Submitted my last paper for Johannine Literature, which brings this year’s long sequence on scripture to a close. On deck is Ecclesiology, followed by Sacraments. Each of those will last two months and will bring this semester to a close. I registered today for a summer intensive on Desert Fathers and Mothers and am very much looking forward to it. The prep work for that one starts in May, then I’ll be up at St. Meinrad for a week in June. Hopefully, the weather won’t be as hot as last year. On the other hand, it would be sort of appropriate, given the subject material.
In other news, I’ve been learning a bit of Koine Greek. A couple of my recent instructors both taught directly from Greek NTs and, overcome with a bit of language-envy, I picked up a grammar, workbook, and NA28 English/Greek New Testament. It’s been great fun so far; basically like learning to read all over again. I’ve also peeked at a few of the classics and if you’re also inclined, I’ll just point out that the Logeion app is free. It comes with several lexicons built-in and integrates well with Attikos, which is also free. It blows my mind that it’s all free, or maybe I’m just easily impressed these days. οὐκ οἶδα, man, I just work here.
More nerdiness: after a long stretch with Cinnamon, I’ve opted to return to i3wm, this time with polybar which I find to be a lot easier to deal with than i3blocks. It looks nicer, too. If none of this means anything to you, don’t worry.
“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.”
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.
Would you like to hear what happens when AI versions of Werner Herzog and Slavoj Zizek converse? Of course you would! https://infiniteconversation.com/
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. :/
I'm still plowing through articles and sources for a paper on St. Augustine's De Trinitate, but I think I've got the basic outline in my head. I had originally glommed on to his analogies (which occupy much of the book's second half), but things get technical very quickly in the secondary sources.
So I've broadened my scope and will (briefly) survey the before-and-after of Trinitarian thought, including the so-called East/West split. I want to answer the question: why does getting the Trinity right matter? Marie LaCugna's assertion that Trinitarian theology's speculative turn in the West has made it largely irrelevant to most Christians has some merit, even if I'm not entirely sure about the rest of her arguments. I've read the Augustine chapter from Thomas Joseph White's recently published The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God and went ahead and ordered the book; it should arrive today.
For completeness, I've also been reading Edmund Hill, Lewis Ayres, Michel Barnes, John Cavadini, William Harmless, Earl Muller, and a host of others. I'm on the fence about trying to include Karl Rahner, but I'm not sure I can - or even should - avoid it. On the other hand, I think I've got a pretty good sample of pre-Nicene thought (the theophanies - Immanent moments - of Novatian, Justin Martyr, and Origen), so I probably owe space to the latter period as well.
So this weekend is some additional digging and hopefully tightening up the bibliography. In the background is another course on the Epistles, for which I owe an essay and additional reading in preparation for our next in-person class.
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. :/
