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