weeks for a  one-week intensive course called Ministry in a Multicultural Context, taught by Fr. Josh Johnson. Maybe it's just the Baader-Meinhof effect, but all of a sudden I'm seeing him pop up all over my various feeds. His assigned readings are Forming Intentional Disciples by Sherry Weddell, Mother Teresa's  Secret Fire by Joseph Langford, and some articles about his work down in Baton Rouge. I'm almost done with the Langford book and it's been great.  Sherry Weddell's book is a repeat for me - I read it years ago on the Kindle and really liked it. I bought a hard copy that I could mark up and underline.

It's looking like we'll get July off. There's a retreat scheduled for us in August, and it'll end with a Candidacy Mass, marking the formal change from aspirants to candidates. Classes resume directly afterward: Ministry of Deacon (in person) with Early Church History  (online). The syllabus is showing a lot of New Testament stuff for the upcoming year: the Epistles, Synoptics, and a section on the Johannine literature. We'll be closing out with Ecclesiology and Sacraments.

All the kids are out of school, so things are feeling a little more relaxed around the house. Many of the college kids are doing summer courses, as is my wife, who is working through her own post-graduate work - an M.Ed. She's also returning to the classroom this fall, teaching middle-school math at our parish school, and will probably start preparing for that in a month or so.

I've decided not to stress about the vegetable garden. It's very weedy but the tomatoes are still growing and the garlic's about ready to harvest. Blackberries will be coming in soon and the grapevines are going crazy. Crossing my fingers that we'll see some figs this year.  The long game of fruit trees (and perennials generally) seems to be suiting my temperament and bandwidth lately.

Grilled paella - one of our go-tos when we’re feeding a crowd.

Currently reading: The Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph B. Soloveitchik 📚

Gray ratsnake. One of the kids spotted it the other day and I’ve been trying to catch a look at it since for a positive ID.

Muscadines are really taking off this year. This is ‘Triumph;’ we also have a ‘Tara Gold’ that’s doing well.

Pitcher’s Stitchwort

Just got the email that Emergence Vol. 3 is available for pre-order! Pre-ordered! Such great work and beautifully produced too.

Currently reading: The Institutes, translated and annotated by Boniface Ramsey by St. John Cassian 📚

So I’ve ventured back into the Fediverse after some time away. Pros/cons about enabling the ActivityPub stuff for Micro.blog? I like the idea of integration/crossposting but want to know if I’m unleashing a hamster avalanche first.

Kitchen is out of commission while some work is being done so I'm using the green egg as an oven tonight.  Trying to embrace a paleolithic outlook with respect to dinner time, which is to say that it'll be done when it's done. Hungry now? Go forage for grubs.

When you cannot see clearly and openly whether the sin is
deadly, you must not pass judgment in your mind, but be concerned
only about my will for that person. And if you do see it, you
must respond not with judgment, but with holy compassion,
for if you act this way your spirit will not be scandalized either
in me or in your neighbors. For you cast contempt on your neighbors
when you pay attention to their ill will toward you rather than
my will for them.

Common Star-Of-Bethlehem

Welcome back, peonies

New strawberry patch!

Two pollinators at once

Currently reading: The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World by Desmond Tutu 📚

Just finished another paper that will close out my online class, clearing the decks to start the preparatory reading for this month's OT course. 

It was a good one, too. Our assigned readings generally followed the pattern of the Apostle's Creed and ranged all over the place, including a fair amount of modern stuff: Bernard Lonergan, Frederick Crowe, Desmond and Mpho Tutu, René Girard, and more. Our instructor (John Dadosky) included his own work as well. I'll be chewing on a lot of these for years to come, I think.

Currently reading: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard 📚

Currently reading: Work by Louisa May Alcott 📚

7-year-old: I have a lot of reading to do.

Me: Same, brother. Same. The reading doesn’t stop until we die.

7-year-old: (pause) There aren’t that many Magic Treehouse Books.

“Where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love.”

— St. John of the Cross

Currently reading: Jane Eyre (Enriched Classics) by Charlotte Bronte 📚 This one’s long overdue for me and has been sitting on the one-of-the-kids-had-this-for-school shelf. Starting it right before bed was a mistake; I got pulled in immediately.

When you fast, see the fasting of others. If you want God to know that you are hungry, know that another is hungry. If you hope for mercy, show mercy. If you look for kindness, show kindness. If you want to receive, give. If you ask for yourself what you deny to others, your asking is a mockery.

Christopher Alexander, a towering figure in architecture and urbanism—one of the biggest influences on the New Urbanism movement—died on Thursday, March 17, after a long illness, it was reported by Michael Mehaffy, a long-time collaborator and protege. Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time.

