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Got up and walked (mostly) my miles this morning. My ankle resented the amount I asked of it yesterday, so I gave it an easier start today. After coffee and hot breakfast, public office hours, and the weekly Staff Meeting I came home for lunch and handling email and perhaps beginning work on my newsletter column on The Conversion of Paul, then another meeting this evening, just for the sheer fun of it.

I walked and ran, showered, had my coffee and fruit, then headed off north of Oxford to Church House, where I experienced a long and informative day of instruction on how to become retired. I was tired at the end, so all I need is a re- prefix and I’ve got the process knocked.

Two mile walk, with another wee bit more running: As yesterday, so today, the ankle feels all right, but various other parts of my legs speak up with notices that the Wednesday Fall had thrown them off-kilter. I keep thinking that this should be a mere out-of-the-habit return to exercise, forgetting that, no, I’m taking my return to running easy because of injury. Coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, coffee and toast, reading, email, and planning an upcoming College of Preachers event on Preaching the Gospels in Lent.

The excitement never stops! I’m not even going to tell you what tomorrow’s big thrill will be.

I walked my morning miles today, taking a very few intermittent short runs as an experiment, and got home just fine, thank you. When I ran, I noted with relief that my ankle behaved most usually, and with caution that my right knee (of the leg which slipped, turned slightly, and went out from under me on Wednesday) gave me warning shots of almost-pain. So I’ll guard the right knee, and try to stretch out the intervals of running for as long as the knee will tolerate.
Hot breakfast, some kitchen cleaning, and sermon work this morning.

I woke this morning after a good night’s sleep, flexed my foot, and discovered (to my astonishment) that I didn’t feel any soreness at all. It felt a bit tender if I massaged it, but after feeling very painful Wednesday night, no real residual pain remained. While I am not at all complaining, my body has missed a perfect chance to teach me a lesson about being careful and ageing and not having magical recuperative powers as I once assumed I did. I’ll try to remember, though, even without the week or more of gradual resumption of ordinary activities.

No run, even with remarkable return to form and flexibility, but coffee and fruit, a shower, Morning Prayer, and a long conversation with Fr Paul in the morning. I’ll probably work on my Sunday sermon in the afternoon, and who knows what-all for the remainder of the day.

(The local story, I mean, the hyperlocal story — The Story is the murder of a Minneapolis civilian by state forces.)

Yesterday, as noted, I fell on my way to Morning Prayer and wrenched my ankle. I had run earlier with no difficulty, but in dressing for the day I put on dress shoes rather than trainers, no treads vs high treads, and didn’t stop to consider the difference that might make (did make). It was a good fsall, not a silent-movie pratfall but a Keanu Reeves lean-backward in slow motion till (in my case) my centre of gravity just toppled. The instant bio-anæsthesia of shock response buffered my sense of what had happened for a good while; I went on to the service, then for coffee, then for a couple of meetings (at which the Team Rector, bless her, insisted that I elevate my foot), then a funeral and stoipped by the grocery to obtain a bag of frozen peas (i.e., ‘ice pack’), but by the time I got home, my ankle was barking ferociously, and I spent the rest of the afternoon either sitting with my foot up or resting with my foot actually over the rest of my body. My foot swelled, my ankle hurt acutely, and I was wondering about going to the local A&E when morning came.

After a really good night’s sleep during which my foot was especially elevated much of the time, I woke up feeling wporlds better. I seem to have escaped significant damage, and although my foot is swollen and bruised, naproxen and rest mean that I haven’t felt meaningful pain today at all. In fact, the greater pain has come from my right knee, which hadn’t bothered me at all yesterday (and even that is just minor). It seems as if I flexed just short of the point of tearing or breaking, for which thanks be to heaven.

I’m continuing to take things easy today, staying home, inside, with my foot up as much of the time as I can bear to. It’s discoloured, may bruise in a while, but for the time being I think Ijust stretched everything. No running for a serious while, though, I expect.

