Finished reading: Calvin by Bruce Gordon 📚

Finished reading: Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy by Michael P. Zuckert & Catherine Zuckert 📚Really wish I’d had this in grad school.

Finished reading: Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham 📚2nd edition, with three added chapters responding to criticism. An important book!

Finished reading: Cities and Thrones and Powers by Stephen R. L. Clark 📚A little out there in some respects, but happy to see something attentive to political aspects of Plotinus.

Finished reading: Choosing Freedom by Karen Stohr 📚Wouldn’t use in a class, but good popular introduction.

Finished reading: Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers by Geoffrey M. Vaughan 📚Happy to recommend to any/all with an interest in these topics.

Wonderful treatment for Holy Saturday – A Clerk of Oxford: ‘Open wæs þæt eorðærn’: the Harrowing of Hell

It’s possible to get a great deal of reading done in a laundromat.

Very few things as anticlimactic as the afternoon before a multi-day vacation starts.

Finished reading: Index, a History of The by Dennis Duncan 📚More interesting than it sounds!

Finished reading: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution by Eric Foner 📚Learned some things.

Finished reading: Augustus by Adrian Goldsworthy 📚 More detail here on the Augustus stage than I’ve read before.

Finished reading: Cicero by Anthony Everitt 📚Worth the time, and more sympathetic than many other portrayals.

Finished reading: Empire by Niall Ferguson 📚

Finished reading: Wyclif’s Dust by David Hugh-Jones 📚

Finished reading: The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris 📚

Really good, a nice counterpart to the author’s other volume on the Norman Conquest.

Currently reading: The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris 📚

Finished reading: Between Two Worlds by Malcolm Gaskill 📚

👍Fantastic review of the 17th-century period.

Finished reading: Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds by Jocelin de Brakelond 📚

Reading for a graduate leadership course in development; it will be interesting to see what the students make of Abbot Samson!

For everlasting memory

New furniture covers, new cat configurations.

If I see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants. - Academicat

Patiently waiting for turn at Cat TV.

THEOLOGY AND BBT

The Big Bang Theory: From Caricature to Complexity (Peter Augustine Lawler): “The Big Bang Theory ultimately points to the limited but real wisdom that comes from understanding two partial truths—that of the personal, judgmental, loving God and also that of the ‘God of nature’ the scientists seek to understand. The show leads us to think about how to put together the two explanations of ‘the Big Bang’—one based on faith in a personal Creator and one based on scientific discovery of the impersonal laws of nature—to account truthfully for both nature and human nature.”

ELIXIR VITAE

“Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in the world.” And a non-trivial evidence of benevolent Providence!

via How Caffeine Evolved to Help Plants Survive and Help People Wake Up - NYTimes.com.