Slow Motion Dash

The weather was adequate (ground was wet, but air was still and the temperature about 9°), my body was sluggish but not achey, and my mile came in at 10:39. I notice that I didn’t note Sunday’s run (I was fretful about the sermon for morning Mass); Sunday’s mile was 10:31, so it looks as…

In Winter, Yet…

4°, ‘light’ breezes, 10:34. The good news (if there can be good news about running) is that the knot in my thigh has been receding over the last couple of runs. On the other hand, a mile hasn’t gotten any shorter, and my time hasn’t gotten any better. On yet another hand, I can now…

Memo to Myself

I’ve been working through Paul’s letters with my ordinands in several different courses, and just now it hit me that scholars typically treat Paul’s interpretation of Abraham as a retrospective rationalisation in light of his satori concerning the Torah and ’justification’. That is, they start from the premise that Paul’s breakthrough concerned the importance of…

On Correctness

When I read papers or give presentations about hermeneutics, people always ask me, ‘If you’re right and there is no intrinsic “meaning” in texts about which to be right or wrong, are all interpretations equal? Aren’t some interpretations just plain wrong? I mean, you talk about The da Vinci Code all the time as an…

Ice Ice Old Man

5°, breezy, and drizzle. This will not be fun. OK, to be fair — it wasn’t really drizzling at all. The breeze wasn’t much bother, except that I had to run north on Magdalen Road into a headwind. My body was just still tight and dead, resistant to opening up and running flat out. So…

Truth And Consequences

The pavement in our garden attracts (a) slugs, especially when wet, and (b) curled-up leaves that look like slugs, especially when wet. As a consequence, I spend a lot of my walking time, especially when it is wet, either (a) treading hypercautiously on what turn out to be curled leaves, or (b) treading incautiously on…

A Dash of November

This morning dawns — well, not quite dawn yet — 7° and dry, 93% humidity. I woke up early to allow a bit more warming-up time than I have allotted in weeks past. We will see what happens. Well, not much. I ran 10:51 — much of the mile, my muscles were resisting, and my…