Category Archives: Random

Ember Monday

It’s totally not a thing…

Despite what the St. Bede’s Breviary tried to tell you this morning and/or this evening depending on your time zone and when you pray the Office.

It was an algorithm error. And, since I had an action-packed weekend—complete with Back-to-School Sunday yesterday—I slept in until 6 and didn’t get to Morning Prayer, I didn’t learn about it until many friends on Facebook started wondering if Ember Monday might be a thing.

Other than a glitch—no!


The new job is great fun and very rewarding. I’m not getting a lot of writing done at the moment, although I must begin producing more and soon. Now that I’m getting in the swing of the school year, you’ll see more substantive posts arriving shortly. And, for those of you who support me on Patreon, let me know what kinds of posts you’d like to see!

Sub-Surface Churn Update

I realized this morning that I haven’t posted anything here for over a month. That’s certainly not because nothing is happening… Rather, I’m in full-on Duck Mode. All may look calm on the surface, but underneath the little feet are paddling away like crazy. Here’s a short list of stuff:

  • Just completed a Saturday all day (9 AM to 3:30 PM) Retreat on Inwardly Digest at St. Michael & All Angels in Tucson, AZ, and a Sunday Adult Forum on the same plus preaching at St Philip’s Tuscon at the gracious invitation of my friends Fr. David Hedges and Fr. Robert Hendrickson.
  • I continue to teach my class on Early & Medieval Church at the Ecumenical Institute of St. Mary’s Seminary. We’re in the 4th century at the moment. I’m having a blast, and it seems like the students are too. At the least, most of them keep coming back to class…
  • This upcoming Sunday I’ll be teaching an Adult Forum at St. Bartholomew’s West Baltimore on Communion Before Baptism. That’s prompting me to think about some of my earlier writings on the topic and to wonder about the utility of collecting these together somehow. I realize that over the years I’ve spent writing and teaching on this stuff, my position has not changed, but the way that I think and teach about it has.
  • On October 15th, I’ll be leading an Adult Forum at St. David’s Roland Park on Inwardly Digest
  • Honey of Souls is in the final stages of typesetting and is collecting endorsements.
  • Some of you may have noticed the appearance of a page on this blog entitled “breviary test 2;” it’s currently inaccessible because it’s still under construction, but it’s almost ready to be seen. That’s part of a project I’m cooking up with Forward Movement.
  • There continues to be progress on other fronts as well including the Anglican Breviary and another Forward Movement collaboration still waiting in the wings…

 

Writing Things Elsewhere

I came to the odd conclusion that my workout schedule has been messing with with my writing… I’ve been doing more weight-training before we head into the racing season, and have not been out on the road much. I realized the other day that my lack of writing seems to be related to a lack of running outside.  So—hopefully as I start doing more outside running that’ll translate to more writing and posting here!

However, I have been doing some writing that’s appearing in other places. I have a piece in the latest issue of The Living Church; I was invited to write a piece on prayer book revision: that can be found here.

I’ve also gotten some writing done on the next volume of the Cassiodorus project. Since the subtitle of that work is “Praying the Psalms with Cassiodorus and the Church Fathers,” I begin with a discussion of what prayer is and then move into how modern people and the Church Fathers understood prayer and the overlaps and differences between the two. The first part of that has appeared over at Grow Christians and indicates the direction I’m going in: that can be found here.

Checking Things Off!

I’m slowly working my way down a list of things to get done.

I’m trying really hard to not start any new projects this year. Instead, I’m trying to finishing a bunch of things that I had started but never actually completed.

Chief among those are the Anglican Breviary project and the upgrade to the breviary which I started on but got stuck in the middle.

An important part of deciding what to do is also deciding what not to do. The Anglican Breviary domain is expiring, and I’m trying to make the decision whether to renew that and continue that project in the way I had been, or to move it into a different space. We’ll see… I’m also still paying for the podcast service even though I haven’t been actively podcasting for a while. As much as I enjoyed that project, I don’t know if it’s worth continuing in its current incarnation. It served a particular role in my research for the Cassiodorus books. With the first volume done, I’m evaluating whether it’s an effective use of time.

Defining Heresies

There is a theology that seems to be marketed largely to White suburban America—that the created image of God is vibrant and whole in humanity and that sin is more of an ugly rumor designed to make you feel bad about yourself.

It’s heresy.

Despite assurances that you may have heard to the contrary, evil is real. Evil—human-created, human perpetuated—is a genuine force in our existence. The evidence is, well, self-evident. Whenever nations and armed groups commit and enable the atrocities of Aleppo, whenever children are raped, whenever the acquisition of money for the few overrides the lives, health, and bodies of the fragile, evil declares its presence to the world. There are strategies that are used and that we use to shield or hide ourselves from it.

That makes it no less real.

Not only that, getting ourselves in the habit of ignoring evil “out there” is part and parcel—a twisted feedback loop—of ignoring evil “in here.”

Understanding and getting in touch with the reality of our own personal sin is an important part of grappling with evil in its many forms.

Already I imagine some readers are turning away in disgust at the notion that they participate anything like “real” sin; adult forums and Lenten talks that M and I have given that speak about sin, confession, and repentance are regularly met with, “I’m not a bad person; this doesn’t apply to me. I don’t have anything to repent for.” (No kidding: that’s an actual quote.)