Christopher Alexander, 1936 - 2018

(h/t MetaFilter)

In him the Old Testament finds its fitting close. He brought the noble line of patriarchs and prophets to its promised fulfillment. What the divine goodness had offered as a promise to them, he held in his arms...Remember us, Saint Joseph, and plead for us to your foster-child. Ask your most holy bride to look kindly upon us, since she is the mother of him who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns eternally. Amen.

— St. Bernadine of Siena, Office of Readings, Solemnity of Joseph, Husband of Mary.

Currently reading: St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns On Paradise by St. Ephrem 📚

Latest paper for Foundations is nearly in the can: revisions, a run-through with grammarly, more revisions. I think it’s about done. This three-classes-at-a-time bit is crazy-making.

Currently reading: In the First Circle by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn 📚 It always pays to ask co-workers what they are reading! Just got this and can’t wait to start.

Radio nerd aside: this Twitter thread is bananas.

TL;DR: lots of the Russian military is communicating in the clear and SDRs around the world are listening and recording it all.

“Teach us to be loving not only in great and exceptional moments, but above all in the ordinary moments of life.

Lord, give us your Holy Spirit. “

— Intercession of Lauds, Ash Wednesday

Currently reading: Fundamental Theology (Sacra Doctrina) by Guy Mansini 📚

This came up in class this weekend and I’ll be using it in parallel with the required texts, though mostly for my own edification. The author’s at St. Meinrad to boot!

Currently reading: Idylls of the King (Penguin Classics) by Alfred Tennyson 📚

Not sure what I was expecting out of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but given its famous opening line, I guess the plot went the only way it could. This book (and the last) happens from me looking at our bookshelf and saying, huh - I didn't know we had this. I'm still not entirely sure where we got some of these. I think after this, I'll look for something on the lighter side. 

“Be glad then that you are overwhelmed, and do not be saddened because he has overcome you. A thirsty man is happy when he is drinking, and he is not depressed because he cannot exhaust the spring. So let this spring satisfy your thirst, and not your thirst the spring…Be thankful then for what you have received and do not be saddened at all that such an abundance still remains.”

— St. Ephrem the Syrian, deacon

This was in the Office of Readings for Sunday - the whole piece, excerpted from a commentary on the Diatessaron, is worth reading and comes at a particularly good time for me (simultaneously thirsty and a little overwhelmed).

“When I notice something wrong in my brother that cannot be corrected - either because it is inevitable or because it comes from some weakness of his in body or character - why do I not bear it patiently and offer my willing sympathy? As scripture says, their children will be carried on their shoulders and comforted on their laps. Could it be because there is a lack in me, a lack of that which bears all things and is patient enough to take up the burden, a lack of the will to love?”

— Blessed Isaac of Stella, Abbot

Still working through the Tolstoy collection. So far The Cossacks is my favorite, followed closely by Family Happiness and The Death of Ivan Ilych. I finished The Devil last night and am still chewing on it. Two endings are included, both terrible, and I’m not sure which is the less terrible.

Draft of one paper (Liturgy!) is done. Will sleep on it, review/edit it tomorrow, and submit Monday-ish. Most of this week's reading for the online class (Creed!) is also done; one more article to get through plus a couple of YT lectures. On deck: readings and essays for the upcoming class (Fundamentals!) at the end of the month. #wharrgarbl

Current state: I have to write a paper for a class that just ended, start the reading assignments for a course beginning in a few weeks, and keep up with the ongoing readings/reflections for an online class that commenced this week.  My head so full. 

“And suddenly he was overcome by such a strange feeling of causeless joy and of love for everything that from an old habit of his childhood he began crossing himself and thanking someone.”

— Tolstoy, The Cossacks

Facebook, said the director of diocesan media, is where the people still are.

So after this latest formation weekend, I installed FB Purity, gritted my teeth, and logged back in after a nine year hiatus. Not much seems to have changed and the plug-in seems to clear away nearly all of the most annoying UI stuff.

I intend to use it like Twitter - follow a few things I’m interested in (church stuff, duh) and mostly lurk/listen.

A little more nerd stuff - I've fallen down the Home Assistant rabbit-hole. Not really interested in the automation aspects as much as having One Place to See Everything. I've been eyeballing it for a while but figured it would have to wait until Raspberry Pis were available again at reasonable prices. Then I saw that there was a Docker image available! Our NAS will run Docker, so fifteen minutes later I had it up and running. A couple of days later I've got what few IoT things we have all discovered and dashboarded. In the process, I wanted to re-install OpenVPN but decided to give Wireguard a try. After a bit of flailing - I had ignored the 'you should reboot' installation message and wasn't actually using the updated kernel - it's up and running beautifully. It's fast, easy to add new clients, and I can set it for on-demand activation whenever I'm off the local wifi network.

