Finished reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers 📚

The Basilica di Santa Chiara, slightly obscured by trees. While the upper church of the Basilica di San Francesco is, I think, my favorite place in Assisi, overall I think I prefer the architecture of Clare’s basilica to Francis’s.

Fresco inside the Chapel of Santa Clara inside the Church of San Damiano

Basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi

A view from St. Peter’s Square

Il Papa! (If you squint you can see him.)

Light beams in Santa Maria del Popolo

Currently reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers 📚

Just in time to leave for Rome/Assisi, tomorrow, I got a little Francis of Assisi sticker for my water bottle.

I love Brother Bird perched on his arm, the stigmata on his hands folded in prayer, & especially the patchwork of his habit.

Finished reading: The Beauty of the Trinity: A Reading of the Summa Halensis by Justin Shaun Coyle 📚

The stack of books on my desk grows comically tall.

Philipp Rosemann:

Let me draw upon the register of contemporary philosophy to explain: if Heidegger is correct that the key to a thinker’s ideas lies in “that which, in what is said, remains unsaid” (das im Sagen Ungesagte)—in unarticulated, sometimes even unthought presuppositions underpinning an entire intellectual edifice—then it may not only be legitimate but crucial to read a work from its margins, from between its lines.

Currently reading: The Beauty of the Trinity: A Reading of the Summa Halensis by Justin Shaun Coyle 📚

Finished reading: Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World by Daniel Sherrell 📚

Currently reading: Poverty and Joy: The Franciscan Tradition by William Short, OFM 📚 I’m considering this as a required text for the intro course I teach (“The Way of Francis and Clare”)

Finished reading: Faith beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay by James Alison 📚

Currently reading: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré 📚

A week from today I’ll be on my way to Rome for a small conference on last things (de novissimis) in the theology of Alexander of Hales, plus a few days for sightseeing. I’m most excited for an overnight trip to Assisi—I’ve never been!

Killers of the Flower Moon looks so good 📽️

Finished reading: The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch 📚 This is a deeply affecting memoir; I especially like how motifs of swimming and water flow throughout the book. I wish I had read it instead of listening to the audiobook. The audiobook narrator read in a very performative style, almost like it was a stage production, at times even shouting the words. That approach may have suited Yuknavitch’s writing style, but I found it consistently distracting and occasionally even irritating.

I’m paying very little attention to early reviews of the new Indiana Jones movie—I want to see it with only the trailer in mind—but I couldn’t help but see that the premiere at Cannes got a lukewarm reception. I’m not too bothered; I wouldn’t think Cannes is the right audience for this movie. 📽️

Greg Hillis—theologian as well as serious baseball fan—offers in Commonweal Magazine an elegant defense of the pitch clock. While I still don’t much like the intrusion of chronology into a time-less sport, I think Hillis is right that too slow a game can interrupt its proper rhythm. ⚾

I know it’s really not that complicated but for whatever reason I can never keep track of where & how the numbering of the Psalter in the Masoretic text differs from that in the Septuagint. Whenever I come up against a medieval author citing a psalm & want to check the reference, I always end up looking up the cited psalm, & the psalms immediately after & before.

Currently reading: Dune by Frank Herbert 📚 Rereading this in anticipation of Part 2 📽️