Month: June 2024

Two miles, coffee and fruit, then off to drop the dogs with their overnight sitters, then to Exeter for an ordination.

Two miles (including a morning stop-off at the office, since I forgot to check the phone message machine on which we still rely), coffee, and will make a hot breakfast in a few minutes.

Yesterday we devoted much of our time to working toward making the spare rooms viable for visitors beginning next week: moving books hither and yon, taking boxes out for recycling, making sure that we have the right toys and food for the right visitors….

Two miles at a decent pace, fruit and coffee, shower, Morning Prayer, some work, a trip to Waitrose, lunch, some housework… and it’s Friday, why should I have to do more?

Didn’t do much writing yesterday, though I had plenty of other things to accomplish. Today I ran (15° and breezy and distinctly humid), coffee and fruit for breakfast, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, came in to town for my second cup at Throwing Buns, and hence to the library (cos it started a very fine rain while we were sat outdoors). I’ll try to extract another page or so today…

Two hot miles, hot coffee, hot breakfast, hot shower, then to Morning Prayer (usual temperature), Wednesday Mass, and home (weary) for the afternoon. Rest, then back to the Parish Centre for marriage prep.

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…

Another morning, another two miles, another fruit breakfast with coffee, another shower, another Mass and sermon, then another Confirmation Class, and just finished writing another column for the parish newspaper. The sermon went down well; Confirmation Class was fine; and now it’s time for reading and perhaps a nap.

I was up late last night for the Finalists’ Dinner at Oriel, so I was not inclined to run this morning. On the other hand, I made my way downstairs in good time, and was drawn out by the gorgeous morning light, and (knowing that dark skies and rain were due for the afternoon) mostly walked, ran for very short spells, and ticked my two-mile box. Coffee, hot breakfast, and I’ll need to write a couple of pieces for church.

Last night marked, as usual, a splendid occasion for visiting with students with whom I greatly enjoyed working. We shared Finalists’ Dinner with Philosophy (Phil/The, to be exact) and, I think, Classics, and one of the philosophers observed to me that Oriel seemed to them to build community within the college distinctly more deeply and thoroughly than other colleges. That goes double for Oriel theologians; my philosophical interlocutor didn’t know how hard Bill Wood and Brendan Harris have worked to cultivate, nourish, and preserve the close-knit fabric woven of our students and staff. Floreat Oriel!

Two miles, fruit breakfast, clean up, Morning Prayer, then to Oxford for my last tutorial of the academic year. After lunch, I’ll drift home and prepare for the PCC meeting tonight. Margaret is still home, thank heaven.