Currently reading: Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy 📚

Found it on one of our bookshelves and we have no idea how it wound up there.

Spent most of Sunday and Monday installing a new ceiling fan. Difficulty level: 16' ceiling. This required two (2) runs to Home Depot to rent a 14' step-ladder and truck to haul it and an extended facetime call with a master electrician friend of mine for some Q&A. Managed it all without serious injury or breaking anything, so I'll call it a win.

In all of the bouncing of the room circuit, the Raspberry Pi bit the dust, or at least its sdcard did. Found a larger card and reflashed it so we’re back in the adblocking business. Oh and amidst all this, one of the garage doors went all haywire and a guy had to come out and basically re-set a bunch of things. So we start the (short) week with everything more or less working again. The sun’s out and the weekend’s snow and ice are, again, melting quickly.

We finished up season 4 of Fargo and season 6 of The Expanse, so we decided to give Peaky Blinders a try. One episode in and we're sufficiently intrigued. I do have to say that we got a good laugh by Netflix's content warning when it started: "Language, Nudity, Gore, Smoking."

We breathlessly intoned "...and smoking!" to each other as things got underway.

Someone on Metafilter just referred to NFTs as “Dunning Krugerands” and I don’t think I’ll read anything better this whole day.

Today’s Wordle needs to be kicked to the curb. There needs to be an indicator of some kind, if you know what I mean.

The retreat for this weekend was canceled. The priest set to lead it came down with Covid, as did several of the staff at the retreat house. There’s a fair bit of noise around here at the moment about another snowpocalypse this weekend, so perhaps it’s just as well. The retreat center is isolated and beautiful, but probably not the best place to be if the roads start getting tricky.

I may look ahead and try to do something in the late summer or early fall. In the meanwhile, prayers for a speedy recovery to all, for the peace, strength, and patience of caregivers, and an end to this pandemic.

A sunny 40 degrees today and I took a few minutes to uproot an apple tree which finally gave up the ghost. Then I did a bit of pruning on another and ended up dressing the pears and sour cherries too. The garlic seems to have come through the recent snowiness, which is nice. I’d like to add 1 or 2 more pears to go with the Keiffer and Bartlett - probably Bosc and/or Anjou.

Currently reading: The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger 📚

A heavy snowfall was nice, but nicer still is listening to it all melt at once.

Just a quick little board game that the kids have underway…

“A certain philosopher asked St. Anthony: Father, how can you be so happy when you are deprived of the consolation of books? Anthony replied: My book, O philosopher, is the nature of created things and any time I want to read the words of God, the book is ever before me.”

We are perhaps too talkative, too activistic, in our conception of the Christian life. Our service of God and of the Church does not consist only in talking and doing. It can also consist in periods of silence, listening, waiting. Perhaps it is very important, in our era of violence and unrest, to rediscover meditation, silent inner unitive prayer, and creative Christian silence.

— Thomas Merton, "Creative Silence"

This sense of separation from God and from one another, this profound ignorance of our innermost depths, presents a singularly convincing case. This is the human condition, and we have all eaten of its fruit. But this is a lie. It is a lie spun largely out of inner noise and mental clutter. It is the inner video that plays again and again and again and steals our attention so that we overlook the simplest of truths: we are already one with God. The Christian contemplative tradition addresses this very problem by exposing the lie and introducing stillness to the mental chatter.

Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land

I decided to splurge on a new keyboard for the office and opted for a mechanical one to replace the janky one I’d been using for a few years, and which I think I found someplace. Oddly enough, the USB model gave me all sorts of issues. Logitech does not officially support Linux, and I fought it for a couple of hours before exchanging it for a Bluetooth model which…just sort of worked straight out of the box. Go figure.

The difference is simply amazing. If you do any amount of typing on a regular basis, I urge you to give one a try. I was going to just order one online but really wanted to feel the thing in action so I limited myself to what I could test-drive at the local big-box electronics store. Friend, you will not regret it. Your fingers will thank you!

Very busy around here lately. Among other things, we welcomed our first grandson to the world! Everyone is doing very well, and it's great fun to see all of the new aunts and uncles jumping feet-first into the roles.

This month's formation session is an introduction to spirituality. On deck is liturgy, followed by Foundations (two months), which I assume is an intro to theology proper. The syllabus for this year winds up with Old Testament (another two months), and this looks to conclude the Aspirant year material. I've looked at the next couple of years' worth of classes, and they look to go into considerably more detail. 

The books: Christian Spirituality: Themes from the Tradition, The Pastoral Rule of St. Gregory the Great, and Into the Silent Land. There are times that I feel like I'm threading two needles at once. First - how can I better understand (and develop) my own spirituality? The readings (and required reflections) prompt some interesting interrogations of my own practices and routines, especially around spirituality in terms of community. It is interesting to see that I've scratched my way towards some of these things already.

