Month: February 2026

My morning run began somewhat woodenly, stiff from a day of not having run nor having walked as much as usual on a Friday. I gradually got looser, and then encountered comically direct, firm headwinds. When I got home, though, it turned out that I’d arrived in my second-best time of the year. You can never tell (or perhaps you can, but I can’t). Coffee, hot breakfast, Morning Prayer at home, some time reading John Darnielle’s This Year as I practise building up my focused reading muscles, shower, and here to blog.

Last night I did the necessary and processed The Last Essay through a manuscript submission system. The developers of these systems evidently hate authors, because the process entails such painfully non-academic-writing considerations, and the interface reminds me of the days when the very notion of a graphical user interface was a novelty. Near the end, I encountered a headachey problem that rose from the fact that I do not, and will not, use Microsoft Word (though I am content to export to and submit in Word .docx format). Apparently some editing processes just don’t register when done by LibreOffice, Pages, or Mellel, and the submission interface kept showing me text that had been deleted as strike-through-ed. At that point I decided just to forge ahead and send the final version to the editor themself. But that’s dome now.

The replacement computer is ordered and should arrive Monday. And I registered for this year’s Bannister Mile this morning, trusting that I won’t spend the day before and the day of bedridden (as I did last year, save for the time it took me to get to Oxford, run the mile, and get back to Abingdon). So it goes on and then it goes around again, it goes on again….

[Whoops! It turns out the MBA arrived today, not Monday. Now I’m struggling to figure out how to transfer data from old to new when the old unit’s screen is useless (remembering that Migration Assistant is incompatible with screen sharing to my iPad).]

I pulled up in my first tutorial this morning, retrieved my five plus-year–old MacBook Air, and opened Accordance (my biblical reference weapon of choice), only to see the screen display a series of pixel-wide lines along the left and bottom. I put it to sleep… and opened it again, and no joy. If anything, there might’ve been a few more lines. Restart? Same story. Shut down? Even more lines.
So, the screen, or the screen controller, has perished. New unit coming next week. Luckily, Apple devices can screen share in such a way that I can use my even older iPad as the screen of my laptop with only a little trouble. Till sometime Monday.

I had a little leftover marking for this morning, and an interrupted night of sleep, so running just didn’t happen. Marking did, so I’ll have everyone’s paper back. Coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, off to Oxford for tutorials, home to Abingdon for the weekend (the NT Seminar concerns ‘getting a post-doc’, which is not a current item on my scholarly agenda). Whew!

Had a good run this morning — dry, milder weather really makes the whole experience less tiresome — then coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, then home to spend the day marking (and being distracted). Four essays came in, five must be returned tomorrow. (One came in at last week’s tute, so I return it not at the tute but at the next one.)

I forgot that I had yesterday’s midweek Eucharist at St Helen’s, so I gave a short-order homily; it turned out well, I think, but I was lucky cos the readings were about the Sign of Jonah, about which I wrote a student ewssay that I then developed into my first academic publication (first accepted, not first in print — so it goes).

Run at a very good pace, hot breakfast, on my way to shower and go to Morning Prayer. After Chapter Meeting, some reading and marking.

I decided to walk, rather than run, this morning — a steady walk with intermittent gentle jogging — then coffee and fruit, showered and dressed, and off to Morning Prayer. I’ll go on to Oxford for tutorial and lunch, then home for the afternoon.

Good morning run, a bit faster than yesterday (though still not up to the pace I’d been attaining a fortnight ago, don’t know what happened). Still, a minimally unpleasant way of keeping moderately, marginally, fit. Coffee and fruit, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, and now public office hours at R&R.
Tasks for today include a report on pastoral care, marking an essay, email to answer, updating my publications web page at Oxford, and… there was something else. This evening there’s a book event for Prof. Najman that I’ll be logging in to.
Oh, I know — I’m to write up for the parish magazine some notes on my very brief ‘Inside Liturgy: Meaning and Action’ talks, that was it.

Hello, my name is AKMA. I used to blog here.

Well, I did miss a day, yesterday. My morning run went well; a good pace, back to the ‘very good’ part of the plateau spectrum. Hot breakfast, changed, then to St Helen’s for our annual Wedding Workshop. The Wedding Workshop brings together couples from the parish whom we’ll marry later in the summer, and gives us a chance to walk through with them a lot of the variables among which they’ll be able to choose: Scripture readings, hymns, instrumental music, and clergy. (Some will already have met us and have asked for one or another; some are just meeting us and forming an impression of whom they might request.) After the Workshop, I settled in to extrude a sermon from my already wrung-out brain, and took a much-needed nap.

