Month: March 2025

A second -1° day in a row, and my run felt disappointing. I didn’t feel strong or limber at the start, and I ran out of gas in the last third of a mile; it was all I could do to keep running all the way to our door. At the time, I thought that this was the point of an average; there are highs and lows, and this would be a high time to balance out recent lows. Much to my amazement, when I hit the timer when I got home, I had reached a personal best by a significant margin. As a result, my running rolling average crept down to 19:19 (the cumulative average since I started timing in January is still 20:28, so…).

Mattins with homily at St Nicolas’s at 11:15, then hurriedly to the Parish Centre to lead the Faith Forum on ‘Incarnation.’ When I get home after that, I’ll collapse in a heap — though I’m preaching at the Ash Wednesday service at St Michael’s, so no slacking off.

I ran into a new (to me) inaccurate citation this morning: the one about plato claiming that empathy is the highest form of knowledge. No, wrong, incorrect. It caught my ear because I felt confident that it was both not the way Plato thought about knowledge and not the way he’d have said that if indeed he had thought it. In order to pass it along that way — without attribution to a specific source — you would have to have no ear for Plato at all. Someone just liked a pop-psychological slogan, and the attribution to Plato made it seem more profound, more ancient, and more authoritative. It turns out, though, to just make you look like someone who knows neither about Plato nor about web slogans without a cited source.

Unless you can find a cited version of an alleged quotation, your overriding assessment of it must be that it’s false. The Web is just too big and too shallow (alas!) to trust unsourced quotations at all.

I took an untimed morning run today; just as well, because my right knee was irritable and my whole body felt resentful about the bitter -1° weather. Hot breakfast, coffee and another coffee, and working on both a homily for tomorrow (on Moses’s face, not on Paul’s ill-conceived metaphor based on Moses’s face) and my parish presentation on Incarnation. Doing the background work for the Incarnation talk gets me excited and voluble, so I have to steel myself to focus on tomorrow’s homily.