Secondly, how will I communicate these things to others? I imagine the first thing will be to extricate notions of spirituality, meditation, and the like from the culture and recast them in terms of the Christian life. For one, these are methods that are not ends in themselves. If love for neighbor has not increased, the time and effort have been wasted. The Desert Fathers knew this and preached extensively on the subject. Regarding fasting, for example, we read in the Institutes. Cassian asks why the monks they were visiting have dispensed with their fasting during their visit. An elder replies:

"Fasting is ever with me, but since I am soon going to send you on your way I shall not always be able to keep you with me. And fasting, as beneficial and necessary as it may be, is nonetheless a gift that is voluntarily offered, whereas the requirements of the commandment demand that the work love be carried out. And so I welcome Christ in you and must refresh him. But when show you on your way I shall be able to make up for the hospitality extended on his behalf by a stricter fast of my own. For 'the children of the bridegroom cannot fast as long as the bridegroom is with them,' but when the bridegroom departs, then they will rightly fast."

(John Cassian, The Institutes, 5.XXIV, trans. Ramsey, 132)

We had an excellent Thanksgiving around here. A few of us filled out last-minute entries for our town's annual 4-miler and we were all grateful that the rain held off until after the event. Dashed home and got the turkey into the grill and spent the rest of the day in the kitchen on clean-up duty for successive waves of food prep.

Today: recovery, last-minute paper edits, and general hanging-around. Tomorrow looks much the same. Hope everyone is doing well. God bless!

Visiting our niece, who is studying engineering, and taking a stroll through the campus bookstore. 👀

Traveling for work for the first time in nearly two years! Feels kinda good tbh.

Day 3 of a formation weekend which has focused on OT exegesis.

Mushrooms, Montgomery Bell State Park

Moths taking off at 6000fps, (h/t metafilter). Did you know moths were so fluffy? Now you do!

Habanero jelly!

All of my radios are croaking! Recently the scanner had to go back to Uniden for a repair that luckily occurred with about three days left on the warranty. Yesterday I re-imaged the Zumspot, and when I went to test it out, I found my TH-D74A doing the flashing-Kenwood-logo behavior. According to Google, this is a sign that the charge controller needs replacement. I dropped an email to Kenwood and got a very quick on the repair process. This one will cost me as the unit is about a year out of warranty. In the meanwhile, I’m going to try to get this $16 DMR HT working with the hotspot.

This weekend we’re off to a retreat, and I’ve been working on getting my last two papers in for our most recent class on church history. I think they’re about ready to be submitted, and I’ll be checking to see which books for the next class - an introduction to scripture - will travel well. I never have as much free time as I expect on retreats, though. We’ll see. In any event, it’ll be nice to get away for a couple of days, and the topics look pretty interesting.

This is another formation weekend - the second part of a church history survey course. Reading assignments are set well in advance, and we've got questions to answer in the weeks leading up to the session. The assignments have largely been source documents of one kind or another, and wrestling with them has been an experience, to say the least. The first portion of the course was early history, which amounts to only about 1,000 years! This weekend will cover the late medieval period, through the Reformation, and into the modern era. Next month's session is on scripture, and the next stack of books is already ready to go.

Sprinkled throughout the marathon lecture sessions, we have time for prayer, Mass, and special sessions focused on specific formation topics. It is all a heck of a lot of fun and also thoroughly exhausting. I had my graduate school interview last week and was officially admitted, so it's all moving along for sure! I should probably buy a t-shirt or something.

My reading list is entirely related to classwork these days. I may be able to get through the latest wave of magazines at some point by Sunday night; we'll have to see.

I've been listening to the Christianity Today podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and it has been great so far. I try to follow cultural-religious trends closely and really appreciate insider's look at the roots of the megachurch movement generally (and the demise of one in particular). So far, it's been equal parts fascinating and heartbreaking.

The garden is mostly done for the year, though you'd never guess by looking at it. It's so full, lush, and overgrown...with weeds.  Only the hot peppers are still yielding heavily. I've dehydrated most of them so far but will probably start turning them into jelly next. I'm anxious for the garlic to arrive, but it looks like it hasn't shipped yet.

Tickseed Beggar-ticks

White-marked Tussock Moth caterpillar

Last step in the formal graduate admissions process is the interview, which has now been scheduled. Almost there!

Passionflower, one of our state symbols

First formation weekend complete. A thousand years or so of church history in a weekend (not including several weeks of preparatory reading and writing). My head is full of stuff.

