Lesser Feasts

FCB Caddell, Head of a Young Man  (1934) My employment at the University of South Florida ended last week. I had a good run. They hired me with tenure, promoted me to full professor, paid me reasonably well, let me use up tons of sick leave when I was desperately ill, allowed me to go half-time for a couple of years just because I felt like it, and basically left me alone to do what I wanted to do. I'm not leaving angry. Far from it. But I am  leaving. Starting August 1 I will be the Isabelle A. and Henry D. Martin Professor of Medieval Philosophy at Georgetown University. I am thrilled beyond words about this. I get to be in a department and at a university where my focus on the Christian intellectual tradition isn't a generously tolerated eccentricity, but essential to the institution's self-conception. I get to teach, by all accounts, really first-rate undergraduates. Yesterday I started cleaning out my office. I'm not going to go all Kon-Mari on it, but any book tha...

  John Houston, Sunset over Cornfields Right on the heels of being called up to the bishop coadjutor search committee, I got asked to chair a faculty search committee in my department. I really, really didn't want to. Faculty searches are a lot of work; they are heavily regulated and subject to all kinds of irksome restraints. (For example, if two committee members see each other in the hallway and one says to the other, "Candidate X looks really promising." they have just violated the state's open meetings law.) But I've had plenty to say over the years about senior faculty who shirk important service, and I didn't want to fall under my own justifiable condemnation; plus, given that I'm teaching only one course this semester and have met all my pressing research deadlines, it really would have been selfish to say no. Not to mention that I'm eligible for a sabbatical next year. Better get that application completed soon. My hope is to spend some substa...

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...

James Paterson, Edinburgh from Craigleith This painting is part of an exhibition of the Glasgow Boys at The Fine Art Society in Edinburgh. (A lot of my images lately have been from that exhibition.) I had hoped to see it in person, but it closes a week from today, and restrictions on travel from the US to Scotland are still too prohibitive. I won't make it to Scotland at all this summer, but I'm taking a few days to get a change of scenery a little closer to home, including a week to ten days of focused work at the library at General Theological Seminary. My main job this week was to get started on Chapter 1, "Anselm's life, work, and contexts." I was planning to save it for last because it will be the most difficult to write, but after drafting Chapters 2-4 I realized that I need the first chapter to make my list of illustrations, which currently requests "a map or maps including all the places mentioned in Chapter 1." That list is due to the press, wel...

  Edward Arthur Walton, "A shepherd and his flock at sunset" 1882 I suppose it's time for my first semi-dispirited update. I'm a bit behind now, probably by about a week. This week has been busy, and it didn't help that I came down with a slight cold yesterday. (The primary symptom is grumpiness, but it's still not conducive to work.) I'm also preaching this weekend, so my focus has to be elsewhere between now and Sunday. Still, it wasn't an entirely unproductive week, even on the book -- I do have an except, as usual. Plus I finished polishing all the additional translations for Anselm: The Complete Treatises  and uploaded them here , where they will be available until the book is published in September 2022. On Wednesday I got some recording done for the Noonday Prayer podcast, which will return in Advent, and then (just to show that I have not entirely forgotten the name of this blog) I celebrated the Feast of Joseph Butler. I've been watching t...

By the time I remembered I was supposed to sign up for worship at Old St Paul's, I was too late, so this morning I went to the Cathedral. It's my last Sunday in Edinburgh (for now). Tomorrow I take the train down to London; on Tuesday I fly home. So today is about getting ready to leave, taking care of unfinished business, and taking stock. The first bit of unfinished business was a print in the window of one of the galleries in Stockbridge that I had decided to buy. So after the service I walked down to Stockbridge. Ah, the Stockbridge Market is open. There's nothing in the fridge; maybe I'll find something I want for lunch. And behold! a booth selling Scotch eggs. I had just  been thinking that I hadn't had a single Scotch egg the whole time I've been here. That's lunch sorted. And then there was a bakery stall, where I found a piece of cake that surely could not be as delicious as it looked, but the experiment seemed worth conducting. Then on to the galle...

My time in Edinburgh is drawing to a close, so I'm beginning to wrap things up. Yesterday I gave my research talk to the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities -- quite a different experience from the first two times, since it was all disembodied. I was very careful to make the talk accessible to a broad audience of humanities folks, which is not easy for a fairly technical subject that requires a good bit of background to motivate it. Judging by the comments and questions, I think I succeeded, though at the expense of annoying the one other philosopher in the group, who clearly wanted a technical talk on the metaphysics of substances, powers, and dispositions, instead of the general-audience talk on virtues and the good life that I had so carefully prepared. (This particular philosopher practices that version of philosophy-as-blood-sport that I associate in particular with, well, her department, of which I used to be a member.) After my talk I turned in the keys to my of...