Today, the day after my ‘day off’, I ran an even better pace, reworked the ending of the sermon, cleaned up, hurried in to get ready before the service, and there we go (or, ‘went’). After the service, I gave one of our brief ‘Spiritual Snacks’ on ‘Inside the Liturgy: Action and Meaning’; it’s part of my effort to gin up interest in serving at the altar). (Don’t tell). After the service and my wee talk, I crossed over to the Parish Centre for a Faith Forum, and then, now, home for a rest.

I’ll paste this morning’s sermon in below the fold.
Continue reading “Breaking Plateaus (Plateaux?)”

I will be meeting my first-years four times (as usual) this term, and I have conveniently — if intensely — arranged for all the meetings to take place on Friday. That’s along with the New Testament seminar up at Keble, and my parish duty to check messages in the morning and afternoon, and the commute to and from Oxford which can vary in duration from about twenty-five minutes to almost two hours (in bad, Friday afternoon traffic). So if I look or sound frazzled on Fridays, or Thursdays or Saturdays as well, I have a reason. Plus, I’m preaching Sunday and we hold our annual Wedding Workshop tomorrow.

Didn’t run this morning, but walked the whole way. I started out running, but my body rebelled. No part of me, not joints, muscles, bones, or lungs, was willing to pick up my pace even to a gentle jog. Coffee, fruit, finishing marking, dressed, Morning Prayer, then off to my tutes.

I have three tutorials, five essays, tomorrow, so today’s agenda involves a lot of marking. Happily, three of the essays have already come in, so I can probably get them all sorted without stress. Shortened night of sleep, so I took an early run. It felt sluggish and rusty, but I came in with a pace at the slow end of my plateau. Maybe just across the inflection point that separates my plateau from the slope that leads to it. Coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, coffee, toast, marking, and I’ll pitch in to my Lenten goal of reading — just reading (doomscrolling and interrupted reading don’t count) — a half hour a day.

‘St Paul and St Thomas Aquinas tell us how there is always more to be hoped for in any and every situation than the empirical facts seem to show.’
— Alasdair MacIntyre, “How Aristotelianism Can Become Revolutionary,” Philosophy of Management 7/1 (2008), p. 19.

‘…however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project.’
Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 252).

Last night’s service at St Paul’s showed Oriel’s choir in a radically different setting from the usual intimate college chapel, and permitted them to sing magnificently at full power. No doubt Dr Maw’s excellence as a teacher and conductor, and his wisdom in selecting pieces that made the most of both the setting (with St Paul’s notorious eight-second reverb, when the nave is relatively dull) and the choir’s strengths, combined to amplify all the best gifts of the choir. The cathedral was surprisingly (to me) full, the officiant, lectors, and intercessors read effectively (I noted that Lord Mendoza read to his usual high standard), God was greatly praised with words from our own St John Henry Newman, and satisfying pizza followed after. I napped on the Oxford Tube back to Our Fair City, and the bus trip home to Abingdon passed fairly quickly. After lugging my backpack and a travel bag crammed with vestments, I slept like a champion, thank heaven.

I had already decreed my intent to have a lie-in and not run today, so after a leisurely wake-up interval I cooked my hot breakfast, changed to work clothes, joined in Morning Prayer at St Helen’s, and have come home for another mug of coffee and some work time. Ash Wednesday parish service is at 7:30 tonight.

I should say something about the political situation in the USA, in answer to Dave’s cry of outrage. I’ve hitherto been venting my spleen on the socials, but at this point my relatively un-visited blog may as well join the party and affirm what Dave says: As if the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not blatant enough evidence, the recent revelation that the DHS sought subpoenas for the operators of online accounts that criticise ICE makes it clear that the US is sliding into the worst kind of authoritarian state, as the government exercises control of the media through its billionaire proxies, executes and disappears citizens for their exercise of First Amendment rights, and indulges its gluttonous id in shameless corruption. At this point I can’t imagine going to the US again even to visit my beloved family, at least not until after the half-terms reveal a clue toward the trajectory the government will follow.