Fig tree is showing some fruit! It’s grown like crazy this year - easily over 7’ as of today. I expect most of it will die back in the winter but it really seems to like the location. This is a Brown Turkey Fig, btw. 🌱

Took a small break from studying to dip into Emergence Vol 1 and devoured Winds  of Awe and Fear by Nick Hunt:

All my journeys into wild winds began with names. I saw them on a map of Europe made unfamiliar by arrowed lines—swooping north, south, east and west, down rivers, through mountain ranges, over seas and national borders—depicting the seasonal corridors of these great unseen forces that shape the continent and its cultures, often in unexpected ways. The names had a fairy-tale quality—the Bora, the Foehn, the Sirocco, the Helm, the Mistral, the Levanter, the Meltemi, the Kosava, the Lodos, and dozens more—which suggested invisible roads to follow, connecting regions that seemed quite separate in my mind. I wanted to see the effects they had on the landscapes, and the living things, over which they blew.

It's wonderful stuff. I started Fred Bahnson's On The Road with Thomas Merton last night too, but am going to try to stretch that one out a bit.

Beautiful mild afternoon with low humidity here. Chipotle chicken on the grill for tacos. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

I am flexing some essay-writing muscles I haven’t had to use for 30+ years, and this as part of the admissions process. I still have the first reading assignments hovering before me.

We attended the first formal meeting last night in the diaconate formation program. It was great to meet the other men and their wives. Also got a chance to mingle with a class-in-progress and get some of their reflections and reactions. The next few years are going to be really, really interesting. Very excited.

Jumping spiders - new phone does pretty well with macro stuff

Amazing bit of music here: Voodoo Child on a clavinet with a whammy bar. As described! (h/t Metafilter).

We’ve welded together Loki and Lovecraft Country over here. Don’t try to change our minds, it’s too late.

Sunset cumulus, adjusted slightly

📷

Poolside reading

As usual, I overthought this completely.

curl https://micro.blog/micropub -d “h=entry” -d @yourblogpost.md -H “Authorization: Bearer BIGNUMBERHERE”

…does the trick, which is push yourblogpost.md to micro.blog. That will teach me to check the local docs first before ranging all over the Internet. I could conceivably use vim to write a post and then dump the buffer into a simple shellscript containing the curl bits above.

The folks here have made generating auth bearer tokens (BIGNUMBERHERE) a snap, so no need to dig through the Indieweb docs, hack up someone else’s xmlrpc code, or otherwise break a sweat.

For clarity - I’ve been happy with the iOS apps (micro.blog and sunlit), and tend to favor quill.pk3.io for posting. The console nerd in me loves a good old text-only interface.

Is anyone posting to micro.blog with a text editor or IDE-type tool? Before migrating, I used a markdown editor in vscode and pushed updates via git. I sometimes miss the all-cli experience and have been digging around for similar tools. Nothing is jumping out at me so far, though.

Re-reading: The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, OP 📚

It’s Sunday, which means something is going on the grill. Today that thing is paella. We use a grilled paella recipe from The Splendid Table and it hasn’t disappointed yet. Good for a crowd, too.

I have a .edu e-mail address again after 30 years. Also a Moodle account! And the syllabus for my first class!

Right on time, I had a tornado dream. These generally recur during big periods of change. Yep.

Currently reading: Agency by William Gibson 📚

Wild blackberries are coming in strong. We picked a bunch the other day and turned them into muffins. They were very, very good! Just sent the kids out to get some more.

What fun! Thanks, @jean!!

Necessity being the mother of invention and all that, I fired up rtl_433 and a couple of really dirty shell scripts so that I can keep track of what’s going on with the smoker while I’m away from the house.

Currently reading: The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (includes The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle, The Living Flame of Love, Letters, and The Minor Works) by Saint John of the Cross 📚

Someone posted a Spotify playlist that neatly approximates the big AOR station of my Atlanta youth/adolescence. I’ve got that going in the background while the grill’s fired up again. Styx, beer, and barbecue smoke make for a pretty good combination.

These just went on the grill - dry brined overnight, then covered in an apricot glaze. I’m using apple wood to smoke them and the whole mess will wind up in tacos when they’re done. It smells ridiculously good even now.

Three sisters

Currently reading: The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore 📚

Currently reading: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn 📚

Beautiful summer cumulus

Nice! Emergence Magazine vol 1 is back in stock!

✅ Ordered

My seeds came early so I was able to get started on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. The corn is in, so now we wait until it’s about 6” to add the beans and pumpkins in and among them. Very excited to see how things develop.

Oxeye Daisies

Stonecrop

Currently reading: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer 📚

Long Hunter State Park hike

It’s raining today so I’m building the raised beds in the garage. They’ll eventually be moved outside of course. Daisy is here keeping me safe from the rain, FedEx, Amazon, and UPS.

