Currently reading: Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that Changed America by Martin Duberman 📚

Currently reading (on Audible): Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry’s Greek Myths (2)) by Stephen Fry 📚

Phil Christman:

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.

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!).

Currently reading: Females by Andrea Long Chu 📚

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

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.

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

Paul Griffiths, in a parenthetical aside:

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

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