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Christianity is not about having an exquisite collection of private meanings that one occasionally dusts and admires. It’s about the mess and inconvenience and annoyance of other people and the terror of being known: God is never more God than when God is walking around in a killable body, irritating the authorities and being misunderstood by God’s stupid friends, of whom I hope I am one.

Jun 23, 2022

One of the peculiarities of writing a dissertation during 2020–21 was the lack of library access. I was fortunate in owning many of the materials I needed, and the library staff at Boston College did what they could to make their collection available to us. Still, I’m glad to have more regular access to a library again (and one as good as the Franciscan Institute’s in Friedsam Memorial Library!).

Jun 20, 2022

Currently reading: Females by Andrea Long Chu 📚

Jun 17, 2022

Currently reading: Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason, and Following Christ (Christian Theology in Context) by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt 📚

Jun 16, 2022

I like this characterization of prayer, in the fourth book of the Franciscan Summa halensis (q.26, m.3, a.7; p. 720 in the 1622 Cologne edition). A quick and rough translation (verging on paraphrase, really):

Properly speaking, prayer is the ascent of the soul to God ordered to the tasting or releasing of something; commonly speaking, prayer is any act of contemplation related to God; most commonly speaking, prayer is any good act.

Jun 13, 2022

Currently reading: Knowing God by Experience: The Spiritual Senses in the Theology of William of Auxerre by Boyd Taylor Coolman 📚

Jun 4, 2022

Paul Griffiths, in a parenthetical aside:

Augustine on the whole does not like jokes, and thinks there will be none in heaven.

Jun 4, 2022

Currently reading: Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity by Paul J. Griffiths 📚

Jun 4, 2022

Willie James Jennings, with a really lovely description of theological education at the end of his After Whiteness:

To be involved in theological education is to long for eternity and the end of death. It is to seek the blessed state where our words start to do new work by first joining the chorus of the words of those who live forever in the Lord and who sound the healing and redeeming voice of the living God. Then our words will heal. Then our words will build up. Then our words will help form life together. Then our words will give witness to a destiny only visible through love. Talking together then is a practice aimed at eternity, and it matters more than we often realize for bringing our hope into focus. This finally is the goal of this book and the task I want to leave you with—to bring hope into focus.

Jun 4, 2022

Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness:

Theological education could mark a new path for Western education, one that builds a vision of education that cultivates the new belonging that this world longs to inhabit. But we cannot give witness to that newness if we imagine that our fundamental struggle is one of institutional survival, or the challenge of educational delivery systems, or the alignment of financial modeling with our desired outcomes, or the expansion of pedagogical models. All these matters are important, but they are not where the struggle meets us or from where the vision of our futures will come.

Jun 2, 2022

Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness:

Theological education is also about resistance. It is the seed from which may grow beautiful habitation or from which may grow mind-bending captivity. Yet how do you design for intellectual resistance? This may be the most pressing question in theological education today, because we theological educators are failing miserably at precisely this—at imagining a form of resistance that builds community.

May 31, 2022

After my first year of full-time teaching, I’m glad to get back to research. Currently reading: A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology edited and translated by Lydia Schumacher and Oleg Bychkov 📚

May 30, 2022

Yesterday I saw a tweet floating around asking for your “personal canon,” that is, which are the books that you have used to understand the world? Limiting myself only to written works (and not, say, music or film), here’s what I would say, roughly ordered according to when I encountered these books:

The gospel according to Luke
The book of Revelation
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
Proslogion by Anselm of Canterbury
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Prophets by Abraham J. Heschel
Silence by Shūsaku Endō
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent by Gustavo Gutiérrez

I don’t have much reading from my childhood represented; I’m not sure that much reading from before college has stuck with me in this world-shaping way. My list also skews decidedly modern (only three premodern texts), which is a little embarassing for me as a medieval theologian.

I might develop this into a fuller blog post, detailing why each of these books belong to my canon and how they inform my understanding of the world. I’m sure I’ll think of other books to add, too (and maybe, upon further refletion, remove some of these).

May 29, 2022

Currently reading (on Audible): Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott 📚

May 28, 2022

Currently reading: Shadow & Claw: The First Half of The Book of the New Sun (The Book of the New Sun, 1) by Gene Wolfe 📚