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.

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.

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.

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: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa Little, Big by John Crowley The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 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]

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been in tech for my entire life. I’m old enough to remember the Apple II rolled into the classroom on a cart for Computer Class. Professionally, I’ve been involved in it long enough to see some technologies reappear under new names, usually during sales presentations. “Workflow” showed up in the late 90s, then slipped off the radar screen long enough to become “Business Rules Engines” a decade or so later, a solution still very much in search of a problem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.