Not necessarily the private army (though I favour that) but definitely the frozen water. It rained last night, and this morning the temperature is 2° (but chills to -6°), so that any given paved surface might be coated with frost, or rough enough for traction, or be actually icy. I needed to run this morning, so I ran cautiously and tentatively at a pace much slower than my usual. I skidded slightly once or twice, but did not have a dangerous slip, and my Achilles tendon made no complaints at all, so that’s a win. Coffee and fruit, I’m about to clean up and dress for work, then Morning Prayer, a meeting with the Team Rector, then the full Staff Meeting, then a funeral for a member of St Helen’s congregation.

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Pride goeth… I slipped and twisted my ankle on the way to Morning Prayer. *sigh*

Just to note that there’s a discussion of Daniel Boyarin’s recent claim that [premodern] Judaism is not rightly characterised as a ‘religion’ (in the modern sense) at Marginalia, and a reminder (which I had forgotten) that Brent Nongbri published a book a while ago arguing (similarly to Preus, Z Smith, McCutcheon, King, and others) that ‘religion’ is strictly a modern Western notion which may be useful in the analysis of premodern (and presumably non-Western) phenomena, but only with painstaking self-critical caution. Reviews abound.

The literature on this sort of controversy far exceeds anything I can adequately bibliographise here. You’re welcome to add favourites in the comments, but I’m not myself going to try to keep logging every useful publication on ‘religion’; I have other fish to fry (or more pertinently in my case, ‘other tofu to stir-fry’).

We observed Epiphany on Sunday in the parish, so today was just Tuesday fter Epiphany, and not the Feast itself, in Abingdon. But in the larger church, today is the Feast of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, so cheers for us on Team Gentiles today. And modified cheers for snow on Epiphany (I don’t remember so much snow for a long time) and on a more solmn note, the year’s mind of Margaret’s dad, Dick Bamforth.

It had not started snowing yet when I left home for my morning miles; it came as a surprise when the sun had come up and I looked out the back door to see real, actual snow dusting the garden, and then even more snow when I left the house for church. I didn’t run this morning, just run-walked, especially for the stretch on Park Road where the shadow of St Michael’s blocks the sun from warming and melting the accumulated frost-ice. The slippery conditions and my intent to coddle my Achilles tendon this morning (and my plan to leaven my running with regular breaks gently to accommodate aging knees) turned out well. The miles took about half again as long as when I run it, which satisfies me, and my tendon gave me no challenges.

Coffee and fruit, shower and dress, Morning Prayer and then public office hours at R&R, and in a bit I will go back to church for a meeting of the Pastoral Team. I plan on doing some reading today, and perhaps writing an overdue review (amazing what can happen when one doesn’t have overdue essays hanging over one’s head).

Wishing all the peace of a snowy Epiphany, and consolation and healing from the sadness of bereavement. May the souls of our beloved rest in the peace and light of divine grace, and may their memory be for a blessing.

I didn’t get enough sleep last night because one of the ladies, the smaller one, from Yorkshire, had an unaccountable fixation on waking me up repeatedly. I went to bed earlier than usual for the express prupose of getting more sleep, and somebody exploded that plan from midnight on.

Continued arctic weather (I mean, ‘from the arctic’, not ‘actually comparable to the climate of the arctic’) has kept the ground frosty at best, icy at worst, which slows my morning pace significantly, accounting in part for my slow-ish pace for my miles. The rest of the accounting — apart from ‘still an old, not very fit guy’ — involves a warning bark from my right Achilles tendon. I do not reckon I can afford to ignore warnings from either of my Achilles tendons, so I dialled down my speed for the last half mile. At any rate, I got the miles in, and literally nobody cares about the time. Coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, coffee, toast, finishing up some parish business, then possibly some reading. Did I mention that I finished The Last Essay?

-3°, felt like -8°, and I ran my miles anyway. I ran at a below average pace, but it would have been faster if I hadn’t encountered icy patches at which I had to slow down and step cautiously. It gave no pleasure, but I hate falling away from regular exercise, so I had to just do it. Coffee, fruit, shower, dress, Morning Prayer, and off to the 8:00 at St Nicolas’s.

I feel as though I ought to respond to Chris‘s lovely, generous response — especially since Dave has noticed. This blogging thing — it may just catch on after all…

I answered Chris with first attention to something that wasn’t even his main point. That’s an initial sign of his grace as a conversation partner; many people would just have harrumphed and castigated me for missing the point, as the beginning of my reply admittedly indicated that I might have done. I think I needed to clear that ground before I began to scaffold a more pertinent response, but I didn’t frame my post that way. Thanks for your patience, Chris.

