Spending Easter with Saint Augustine and His Mom
Circle of Pedro Berruguete (c. 1450-1504), “Saint Augustine and Saint Monnica”
Exeunte anno quinquagesimo septimo aetatis carnis meae . . .
That’s Augustinian for “As the fifty-seventh year of the age of my flesh was drawing to a close,” which is an over-the-top way of noting that I turn fifty-seven tomorrow.
Sunday’s presentation (here) was meant to cover Augustine’s conversion, Monnica, and the sacraments, but I didn’t manage to get to the sacraments except very tangentially. That’s OK: I have one more presentation in which I can tie up some loose ends as I do a 20,000-foot view of the exegetical books. And listening back to it, as I’m doing now, I’m pretty happy with how it went. People asked great questions and made really smart observations, and Monnica at last got her due. (Start at 39:55 if you want to get straight to her.)
The week has been focused on exercise, worship, and evaluating other people’s work. As for exercise, I managed to drag myself to the gym on Sunday in addition to my usual workouts with my trainer on Tuesday and Thursday. It’s hard to tell, because I don’t have anyone handy who is skilled with the calipers, but I think my weight gain over the last few months is muscle. Certainly my waist seems to be the same size at 162 that it was at 156. For this Sunday’s presentation I will have both a suit and a shirt that have been tailored to fit my present shape; I’m looking forward to that.
As for worship, I was off to St Petersburg to celebrate Ascension Day, which is my favorite feast. I think of it as a glorious eruption of the Incarnation cycle into the Resurrection cycle:
Thou hast raised our human nature on the clouds to God’s right hand:
There we sit in heavenly places, there with thee in glory stand.
Jesus reigns, adored by angels; Man with God is on the throne;
Mighty Lord, in thine ascension, we by faith behold our own.
St Pete is a bit of a haul for a Thursday evening service, but I’ve been bitching for years about how no one around here does a proper Ascension Day service, so I kind of had to go—and of course I’m very glad I did. I sang with the choir, which premiered a lovely new anthem by their director of music, and heard an excellent sermon.
And then there’s evaluating other people’s work. Medieval philosophy is a small subfield and somewhat on the margins of the discipline (though not nearly as marginalized as it was a couple of generations ago), so I don’t get asked to do nearly as much of that sort of thing as many colleagues who are at a similar stage in their careers. But I do get asked some, and I almost never say no. Evaluations for promotion, in particular, are of such great professional importance that I feel an all-but-insuperable obligation to write them whenever I’m asked. This week I wrote my third of the year, which is a personal best, not likely to be repeated. I also wrote a reference letter for a fellowship application, but that was easy, because I already know the applicant and his work very well (neither was true for the promotion evaluation). Today I’m trying to figure out what to do about the journal submission I agreed to referee. It looked like something I should be able to manage—it’s on the topic of my most-cited paper, so I kind of know stuff—but on reading it I discovered that most of it is technical philosophy of language, about which I know absolutely nothing.
I may just have to punt.
Oh, yeah, there was one more thing. We decided, with considerable trepidation, to take our Tess to the Tampa Riverwalk. She can be very reactive to other dogs, but she behaved absolutely beautifully. It was quite the triumph, and as you can see, she had a great time.