Currently reading: How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea by Gooley, Tristan 📚. Picked this up, along with Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer on a recent road trip which included a stop in Savannah, Georgia. I love hitting indie bookstores when traveling, and find myself gravitating to the nature and regional sections every time. We started an audiobook on the trip and have had to re-borrow it from the library so we can finish it: The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn.

It’s nice to take a break from theology for a bit. We tried one of the Brother Cadfael mysteries (we’re on something of a mystery-genre jag right now) but it was a little tough to follow in audio format. Will definitely be looking into them in hard-copy at some point.

…and the vineyard (lol) is also done for now.

First peony has opened!

Got the grape trellises in. I’ll do the wire tomorrow and maybe plant the pair of vines on Sunday. It’s going to have to wait until after I get back from an overnight camping thing with the youth group. On deck after that are the elderberry cuttings, a replacement climbing rose, and the long-delayed raised-bed rebuild.

Beautiful morning for a 5K. Negative splits, too! I’ll take that any day of the week.

Expanding our orchard! Today we picked up a pair of Arkansas Black apple trees, along with a Cortland for pollination. Also grabbed a Keiffer pear to replace the one we lost a few years ago. Finally, a pair of muscadine grapevines: ‘Tara Bronze’ and ‘Triumph.’

I’ve wanted to try grapes for awhile now, so it’s high time to dive right in. Lot of holes to dig tomorrow.

Currently reading: Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri 📚

First pawpaw blooms!

Swarm trap

Top-bar hive

For the perpetual excuse
of Adam for his fall — “My little Eve,
God bless her, did beguile me and I ate,”
For his insistence on a nurse,
All service, breast, and lap, for giving Fate
Feminine gender to make girls believe
That they can save him, you must now atone,
Joseph, in silence and alone;
While she who loves you makes you shake with fright,
Your love for her must tuck you up and kiss good night.
— Auden

Here’s how we can be more like St. Joseph, whose solemnity we celebrate today.

• Pray a lot.
• Don’t say much.
• Go where you’re told — and stay there until told otherwise.

Books: dug out a collection of short stories I haven’t touched since college - Stories of the Old South, edited by Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway, SJ. Last night I read “Athénaïse” by Kate Chopin. I could have sworn I read The Awakening at some point along the way, but I’m looking at plot summaries and I’m either mistaken or I’ve forgotten every bit of it. In either case, I want to read more of her work.

Still working my way through Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth and trying to get caught up on all the magazines which have landed.

Currently reading: Stories of the Old South by Ben Forkner 📚

…which means ‘Sent’

Come, let us reason together.

Tonight I teach the contraception and IVF session for RCIA. Should be a good one. We did it last year as a standalone session for the first time since there's so much to cover. The Q&A portion at the end was interesting, to say the least. I anticipate the same tonight.

In this big family, Daft Punk’s music was something that every single person could get behind and feel good about. Random Access Memories is in perennial rotation here and probably will be forever. Thanks for all the great work and good luck in whatever comes next.

Currently reading: Photographically Speaking by David duChemin 📚

I don’t think I’ve heard anything as lovely as the sound of all this snow and ice melting all around me. The gutters sound like it’s pouring down rain.

Beware the pogonip!

The bicolored redwings I saw yesterday are much more likely be females of the 'standard' redwinged blackbirds. Kudos to my wife for pointing this out.  

Dusting the camera off made me want to go and recover all of my older bird photos. I had hosted them on flickr years ago, but pulled them down. Though I unfortunately seem to have lost the archive of my flickr albums somewhere along the way, I still have all the original RAW files, so I need to do a bit cleanup and editing, then invest in a better local backup solution. Probably time to pull the trigger on the NAS I've been considering for awhile.

In the meanwhile, here's a Trogon (T. violaceous  or T. ramonianus, not sure on the sex):

I took this quite a few years ago in Costa Rica. It's one of my favorite bird pics - so colorful! Right now all I can imagine is how warm it is there. :|

Been eyeballing the bird feeder and have spotted some bicolor red-winged blackbirds. Sibley says we’re not really their normal range but there they are. Nice looking birds! If I can find an SD card I’ll try to get a photo with the good camera.

No barbecuing today I guess.

View from inside…this is my amateur radio antenna.

“The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers…. In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

— Hillaire Belloc

Elderberry cuttings are coming along nicely

Currently reading: John Cassian, The institutes by John Cassian 📚

Tonight’s tasting selections…

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Phil 4:8

Today is the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle. That verse from the Letter to the Philippians spoke deeply to me during the long run-up before my eventual return to the Church about twenty years ago. I had it pinned to my cubicle wall at work and eventually took St. Paul's name for my Confirmation at the Easter Vigil. I can't say I identified much with Saul. I had no faith to speak of, never mind feeling strongly enough about anything to actively fight against others. The Damascus road, though, is a different matter.

