There are two kinds of living things. They are distinguished by the strategies they have developed in response to perceived threat and danger. One kind responds to danger by running away from it, developing strategies and evolving tools to sidestep threats in more and more complex and sophisticated ways. We call this kind of living thing Animals. The other kind’s strategy is to hunker down, grow roots along with protective armor, and face danger by refusing to be moved. We... Read more
Spring semester classes start today. One of my courses is a team-taught colloquium with a colleague from the Political Science department who is also a Dominican priest. We will begin our “Faith and Doubt” colloquium on Thursday with Anne Lamott’s Plan B as we are seeking from the start to provide our students with a less traditional, less mysterious, and more serviceable orientation to “faith,” one that will be developed and stretched to its limit over the semester. Lamott’s observation... Read more
At a department meeting not long ago, our department chair wondered whether it might be good for the sake of building department chemistry to have various events in which we share teaching tricks of the trade with each other. “After all,” he said, “three of our faculty have won the Accinno award!” The Accinno award is my college’s “Teacher of the Year” award, which I won eighteen years ago in just the third year of its existence. I expressed my... Read more
Over the past year or so I have read several books by Peter Enns, a professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University in Pennsylvania. In his 2014 book The Bible Tells Me So . . .” and The Sin of Certainty published in 2016, Enns make the argument that interpreting the Bible should start with completely scrapping the idea that the Bible is a divinely inspired rule book for how to live a life pleasing to God, a rule book... Read more
During both the Advent and the Epiphany liturgical seasons, John the Baptist gets a lot of play. Last Sunday was “The Baptism of our Lord” Sunday which obviously involves Jesus’ cousin as an important character. Next Sunday’s gospel includes John’s identifying Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” after which John directs a couple of his disciples to leave his entourage and follow Jesus. Eventually, as we know, John runs afoul of Herod... Read more
The season of Epiphany, squeezed in between the Christmas season and Lent, is the annual liturgical celebration of Jesus’ coming out party. The gospel texts over the next few weeks will follow Jesus as he calls disciples, performs miracles, gets thrown out of his hometown synagogue for claiming to be the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah, and delivers the Sermon on the Mount. The gospel reading for the First Sunday of Epiphany is Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism... Read more
The college basketball season is in full swing. Although I have not posted about it recently, those who know me either in person or through this blog know that I am a college basketball fanatic, particularly for the Providence College Friars men’s basketball team. They had a season for the ages last year and are showing signs of having another memorable season this year. Last week on a Facebook site called “Friartown” that has several thousand members who are fellow... Read more
There are eight to ten movies that Jeanne and I watch religiously during the Christmas season, from the obvious (“It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas”) to a few that are not as well-known. Somehow this season we have failed so far to watch one of the lesser known films which might actually be my favorite–the 2006 French film “Joyeux Noel.” This film is a fictionalized account of the 1914 Christmas Truce that spontaneously occurred in numerous places along the battlefield... Read more
Every New Year’s Day for the past decade—the amount of time I have been writing this blog—I have posted something about hope for the New Year and suggested one or two things that I might commit to going forward that more or less looked like New Year’s resolutions. Last year I decided that my New Year’s resolution was to spend (waste) less time on social media; my practical step in that direction was to delete my Twitter account. It was... Read more
He who loves his life will lose it. John 12:25 I subscribe to two magazines, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. They pile up on the end table next to my side of the bed all semester–I generally start catching up on them in between semesters, often while riding on the stationary bike at the gym. The theme of the recently-arrived January 2023 The Atlantic is “Notes from the Apocalypse.” Given that I have participated in a team-taught colloquium called “Apocalypse” three times–including... Read more
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