Lesser Feasts

  I sent Anselm: The Complete Treatises  off to Hackett last Friday, all 250,000 words of it. Tomorrow I'm sending off a complete draft of Anselm: A Very Short Introduction  to Oxford University Press. At a mere 36,000 words, it will be a much slenderer volume (that's kind of the point), but I'm really pleased with it. I am tired, but content. The VSI will be sent out to readers for the press, so I'll have those comments to take into account, as well as comments from friends who have been kind enough to read the draft. So there will be more work to do, but for now I can put it aside and concentrate on the more immediate task of teaching Plato's Phaedo  to my intro class and figuring out Sunday's sermon. I conclude the VSI with a reflection on a short passage of Anselm's Prayer to the Holy Cross. Here's my final paragraph, followed by the full text of the Prayer. You might wish to keep it on hand for Holy Cross Day, September 14. (It may also help to know...

William McTaggart (1835-1910), Winter Wheat I returned from my very productive New York/Philadelphia trip in good shape to have both Anselm: I Can't Believe How Short This Introduction Is  and Anselm: Complete Treatises with Selected Recipes and Sick Twitter Burns  off to the publishers by my September 1 deadline. This week, though, is all about getting ready for the start of classes on the 23rd. I posted the skeleton of a syllabus yesterday (the deadline to do so, though what the penalty is, or even could be, for failure to meet the deadline is not at all obvious). I do not believe in this syllabus. It's pretty close to my syllabus from the last time I taught the class, and that went pretty well, so maybe I should have more confidence this time. But I have a sinking feeling that I have not remotely accommodated the differences between last time and this time. Last time I had 100 students, so I could get some discussion going (a fair bit, as it turned out). This time I have 30...

The initial capital from On the Procession of the Holy Spirit , which goes unmentioned in the book (Bodl. 271 f 109r). 'N' of course stands for New York. Getting away to a place where I had nothing to do but write during the day and catch up with friends in the evening has proved to be more productive even than I had hoped. Last week I wrote the chapter on the fall of the angels. On Monday, thanks to the realization that I basically had already written the Atonement chapter, I finished that chapter as well. (Copy-and-paste plus maybe three hours of editing was all it took.) That means yesterday I started chapter 7, "Life in the meantime." This one may take a while longer because I don't have a clear plan for it, just a jumble of themes: living on the knife-edge between heaven and hell, the central concepts of obedience and order, grace, what goes on in the prayers and meditations, why Anselm thinks you definitely shouldn't marry your late husband's brother...

The view from atop the coffee bus (is that a thing?) in the patio of the High Line Hotel, Chelsea Despite the best efforts of General Seminary to thwart me by randomly changing the library's opening hours, not to mention my own occasional late nights (late for me, anyway) catching up with dear friends, I have managed to settle into a productive routine. It's nothing fancy: just breakfast, about four hours of writing (interrupted by lunch if I got a late start), nap, gym, miscellaneous stuff. That last part could use some refining. Still, I got Chapter 5, "How things went wrong," drafted from start to finish over the course of five days. I'll take it. Serendipitously, I stumbled across this post  about how one can't consistently do focused mental work for more than three or four hours a day. I'm finding this guy's writing useful. ***** This week's excerpt summarizes the philosophical issues at play in Anselm's account of the fall of the angels a...

Monday, 2 August I have been assured that there will be Morning Prayer in Good Shepherd Chapel at 9:00. There is, but only because I've shown up with my Daily Office Book  in my overfilled briefcase and say it by myself. I almost forget to turn east for the creed, but no one is there to see it but God, who already knows I'm a bit scatter-brained. **** At home I have a stained-glass Saint Anselm presiding over my work. At General Seminary I have John Henry Hobart, founder of the seminary. He would be glad that I said Morning Prayer, but he would wonder where everyone else was. A bit of Episcopal Church trivia I know for some reason: he hated that portrait. ***** By noon I've made some decent progress, so I ask the cheerful woman at the front desk whether there's anywhere close, good, and cheap for lunch. "Well, there's La Bergamote. It's close and good, though not especially cheap." The Croque Monsieur is excellent. It is not especially cheap. ***** Thi...