But here’s the thing: the Gospel is the tool to fight back against evil. The truth of God’s love is the only weapon that doesn’t beget more violence, more hatred—more evil. And if we say nice words about applying it in the world, we must begin by applying it to our own hearts and our own homes. We must recognize our own need for repentance and for grace. (And I use “we” here deliberately because I’m just as enmeshed in this as anyone else… I’m not perfect and have never claimed to be!!)

Spirituality, religion, faith, whatever we want to call it and however we want to define it has got to fundamentally be about truth, recognizing truth and confronting our own shallow constructs with it.  Evelyn Underhill nails it when she writes:

Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment. (Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People, 3.)

We are not telling the truth as revealed in the Gospel if we pretend that evil is not real.

I do believe in the image of God indelibly imprinted on the human soul. But I also believe in the sin and evil that obscure it, and that it must be cleansed frequently, its blurred lines touched up, and be colored in with the virtues (a nice image from Didymus the Blind riffing on Athanasius…).

But that cleansing work, performed by God, invited and cooperated with by us, has got to happen. We must recognize our own personal, secret, hidden complicities in the broader evils of our age. Yes, megacorps are bad; but our own personal sin has a role in sustaining and growing them… No, it’s not enough to decry them or use a general confession that mentions them obliquely. If you can’t begin to name your complicities, then you don’t really mean it.

The fall of Aleppo thrusts the face of evil into our eyes once again.

Reinhold Niebuhr is credited with saying that the only objectively verifiable Christian doctrine is Original Sin. This morning, scrolling through my news feeds, I’m feeling that. And yet there’s a cottage industry of ignoring and downplaying that such a thing even exists. Unfortunately for it, to twist a phrase, reality has a well-known Augustinian bias.

Ah, well—back to the book.

Happy Advent!

Historical/Fantasy Authors Take Note

Alice Hicklin tweeting as @AngloSaxonist is one of my favorite medieval tweeters. She sends out terrific images of mostly Early Medieval artifacts, and if you have any interest in the material culture of this period or just like pretty things, I definitely recommend you follow her!

This one came across today:

 

Here’s the point I want to make.

It’s November so everybody and their brother who thinks they can write a historical fiction or fantasy novel is toying with the idea of doing so. Please, learn an important lesson from this beautiful reliquary. While gemstones could be polished, cutting and faceting is a relatively late technology. Some crystals do appear in natural shapes that look like or suggest faceting, but the actual cutting of gems didn’t happen until the late medieval period and the Renaissance.

Pretty sparkly gems in your story are fine, but if the technology level is Early Medieval, gems would be in the cabochon style seen here, not faceted cuts!

I’ll save my rant on the ridiculous paucity of bucklers in historical fiction and fantasy (as in the end of this post) for another day…

Brain Foggy

Between things at work, things at home, trying to promote a book, trying to write two books, and fulfilling other writing/programming obligations, my brain hurts…  I owe a number of people emails as well that I’m very behind on. If you’re one of them, I apologize!

I have things to say on a number of church-related links floating around right now, but don’t have the time to actually say them. So let me issue this as a general thought on things in the church right now.

If you see something that needs doing, don’t wait on a committee or a process. Just do it. Some of the very best stuff for the church that I’ve seen in the last decade or two wasn’t produced by committees, dioceses, study groups, or well-funded organizational structures.

 

They were all done by regular people and their friends who gave a crap.

 

It’s your turn.

 

Podcasting Pause and Reflection

Due to several swiftly-approaching deadlines, I’m taking a hiatus from recording the St. Bede Psalmcast for a bit. We’ll see how long “a bit” turn out to be…

I’ve enjoyed doing the podcast. It’s certainly done what it was supposed to do, providing a venue for enforced research for my Cassiodorus/Psalms book. For that alone it’s been beneficial.

I’ve found some aspects of it frustrating as well. Chief among them is that I find it oddly detached from listener data and feedback. I use Soundcloud but it is also pushed to iTunes. I can see how many listens each episode has received on Soundcloud, but have no idea about the iTunes side. I literally have no idea how many people are or aren’t listening to it. Apparently the proper way to do it is to use a self-hosting solution that runs through subscription services so that you can track the number of file downloads directly from the server—but I didn’t do that when I set it up. Hence, I lack data to get a clear sense of when and why I get listeners.

Too, despite Soundcloud having the capability for comments and posting episodes here on the blog, I’ve received very little feedback on the show and its content. I don’t know if I’m connecting with my audience because I know very little of what my audience likes or doesn’t like. Looping back to the original purpose, yes, it helped me do structured research for my book; what it didn’t do was give me a sense of what my book’s target audience thought of what was being produced…

All in all, I like podcasting. If anything, I think the St. Bede Psalmcast might be a little too structured—I’m wondering if a more free-form podcast might be more engaging, particularly if it’s not “purpose-driven” in the same way that this one was. In any case—that’s it for a while, anyway.

Other Stuff Other Places

  • Busyness continues, but I’m learning some really cool stuff I never knew before about the guts of WordPress!
  • My latest piece went live at Grow Christians yesterday. It’s a musing about the relationship of respect to what it means to behave “appropriately” thinking specifically around kids in church.
  • Also, the new Summer edition of The Anglican Digest is out digitally. This whole issue focuses specifically on favorite prayers from the Book of Common Prayer; my reflection is the first one after Catherine’s Letter From the Editor.
  • Coming attractions… It’s not on Amazon yet, but my new book from Forward Movement has  a Library of Congress number, and a small number of physical advance copies are in the process of being printed!!