Ruminations about hermeneutics, theology, theory, politics, ecclesiastical life… and exercise.
The fundamental condition of interpretive practice is difference. Thus, every heremenutic that aims at — or takes as its founding premise — a correctness or identity (in the sense of a an interpretation that attains conceptual homology with a given criterion, ordinarily ‘the intention of the author at the momment of inscription’) begins in the…
Winter reminds me of another reason I hate running: winter. Luckily, it provides a very strong incentive to get the run over with as rapidly as my boy will allow: that, too, is winter. 1°, very light breezes, 10:27. Somehow the timer on my phone got switched from its usual straight-ahead digital timer to a…
I thought I was running at a decent pace, but I must not have been stretching out my legs enough. To be fair, that makes sense, as the pavements are coated with wet, almost-frozen leaves. Still, 10:53 was a disappointment. I slept later than usual, hence was running a bit later than usual (to have…
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…
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…
Just a note here linking to Peter Gurry’s report Paul Foster’s survey of the British New Testament conference attendees regarding which letters they think Paul wrote and didn’t write, with a very intriguing graph.
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…
4°, very light breezes, got started on a good pace and didn’t start tightening up till the very end, and no knot in my right groin muscle. 10:22.
3°, calm. Still feeling tight for most of the mile, though not quite so badly. In the end, 10:33 — an improvement, but a far cry from the heyday of the 10:10 plateau.
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…
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…
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…