All posts in July 2006

In my on-going (some might uncharitably say “obsessive”) concern to articulate the ways that faith and culture, reflective theology and daily life interact, I’m working out some premises of which I’ll try to persuade my students this fall. This morning’s premise concerns the relation of the self to culture, and how that affects the ways…

A very happy birthday to Doc, a sweet guy as well as being one of the most insightful denizens of the internet.

Beauty, truth, excellence are hard; they cut through encrusted bullshit. And if you open your heart to beauty, truth, and excellence, they will not let you off the hook. They will haunt, afflict, beset you. One of the pernicious dimensions of the da Vinci Code phenomenon derives from the extent to which both its conspiratorial…

I don’now if I’d have predicted it, but Jennifer is the next one in the family (after Si and me) to put pixels to blog, with a guest blog column in Guernica, calling attention to the case of Ehren K. Watada, whose conscience will not permit him to participate in an illegal war. Welcome to…

Margaret and Pippa took off this morning for their summer vacation with east-coast family, from which Margaret will fly directly south to begin her next academic year at Duke. Si will be home with me for a few more weeks, but (especially since Si spends so much time at work and away with Laura) the…

As Margaret and I batted ideas around this past weekend, we noted again that so many people show a proclivity to accept claims on the basis of a speaker’s authority, without qualification. We were thinking of a scholar we know of, whom people quote as though his words settled an issue once and for all.…

Somehow, I have lost about a week of work on my James manuscript. I can’t find the relevant file anywhere on my main drive, on my backup drive, in any way, shape, or form. My best guess is that Microsoft Word crashed sometime in the background, and I didn’t notice, and hadn’t saved for a…

Margaret and I had one of our insta-vacations this past weekend (only one day, sadly, but a change is almost as good as a rest, or something) — so I have all sorts of ideas percolating behind my glasses. Rather than rush one to expression, though, I’d like to put in a word for the…

About six years ago, give or take a few days, Beatrice was born. Nine or eleven weeks later, Margaret brought her home. Yesterday was something vaguely like her sixth birthday. She has aged a little, but has not lost her puppy-cuteness. Now, on her most recent trip, the vet noticed that someone has been giving…

David Knight: friend, Seabury alum, Katrina survivor, and deputy to General Convention reflects on the Episcopal General Convention 2006 in two posts. Thomas Knoll writes to ask, “How many students would you need to make it worth your time to develop a course on Beautiful Evidence? In other words, if I found 5, 10, 15,…

I’m a dreadful old curmudgeon about “top music” lists; I (naturally) prefer music I know well to music that I haven’t heard often enough to appreciate, and I don’t listen to very much brand-new music these days (and never quite caught the hip-hop bug). So my sense that most “top” lists favor very recent selections…

This morning ends the Ekklesia Project gathering for the year, with Joel Shuman speaking with us about the benefit of reading Dante’s Divine Comedy for imagining the Kingdom of God. By reading the poem in its entirety, Joel learned to face some challenges he had previously overlooked. The poem constitutes a very long parable to…