Month: June 2024

Two miles this morning, in the second consecutive day warm enough to run without my hoodie. I was making pretty good time till something in my right Achilles tendon tweaked, just a little, but I didn’t force the issue and limped, then walked plainly home. It hasn’t bothered me since, so I suppose I didn’t damage anything. Fruit and coffee, shower, Morning Prayer, then home for a second mug and to begin my working day.

Both yesterday and today — and after having spent more time reading than has been usual — I’ve found the magic aquifer from which issues fluent writing, and I’ve made a significant start (with momentum) for an overdue essay. Take increased reading (for stirring up ideas and remembering how people who write put sentences and paragraphs together), add some sermon composition (for practice in writing short, occasional prose pieces) and my typing fingers, my writing hands have limbered up and resumed the activity that once came so readily to them. If I can just preserve that impetus for another eight pages or so, I’ll be in great shape, and will be free to push on toward the second overdue essay I’m trying to clear this summer. If I can manage that, it’s clear sailing to start composing my book manuscript, the last book I plan on writing and the one I feel the need to get into print before I die or succumb to dotage.

But for the moment, even just my current good start thrills me and reminds me that there’s something worthwhile that I can contribute. It sparks joy, as I believe we’ve been taught to say.

Two miles, coffee and (at home) Morning Prayer, and hard at work grinding and polishing tomorrow’s sermon. It’s raining, which threatens the Abingdon Passion Play, but there’s three hours till the first showing, and a long day ahead before the late show, for the sky and grounds to dry out.

I’m a long-time fan of Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties, which I’m now revisiting for an essay, and I find the standard English translation/edition extremely irritating. Mary Gregor translated it in 1979 in an adequate German/English version (I’d tweak it here or there; I’m particularly frustrated that Gregor renders ein Schriftgelehrt as ‘one versed in Scripture’, missing the Luther Bible’s use of the word for the scribes, Jesus’s antithetical interlocutors), but the typesetting and proofreading are lamentable. Worse still, it has been reprinted and also incorporated into the University of Cambridge Press volume Kant and Rational Religion, which appears to have OCR-ed the previous text and proofed the result carelessly, so that problems in the original are carried over and intensified in the reprints. I tweeted a couple of examples on the Former Bird site, and may move the tweet over to BlueSky too.)

Isn’t it time for a fresh translation? And if one must simply make the Gregor translation an immortal standard, might not a reputable press clean up the typos when they reprint it?

Two miles, fruit and coffee, now it’s time for me to clean up and get ready for Morning Prayer; then time to work on Sunday’s sermon.

Since interest in right-wing US politicians are once again indulging their fixation on imposing their imagined Ten Commandments on schoolchildren — I mean, honestly — (no, ‘honesty’ has nothing to do with it) — I’ll just drop this link to my essay on the unabashed idolatry that constitutes a central element of US political life (especially, though not exclusively, among Republicans).

Two miles, fruit and coffee, clean-up and Morning Prayer, and public-facing coffee ministry at The Missing Bean as I work toward Sunday’s sermon.

In answer to yesterday’s question, two of my four correspondents remembered the incident — which I’m counting as sufficient evidence to assert it as truth. From now on, ‘caught between two thoughts’ is an documented phrase referring to a condition of inattention (whether general inattention or lack of attention to what runs out to be the most important ting). (Edit: Sad Correction. The un-search-able phrase was ‘caught him between two thoughts’; alas, ‘caught between two thoughts’ yields abundant results. I’ll just go sit in the corner and sulk.)

For years — thirty-eight or so years — I’ve had a certain phrase in my head, a phrase for which I get no Google results. It arises from the context of Duke basketball, and the expectation that my mates and I would watch televised games together during our graduate studies in Durham.

One afternoon, or night, we were watching a game (I have the strong sense that it was an ACC game, and almost as strong a sense that it involved Duke) in which a player (it could’ve been Quin Snyder) was operating on the perimeter, the camera following him although he didn’t have the ball. He may have broken toward the paint, or may have been sizing up the defence, when we, the viewers, saw the ball flying into the frame and bouncing off the stalwart, startled young man — at which point the commentator observed, ‘[The ball] caught him between two thoughts.’ In my recollection, we all found this a side-splittingly funny remark, and it became a byword for situations in which someone was caught off guard, especially (in our academic setting) by an unanticipated question or observation.

But in retrospect, I realised that I couldn’t be totally sure about the whole memory; I am, after all, getting older, and the phrase seemed not to have left any trace on the internet. So this afternoon I wrote to my post-grad basketball buddies, to check my recollection with them….

Ran my morning route (mildly frustrated that my new, more ambitious pace hasn’t just become routine for sore muscles), coffee and hot breakfast, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, emails and admin, Staff Meeting, more email, a break for reading and napping, dinner, and shortly the parish marriage prep class for four couples (or fewer, if they don’t show up).

Two frustratingly stiff and short-winded miles; coffee and fruit breakfast; cleaned up and got ready for Morning Prayer, to which I’ll go next. Yesterday I cleared almost all my email, hallelujah, and began reading again — some time spent reading Don Camillo and the Prodigal Son, some time reading Candida Moss’s God’s Ghostwriters, some reading The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. I’m still somewhat shell-shocked from obligatory reading/marking from term-time, but that usually diminishes over a week or so.

Two miles, fruit breakfast and coffee, clean up, go to Morning Prayer — then (I whisper this) my week looks as if I won’t be manically busy. Maybe I’ll even make progress on the two essays on which I’m criminally late…