Eventually I drew near to Chris’s sensible, intriguing suggestion that ‘religion’ may helpfully treated as a ‘container’ (in the sense of ‘a bounded space of shared identity and meaning-making’). I was answering Chris from within the container, as it were, while he was contemplating ‘religion’ as if from looking at the container. I forbear to say ‘from outside’, since (a) Chris is too subtle to suppose he escapes being containerised, and (b) he himself participates in practices internal to the container, though he and I might (given world enough, and time) less coyly sit down, and think which way we walk, and pass our short lives’ day in articulating, assessing, acknowledging, rejoicing in, and in some cases discovering the insignificance of our differences.

There’s an irony, too, in my having begun my response from the position that I hold various doctrinal claims to be ‘true’, inasmuch as I’ve repeated far too often my axiom ‘A theory of truth is one theory too many’ (a misrepresentation of what Freud attributed to Charcot: ‘Theory is good, but that doesn’t prevent things from existing’ in Complete Works volume 3, p. 13). I say that — heuristically, not metaphysically — because we demonstrate what we take to be true by how we live more than by what abstractions we affirm. But again, Chris didn’t take any cheap tu quoque shots on this point, bless him. I do affirm, unhesitatingly, that the ordinary repertoire of Christian beliefs are true, though I enact that faith very imperfectly, and though in the analytical sense I don’t profess to know just how they are true.

Now by way of direct response, when Chris says ‘he isn’t necessarily interested in my framing and exploration of religion-as-container, but instead in sharing the way in which his participation in his religion guides his participation in civic life’ I should have made clear that I am interested in his framing, and I take it to be a useful dialogical gesture, so long as no one takes the gesture of containerisation to capture what ‘religion’ is really all about, and doubly so when that ‘really’ departs from what the religion’s adherents would say about themselves. No, adherents don’t have some privileged status for describing truly the nature of their way, but discussion of ‘religion’ loses some degree of usefulness when it loses touch with what the adherents might say about themselves.

That ‘degree of usefulness’ may not be worth worrying about in some circumstances. Let’s say, strictly hypothetically, that a ‘religion’ devised as a tax dodge that in turn grew beyond its initial function and became an international mind control syndicate — the dangers of corruption in civic life would warrant talking about the ‘religion’ in terms that adherents might not affirm, and we would all have to deal with the fallout. My attitude toward truth-claims isn’t negative across the board; I just don’t thinnk we often gain clarity about a problem by arriving at a crystalline abstract definition of truth. Or religion — which may be just what Chris was talking about in the first place, which makes this a great place for me to just stop talking: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen (‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Ogden trans., p. 188/189).

No, I did not run this morning in subzero temperatures that felt like -8°, on pavements that are icy in spots. No, no. I’m frustrated by that — I don’t like interrupting my running schedule — but I’m not foolhardy.

I demonstrated the greater part of valour this sub-zero morning, opting to walk my two miles on the frosted-rain-covered pavements rather than running. Then coffee, fruit, some sermon prep, Morning Prayer, coffee, a homemade cranberry muffin (by Margaret), laundry, errands, grocery shopping, lunch, and spending the afternoon settling into Sunday’s sermon.

I noticed for the first time — I’d say ‘Shame on me’, but the Internet is a big multiverse and nobody can keep up with it — the Standard Ebooks website for free, open source ebooks. It’s just the kind of project I love, and my first thought was ‘I should join in and make some!’ This is clearly a post-submission reponse to my not having academic writing hanging over my head; it would make more sense after retirement than during the coming year, wherein I’ll still have parish responsibilities and will be tutoring for Oriel (along with retirement preparation, househunting, and so on). But it’s a fabulous resource, despite it’s not having a good collection of theology books.

