I’m beginning to read Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. It’s one of those books that I really should have read by now, & I’m finally remedying that. One of the points she makes in her preface to the second edition concerns the relationship between memory & forgetting: for the medieval memory, forgetting is not always a failure of memory but may in fact be “the sort of forgetting that itself results form an activity of memory.

The early Franciscans refusing to handle coin yet begging for alms, the new Joker movie, & the new Nosferatu trailer.

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In 1943, Pope Pius XII promulgated Divino afflante Spiritu, encouraging the translation of the Bible on the basis of original Hebrew & Greek texts. Prior to Divino afflante Spiritu the Latin Vulgate had served as the textual basis for Catholic translations of the Bible; this new directive from the pope inaugurated the modern era of Catholic biblical scholarship. The French Dominicans at the École Biblique in Jerusalem answered the call, publishing a French translation of the Bible—La Bible de Jérusalem—in 1956.

Here I rank the Oscars nominees for Best Picture, from least favorite to favorite. Honestly this was a very good year for Best Picture nominees so it was hard ranking them. With the exception of my bottom 3 (I really did not care for any of those), I could very easily arrive at an entirely different ranking, depending on the day. 10. Maestro Everything about Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic just felt so effortful, especially the performances.

Today, on the feast of Saints Perpetua & Felicity, I thought about their martyrdom. The account of their martyrdom—most of which is written by Perpetua herself—is a witness not only to the victory of life over death upon which Christianity is founded, but also of resistance against imperial oppression. Indeed, it is precisely in their dying that Perpetua & Felicity overcome the death-dealing ways of the Roman empire. From Perpetua’s Passion:

One of the particular challenges of teaching theology today—even to students who have some religious background—is the utter lack of theological formation most people in the United States receive. Some students may come in with some religious formation, in that they have participated in their church’s faith formation classes or even theology classes in a religious high school, but that formation tends to be more catechetical than theological. To oversimplify, catechesis provides a student with a religious community’s answers to theological questions, but it does not always provide the rationale for those answers.