I honestly had not known until a few days ago that Edinburgh, like so many other cities, is traditionally said to be built on seven hills. Thanks to this video , I learned that I had already walked up four of them. One walks up Castle Rock in the normal course of touristy things. I've been on Calton Hill any number of times, most memorably after the early-morning Easter Vigil at Old St Paul's a few years ago, when I joined the choir for their traditional singing of the Hallelujah Chorus on the National Monument (albeit in C, because who has those notes at that hour?). I've posted here about my occasional outings to Arthur's Seat. And this past weekend I went up Craiglockhart Hill. Having put in a particularly good day of work yesterday -- though honestly I still don't know whether my brilliant set piece about sins ex certa malitia  in Aquinas and Scotus is actually any good, or just one of those cases of my typing outrunning my thinking -- I decided that this after...

If you want to be persnickety about it, I've never actually made it all the way to the very tippy-top of Arthur's Seat. There's a point very near the top where the path becomes quite narrow and exposed, and I get that out-on-a-ledge feeling, and my fear of heights tells me not to go any farther. But if I make it that far, I count it as attaining the summit: I've managed physically to reach the highest point that's possible for me psychologically. The last time I attained the summit was in the spring of 2016, before the Late Unpleasantness occurred. It was pretty taxing for me: more so, no doubt, because I was carrying an extra twenty or thirty pounds. Even a few months of walking around hilly Edinburgh doesn't quite prepare me to spring up Arthur's Seat without pausing for breath, I find. When I was back for the Festival in August of last year, I gave it a shot again. I didn't get terribly far up before I had to call it quits. I was still too weak from m...

I put on decent clothes last night for the first time since I've been in Edinburgh. I had a reservation at Café St Honoré, a wonderful little French restaurant down a cobbled street in the New Town. It's the sort of place where posh people in Alexander McCall Smith's novels are always having dinner for some special occasion. My special occasion was the end of my fourteen-day self-isolation. The decent clothes, I must say, were a bit snug. A basically sedentary two weeks had done wonders for my Anselm bibliography and my progress on the second Brahms violin sonata, but it had not been kind to my waistline. Five pounds, maybe. But I had neglected to remind myself that the reason I can always eat everything I want in Edinburgh and still lose weight is that I'm walking. All the time. Everywhere. Which I hadn't been. For two weeks. The modest protest from my waistband notwithstanding, I set out for dinner. Such freedom to do as I pleased, to walk along the streets of thi...

Twenty-four hours to go. The essence -- the essence , I'm telling you -- of living in Edinburgh is walking several miles in the course of a day, just doing normal things, experiencing the ever-changing light, the quiet beauty of the buildings, marveling at the impeccably behaved Scottish dogs. Obviously I knew what I was getting myself into when I came here. Two weeks of isolation for the sake of two or three months of Edinburgh seemed, and was, a sensible bargain. But I will be very glad indeed when life gets back to normal, or, rather, to that super-charged beyond-normal that characterizes life in my favorite city. My first full day will be Michaelmas: Morning Prayer and Eucharist at the Cathedral, then getting set up in my office in Hope Park Square. But the fourteen days will expire, by my reckoning, tomorrow evening. I have a reservation for dinner at Cafe St Honore , and I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it. After two weeks of microwaving ready meals br...

You know you've spent too much time in Scotland -- wait, that's a conceptual impossibility; let's start that again -- you know you've spent a delightfully rich amount of time in Scotland when Adamnan of Iona comes up in the calendar and you think, "Ah, yes. Adamnan of Iona," rather than, "Who?" But in case you're wondering, Adamnan was abbot of Iona around 700; he was kinsman and hagiographer of the much better-known Saint Columba. (I have to justify the name of this blog somehow.) On this ninth day of self-isolation I think I have finally hit my stride. Not that I wasn't being reasonably productive before, but more things fell into place today. I finally started writing my chapter on Scotus's account of the virtues. (The virtues are not that important in Scotus's ethics, but the reasons they're not important are important.) I attended the weekly research-in-progress seminar for the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities...