Last night, after I retired (early) (I mean, ‘I went to bed’ — the next year is going to entail tricky use of the word ‘retire’), Margaret asked whether I had noticed anything odd about Flora. I answered that she’s stayed unusually close to me while I was cleaning the kitchen at the end of the day. She (Margaret) noted that she (Flora) was shivering and had climbed up into Margaret’s aarms in an atypical way. I noted that there had been fireworks going off; maybe she had been disturbed by them. The ladies have not shown any particular concern about fireworks in the past, and Margaret and I have appreciated having one fwer thing to worry about — but it appears that this year they’ve changed, or something about New Year’s fireworks bothers them more than summer fireworks or Guy Fawkes fireworks. Who knows? But Flora insisted on getting into our bed with us. Margaret took her down to the day bed in the living room so that I could sleep (and so that Flora wouldn’t get the idea that she could climb into our bedroom bed), but Flora ran back upstairs and jumped up into bed, shivering, so I figured that we could allow her a scary night of explosions and just hugged her till her shivering subsided. Later, Margaret came back upstairs, and Minke climbed into bed, too. All seems normal this morning. We’ll see how that goes.

Another cold morning run, this one markedly slower, to start the new year. Listened to a BBC report on the making of The Muppet Show (I hadn’t realised that it was produced here in the UK), coffee, fruit, reading and thinking about Chris Corrigan’s gracious response to my response, coffee, toast (with Christmas gift jam), cleaned up, and now I’m blogging.

Happy New Year, and may heaven permit us a much better year than 2025. It may take another three years of making America trashy before things turn for the better, though.

The wonderful Chris Corrigan wrote a post recently on how and whether to define ‘religion’, and as a long-time blogging conversation partner, it’s incumbent on me to comment. (Plus, it feels so good to weave links among personal blogs, just as we did in the Olden Times.) Chris treats the elusiveness of ‘religion’ as a feature, not a bug, even though the difficulty remains and causes some problems. (Fair condensation, Chris?)

This has been a longstanding issue in religious studies, which is 100% not my specialisation (though for a variety of reasons, beginning from the fact that Margaret read Relisious Studies for her undergrad degree, I’ve been caught up in the topic from the margin). Chris cites Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who was already looking worn around the edges when Margaret and I were studying him; I subsequently ended up teaching ‘Intro to Religious Studies’ at my first teaching post at Eckerd College, where I used exactly this problem as the axis of the course. I began with the Baseball Annie monologue that opens Bull Durham and a ‘Nacirema’ article about sport and ritual (I can’t find it now, annoyingly). We then worked through Preus’s Explaining Religion (spending more time on some chapters than others), mostly from my Wittgensteinian-inflected perspective. If I recall correctly, we ended with part of Nicholas Lash’s Easter In Ordinary. I should note that this was in time long past, when one could assign significant amounts of reading for a discussion-based course, and a reasonable proportion of the class would actually read the assignment.
This is some of the background I bring to responding to Chris, this along with extensive immersion in the critical theory of the ’80s and ’90s, with glancing blows from that literature since then.
So, now, to Chris’s post. First, as a priest and theologian and general church-going sort of person, I should own up that I take my faith and the sorts of congruent Christian discourse as true and real in a more than merely notional way. That applies even in a way that excludes other ‘religious’ claims. That’s just part of what I take believing to mean, and I’m keenly aware of the risks and presumption baked into that. At the same time, I know and recognise that other profound, admirable, illuminating people do not hold to what I believe, and some believe things that my faith contradicts. Since I have no specific reason to think I’m cleverer or more pious or more receptive to divine revelation than these among my neighbours, I must hold to my faith with a humility that obliges me to treat people’s divergent faiths with the respect that I’d wish them to show mine. I have more to learn than one lifetime (and at my age, I can’t assume I have a whole lot more time coming to me, though [I just checked] the UK government figures that guys such as I have a 50% chance of living to 86 — not bad) will afford, so I can’t by any means rule out the possibility that my Muslim neighbour has arrived at the true, real way of faith and I am wrong about many particulars.

All of which is to say that where Christian nationalists take their faith as a warrant to oppress others because they can’t imagine that they’re wrong, I take my faith as an obligation to honour others’ faith up to the point where our claims conflict, and there to handle that conflict as gently and respectfully as circumstances permit.