I, too, can point to a particular moment and place where the presence of God was made plain and demanded a response. I learned about strength perfected in weakness, and the more excellent way. Saint Paul has haunted my spiritual life since then - sometimes in clarity, other times as something of an enigma, seen in a mirror darkly.

I've been thinking a bit about the HBO series The Leftovers recently, probably because part of the soundtrack came up in a Spotify playlist I use when I'm working. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Beneath the weird-fiction/sci-fi/supernatural elements of the premise is a profound meditation on grief in response to inexplicable, massive loss. The Departure, as it's called in the show, stands in for any number of similar events: Sandy Hook, 9/11, and so on. People seem to either love the show or hate it, and my feelings ought to be apparent.

It occurred to me this morning, though, that if Damon Lindelof were making The Leftovers today, he'd need to account for the large numbers of Departure-deniers: the ones running around claiming that those who lost loved ones were crisis actors, and that the Departed were all somehow involved in a plot masterminded by...someone. In-show, there'd have to be a persistent dismissal of the whole thing as fake and frankly I think this group would be more evident (and pernicious) than The Guilty Remnant, a nihilistic cult that forms in the post-event period.

I never understood the QAnon stuff. For me, big conspiracies tend to assume a level of competence that's usually not in evidence, and when actual conspiracies do come to light, things tend to change pretty quickly - hearings are held, arrests made, and so on. The bigger the secret and the bigger the crowd involved, the less likely everyone's going to keep their mouths shut. I mean, let's set aside the actual substance of the Q theory, which is too much to go into here, and focus solely on its first principle.

Compartmentalization works. No one has a full picture, and those who do have it are few and far between, making it unlikely that they could leak and remain hidden for very long. People get caught relaying secrets all the time, and some of these ought to know best how to do it. Moreover, they're passed things along to one or maybe two people, not broadcast them to the world on the Internet. They're caught all the same. The idea that these disclosures proceed from some highly-placed government source - and continue to do so over time without identification or arrest and prosecution, well, it just doesn't fly, sorry.

For a long time it smelled an awful lot like Gnosticism to me. Certainly it has a lot in common: deliverance via secret knowledge, unavailable to all but the initiates. Or perhaps I'm making too much of one and selling short the other. In either case, QAnon occupied a peculiar spot in people's lives. What will take its place now?

I'm thinking especially for the people who, having gone all-in with it, are now finding themselves disillusioned. Some of them have sundered ties with families and friends, finding comfort with their fellow-travelers online and occasionally in-person. They sought to explain the world and everything in it, and now what? Prophecies failing to deliver, goalposts moved, just be a little more patient. When you have trusted in something completely, and it fails just as completely, it feels very much like the earth has dropped away from your feet: disorienting and terrifying. Things that made sense before are now turned inside-out. Everything has to be re-interrogated, and perhaps without much help from others. If you're lucky, you have support around you while you figure things out. If not, maybe you go grabbing for the next available thing that looks solid.

What I hope and pray for is that they find an easy return and an open door. I could never take it very seriously - I know too many people who work in government. But I recognize that many people did (and still do). And having walked down a long (and weird) road, the best thing we might be able to do is make sure that the return path is as clear as possible. I also think of the families that have been divided over this, by the very real losses they feel over someone who has taken this path, and pray for their healing and restoration.

May the ones who are leaving this - or have already left - and now find themselves struggling encounter patience and charity, instead of the laughter and derision they might fear.  We could do a lot worse than offer a way off the island to which some of our neighbors and loved ones have collectively paddled out.  

Strive to preserve your heart in peace and let no event of this world disturb it. Reflect that all must come to an end. Keep spiritually tranquil in a loving attentiveness to God and when it is necessary to speak, let it be with the same calm and peace.

— St. John of the Cross

Currently reading: Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton 📚

On deck: The Holy Week volume of Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth and Cassian’s Institutes. It’s beginning to feel a lot like Lent.

A list of text-heavy sites I visit regularly:

• Text-only NPR
• Drudge
  
• Readspike news aggregator
• Christian Science Monitor Text Edition
• CNN's 'Lite' page
• AP News
• MetaFilter
• HackerNews
• RISKS-L
  
• The Rule of St. Benedict
• Universalis
• wttr.in

The National Weather Service has text-only forecast pages, like this one, which you can adjust for your own area. You can go deep into their weather nerd stuff, too.

There are also some great lectionary resources. The Dominican House of Studies in DC had some wonderful patristic resources online but had to take them down because of copyright concerns. They helpfully point to places like this one, though. Here's the Catena Aurea as well.

A reminder: social media is not the Internet, and you can use the latter without the former pretty effectively. I wonder how long before a sort of 'primitive/retro Internet' movement takes root and spreads among the younger crowd - text-heavy, low-latency, self-curated/owned, free of the exquisitely-tuned engagement and telemetry.