I woke up at a usual time, which meant a short night since I was out late at the Theology Dinner; I felt ambivalent about running this morning, but force of habit won out (yes!) and I covered my miles at a plateau pace. Not a fast plateau pace, but a sound, square plateau pace. Coffee and fruit, shower, fed and put out the ladies, Morning Prayer, bus to Oxford, coffee, tutorial, lunch, bus to London, Oriel Evensong at St Paul’s (if you’re thinking of going, don’t worry about tickets or fees, just come right in, there’s plenty of room and no charge (the tickets and fee cover special seating and an after-service drinks reception to which I shan’t be going), bus back to Oxford, bus back to Abingdon.

That’s a day.

Last night, the speaker for the JCR at Theology Dinner alluded to looking up my blog in advance of his admissions interview, only to find (as he said) that I ‘like running’. For the avoidance of doubt, I do not like running. I like being healthy, and (regrettably) the handiest way to attain that goal is to exercise regularly.

I noticed that someone arrived at my ‘What’s So Hard About Exegesis?’ post last week, and as I thought about the topic and my very wordy post, it occurred to me that a shorter answer to the question might be ‘Students come to exegesis want to know “how” in terms of method, whereas the crucial ‘how’ is a matter of manner — not ‘Step One, Step Two, Step Three’ but ‘In what sort of spirit, what frame of mind, should one undertake exegesis?’.

My morning run was unpleasant (I mean, ‘more than usual’), feeling sluggish with hard breathing. Still, the pace was in keeping with my late-2025 plateau. I had worked up to a slightly faster pace in late October/early November, but this is roughly as good as my pace has been all along. So that’s sorted, after Christmas holidays, ankle injury, and Chicago wedding.

Then home for coffee and fruit, shower, and Morning Prayer. Tonight’s the Theology Dinner at Oriel; then. tomorrow night is the observance of Oriel’s 700th anniversary at St Paul’s (I’ll be seated, perhaps processing?, with Oriel clergy, but they have wisely prevented me from saying anything. Then Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, at which I had thought I was timetabled to preach, but last night the Rector emailed me to note that I was just there to assist, not to preach, so I have a significant slice of work off my desk. Then Friday I begin my four weeks of tutoring first-years, which makes a month’s uptick in my workload, but that’ll be fine.

Last night we ran across a review of a collection of essays to which Margaret made a contribution, which review expressed a very high regard for her essay in the volume. The book’s title is The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics; her essay is ‘The Difference Bodily Resurrection Makes: Caring for Animals While Hoping for Heaven’.

The book reviewer, Charles Taliaferro (in Religious Studies Review 47, 2021), says ‘The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics with 35 original chapters and a masterful introduction is a terrific contribution to a vital dimension of religious and environmental ethics’, so you know the whole volume warrants attention. But he reserves particular praise for Margaret’s chapter:

The last chapter in the book, “The Difference Bodily Resurrection Makes” by Margaret Adams [sic] is brilliant, and a great essay to end the book. If you have ever wondered if dogs will go to heaven, this chapter is for you. I will not do a spoiler; you will simply need to buy the book. But I will add that this chapter admirably links theology, philosophy, and religion to practical ethical practices here and now.

Margaret wouldn’t want me to call attention to it on the socials, but I reckon there are few enough people visiting this joint that I can brag about her here.

An interrupted night of sleep, but it all added up to a good duration. As a result, though, I got a late start and felt distinctly as though I was running through gelatine. As yet another example of the unpredictable relation between what I perceive (on one hand) and… errhh… reality (on the other), I ran to my best pace of the year. So that’s a good thing.

We had a merry lunchtime birthday party, after which we returned and had an afternoon rest; then I banged together a homily for the 8:00, and shortly we will settle down to watch crime drama for the evening. Another thrill-packed day chez Akma.

I got a good night’s sleep last night — 7 hours, much better than my recent nights — and was moving slowly when I did wake up, so that I’m only now ready to run, at a time when I’m usually cooling down and making coffee. I’ll take a day off, shift to the coffee and fruit just now, then get ready for Morning Prayer.

Clear skies before daybreak, so I ran my miles, and this time again felt that the whole operation was going more smoothly. As it turns out, it was — my best pace since before my ankle turn. Maybe the plateau isn’t so flat after all. Coffee, fruit, shower, decaf, Morning Prayer, coffee, toast, and now I’ll see about conquering either Sunday’s sermon or the last paragraph(s) that the editors requested for The Last Essay.