Now, I actually will get to Chris’s post. One implication of what I’ve said above at too great length is that I have no investment in ‘religion’ as a category (a ‘container’, in Chris’s terms, though his container does somewhat different work). I don’t look down the ‘Religions’ aisle at Tesco and select ‘Catholic-leaning Anglicanism’ from among options tht include Islam, Judaism, Hinduism (< a case in point about the difficulty in subsuming a way of life/worldview into the category of ‘religion’), Buddhism, Wicca, and various smaller-scale alternatives. Rather, what I observe about the world coheres most closely with what a long, broad tradition of Christian teachers and practitioners have said about the world. My teachers and heroes have handed down the truth (more or less), and people who dissent from that are, as far as I can understand, just wrong about their dissent. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid or mad or evil, any more than I’d wish that they regard me as stupid/mad/evil. That humility and respect has twin roots in my philosophical training (while Margaret was reading religious studies, I was reading philosophy) and my theology; there are ways of being Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or Buddhist) that claim a warrant (erroneously, by my lights) to inflict harm on people who don’t share their faith (or who share it wrongly), so it’s no special magic or blessing about professing faith in Jesus that insulates a Christian from possible error. Again, that’s why I may not pass judgement on anyone else.

So my participation in the public sphere entails a kind of partly pragmatic, partly æsthetic, partly theological-philosophical caution about making claims on behalf of Christian faith that I wouldn’t countenance from people who don’t share that faith, or who share if differently from me. But (annoyingly, again) I can no more presuppose that other citizens hold to the value and authority of ‘human dignity and peace and care’ or even ‘expertise’ (alas!) than that they adhere to the sound principles of catholic Anglican theology and worship. Some inhabitants of my community promote the idea that their party should be permitted to adjudicate every aspect of human possibility: how one reads, what one may say, to what sex or race or ethnicity one belongs (if any), who even may be allowed to live — and they will exercise that adjudicated conclusion by force. This may account for the decisive division in the world’s populace, the division between people who will negotiate how best to live together (on one hand) and people who will oblige others to live on their terms. This isn’t a specifically ‘religious’ division; many of the current crop of penny-ante fascists are straight-up nihilists (not even as thoughtful about such topics as a Western atheist). The tricky task set before us entails finding a modus vivendi by which we who hold to particular exclusive claims about human flourishing can honour and respect people who take a different view, but who still want to live in a civic community with us, and how we can work together to minimise the damage done by fascist-nihilists who will contentedly imprison, torture, kill anybody who gets in the way of their implementing their will.

I observe that this turns out to be less a conversation with Chris than a related, overlong blog post inspired by his. To offer at least a fig leaf of conversation, then, I’d say that when Chris uses the word ‘religion’ with reference to something that characterises me, I sense more of an arm’s-length tenor to his usage than I can identify with, and when he says something like ‘Religion is nothing special, except that it is accorded a special place in our civic life’ — man, even granted my scepticism about the term ‘religion’, I wouldn’t want to say that. Being Jewish certainly is special; being Muslim is special; being Buddhist — well, depending on how you’re talking, maybe it’s nothing, but maybe that’s still special; even being a dull old Anglican is special.

But there are few people I would trust more than Chris to undertake a respectful way of working through differences toward an irenic, fruitful, respectful way of civic life that has room even for us who adhere to something like a ‘religion’. If Nex?wlélex?wm were nearer Oxford, we could spend wonderful, productive, provocative afternoons and evenings talking through some of these things.

Took my morning miles at -1° today, which seems to have added some pep to my stride as I recorded my best time of the month. Coffee, made tea for Margaret (actually do that most days, but I wanted to include something to separate ‘coffee’ from the upcoming ‘shower’), cleaned up, hot breakfast, Morning Prayer, and ready to begin the day. Did I mention that I sent off The Last Essay yesterday? I’m almost drunk with relief, and it’s only 9:30 in the morning.

Got up, walked and ran my two miles, fruit and coffee, did some reading, cleaned up, coffee and toast, started working on The Last Essay, some minor distractions, back to work on TLE, lunch, a bit more work on TLE and… to my giddy astonishment — it seems to be done. I will surely have to make some editorial changes, but it’s in the editors’ hands now, and I own no editor anything. I am more or less a free researcher.
That means that in the near future, I’ll begin plugging away at The Last Book. I can’t tell you what sheer joy it will be to finish writing that (if the time be given me to finish it).