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

Close up of some small oval berries amidst foliage on a pawpaw tree.

Ad cenam agni providi

Well, it’s been a hot minute or two since I last posted anything. Since the last time, we completed the two-month sequence in ecclesiology. I started out lukewarm on the topic but got quite into it by the end. Our next class - the Sacraments - is in a few weeks, and I’ve nearly completed the required reading (Lawrence Feingold’s Touched by Christ: The Sacramental Economy). I also have one of the ‘recommended’ texts on tap (Colman O’Neill’s Meeting Christ in the Sacraments) and will probably dive into that next. All of the books for my summer course are sitting here as well, but the professor hasn’t posted the syllabus yet so they’re sort of on hold.

For fiction reading, I finished Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which I thought was terrific. This started something of a Russian streak, so I read Crime and Punishment next and am determined to actually finish Doctor Zhivago on this go-round. I’m about halfway through it. Not sure what I’ll look at next. A few of us were discussing Graham Greene in class last month, so probably one of his novels. I read The End of the Affair years ago and remember liking it. The Power and the Glory came highly recommended, as was The Heart of the Matter.

Still enjoying Greek, and have added daily practice of reading the day’s Gospel aloud in Spanish as well. A Spanish translation of Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity arrived today, which looks challenging stuff.

Holy Week was busy for us - Palm Sunday, the Chrism Mass on Tuesday, a senior banquet for one of the kids, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil. Just a few moments to catch our breath and bask in the glow of it all. The sun’s out and things are finally drying off a bit. Everything outside is growing like mad. Famliy is mostly health, save for the odd cold bug here and there. The cat has a clean bill of health from a stubborn ear infection. Dog snoozing the sun.

Every day the rooster gets out and parades past my office window. Then I chase him right back into the coop. It’s become something of a routine. He starts to make a run for it as soon as he hears me unlocking the front door.

All is well, all is well. All manner of things are well. I hope the same for you and yours.

οὐκ οἶδα

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.”

— Henry Beston, The Outermost House