Sometimes I get nostalgic and revert back to pure-text in as many places as I can. Linux makes this a little bit easier. Only the email bit was a little tricky to perfect. Here is the list of apps:

• elinks for text-only browsing
• newsboat for RSS
• neomutt for email (I use a commercial email provider and a tool called offlineimap to transfer mail)
  
• weechat, principally for IRC, but it also has plugins for Slack and Jabber.
  

If you're wondering how much of the web is useful without graphics, javascript and all the rest, the answer is: a lot more than you'd think. Many sites have "lite" versions for bandwidth constrained users. Other sites render pretty well, but to be sure, places like Amazon still need a modern browser.

Now I'm off to see if there's a way to update micro.blog with vim, vscode, or atom...

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are...

- W.H. Auden

I've started The Moviegoer, and am enjoying it so far. Fulfilled in Christ turned out to be more of a reference book than something you'd read straight through. The introductory materials were good and I'm sure I'll be reaching for it a lot in the future.

The light outside is changing as the days lengthen, which is nice. The season has been mild so far, but we usually don't get our coldest days until about now. The seed catalogs came a couple of weeks ago (on the solstice, if you can believe it) and we sketched out some timelines for starting some seeds, which we've never done before. Our last-frost date is in mid-April, so there's still some time for planning and repairs of a couple of the raised beds.

Is it just me, or is half the fun of a new book finding the next things to read in the footnotes?

Happy New Year, everyone!

Last few books of 2020 are arriving today: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Merton on contemplative prayer, and Fr. Devin Roza’s Fulfilled in Christ, which explores typology in the sacraments. For Christmas I also received the third volume of Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth, and will be saving it for Lent.

To fill the gaps I’ve been dipping back into Joseph Conrad. At some point in the past, I shelled out a few bucks for his complete works on the Kindle so he’s something of a go-to: The Shadow-Line, which was pretty good and The Rover, which I’ve just started.

All told, my vacation has been the holidays, which were good (and continuing as I write), an extended communications blackout thanks to the bomb on Christmas morning, a fair amount of ham radio tinkering, and a new game called Factorio, which I’ve needed to strictly ration.

I also just turned 50; the receiving line forms to the left please.

Thanks be to God, we are all well. I pray the same for you and yours.

Quite a temperature drop over 24 hours…

Currently reading: Learning the Virtues: That Lead You to God by Romano Guardini 📚

Currently reading: Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 📚. So short I’ll have to pace it at 1 chapter/week to stretch it through Advent.

Race day!

The mint has grown back so I guess it’s mojitos in November. The cold will be here for good at some point but until then…

It’s 75 here today so we’re barbecuing and hanging around outside. Winter will get here when it gets here but for now…

Sunny window nap

Currently reading: Compensating the Sales Force, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Designing Winning Sales Reward Programs by Cichelli, David 📚

Here is a very rare post that touches ever-so-briefly on work.

I don’t do a ton of business-related reading. When I do, it’s usually because some book is making the rounds in the C-suite of my employer and reading what they’re reading has been helpful in my role, which is nominally manager but perhaps more accurately described as contextualizer-in-chief.

In any event, the start of a new fiscal year comes with the annual adjustments to the sales compensation plan (i.e., quotas, bonuses, spiffs, and the like). These might seem like a minor thing to the rest of the company but I’m here to tell you that they are of nearly existential importance to the sales team, of which I am a part.

I recently got very interested in how compensation plans are developed, so here we are.

Low blow, Amazon. Low blow. Holiday wishbook? Chock full of toys?

Pickling and fermenting

Running haunt

Waxing gibbous cat

Two briskets rubbed down and ready for the smoker tomorrow. Mesquite at the ready. Weather looking good. All systems go.

We just found a baby snapping turtle on our back patio. This was a surprise, since there aren’t any rivers or lakes within small-turtle-schlepping distance. Maybe he was dropped by a bird. He’s safe in a bucket and will be trundled to the river a few miles away.

Maxfield Parrish evening

St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church, Eureka Springs, Arkansas

Approaching wall cloud, NW Arkansas

Have you ever seen a pawpaw tree? Now you have. Pawpaws are a fruit tree native to North America and were fairly well-known a generation or so ago. The fruit doesn’t keep for long after it’s picked, so they’ve never been much of a commercial crop. I’ve heard that pawpaws sometimes show up at farmer’s markets. We planted this one a couple of years ago and it seems to be doing pretty well - it’s nearly as tall as I am. Hopefully it will fruit in a year or so but I may need to add a second one. Its principal pollinators are flies, so the blossoms are described as a bit on the stinky side. This one is planted well away from the house.

The fruit is said to be delicious - a cross between mango and banana, with a creamy custard-like texture.

Cicada