The knock at the door came at 8:30 pm. What could that be? All I could think was that Her Majesty's Self-Isolation Enforcement Squad had come to verify that I was where I had said I would be. Good luck, that, since it is just  possible that I had somewhat  stretched the letter of the law earlier in the day. Setting down my gin and tonic, I went to the door. "Hi! I'm Gillian," said a cheerful thirty-something woman with a perfect Edinburgh accent. "I own the property downstairs. This is Anya. She's one of the two students renting the upstairs flat. The owner of your flat -- she's not very nice, actually, but she did tell us you'd be here, and we wanted to welcome you to the building." She handed me a bottle of wine, and we chatted for a few minutes. Thinking back over it this morning, I realize it's the only conversation I've had in person in a week, beyond the few words it takes to accept a grocery drop-off from the Deliveroo driver. I en...

 I find that a lot of my self-isolation period is occupied with planning what I'm going to do when I'm no longer required to self-isolate. Trip to the Cairngorms? All worked out. Plans for daily public worship beginning on Michaelmas? You bet. Another favorite pastime is trying imagine how I might excusably go out into the world (where, strangely enough, it is persistently sunny). For example, I could surely be allowed to go out to empty my trash in the nearest bin, and then it would be totally understandable if I got turned around on the way back and accidentally  walked all the way down to Stockbridge and then down along the Water of Leith and back through Canonmills . . . OK, maybe not. Fortunately I'm managing to get work done. I just submitted a bibliographical entry on Anselm -- quite a lot of work for barely 5000 words -- and my proposal for the latest Oxbridge Handguide to Stuff should be ready to go off tomorrow. Then it's on to Scotus on virtue. Music is also ...

A beautiful, cloudless day in Edinburgh tests my commitment to self-isolation. What would Hildegard of Bingen have done? Well, she would have written some theology: I got a proposal off to a press. She would have made some music: I did some serious practice on Bach, Brahms, and Franck. She would have prayed: I followed the appointed prayer for my current jurisdiction . But would she have taken a walk? Here I think we must play the mystery card.

Now that I am completely unpacked, my groceries have been delivered, and I have settled into my new time zone, I have no further excuse not to begin tackling the to-do list for today that I so sensibly made for myself last night. First on that list is "post to blog." Since I can't get out and have adventures, the best I can do for today is take you on a tour of my flat. I'm in the Georgian New Town on Royal Crescent, overlooking the King George V Park. The flat fortunately has high ceilings and lots of windows, so there's plenty of light even on a grey day like today. The view from the back windows is classic Edinburgh. And yes, people do sit out there. Knowing that I would have a Clavinova in the flat, I brought a bunch of music to learn. I read through this (the Bach Violin Sonata in F minor) yesterday, and today I mean to get started on the Brahms No. 2 in A major. And there you have it. On to the rest of my to-do list, which is all about Augustine, Anselm, Sco...

After a long but impressively smooth journey, I found myself last night around 8:30 sitting on Dublin Street, waiting for the letting agent to bring me the keys for my flat, and singing this sotto voce  as the occasional passerby slipped into the quiet of a Sunday evening in the less bustling parts of the New Town. I justify the sentimentality and arguably misplaced nostalgia by noting that the arranger (the tall tenor in the middle) is an American living in Edinburgh. This morning I am barely jet-lagged. I've ordered grocery delivery, made my usual breakfast of buttered crumpets and cafetiere coffee, and sat down to plan my day. Being forbidden by law to leave my flat except under unusual circumstances, I have no excuse not to be productive, though I find that staring dreamily out of my windows is a perfectly good use of time in itself.

Sitting in O'Hare on my first of two layovers -- not part of my original itinerary, or even of the itinerary after that -- I feel as if I should write something poetic about liminality. The bus from my arrival terminal to the international terminal, going through security for the second time . . . watching two Sunday services, one at home and one in Edinburgh, but being physically present for neither . . . I'm sure there's something terribly deep there, but I can't think what it is. The gate agents are busy making sure people are going to be able to get where they want to go. "Do you have the QR code you need to get into Spain?" "Have you registered your fourteen-day self-isolation address with the UK?" (That one was for me, and of course I have.) I have all sorts of paperwork just in case Her Majesty's border agents, who can be skeptical (or "sceptical") at the best of times, are inclined to be inquisitive: the itinerary for my return ...

Tomorrow I leave for Edinburgh. I have been eager for many months to be able to say that. Edinburgh is where I go to recharge, to get back to work after other duties (sometimes quite pleasant ones) have stalled my research. I have cadged an office and a nominal fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University, I have found a decent flat in the New Town, and I am making the necessary arrangements to exercise my priestly ministry -- though only a bit -- in the Diocese of Edinburgh. So tomorrow I leave for Edinburgh. I have a very thorough and thoughtful packing list, which I have no doubt is going to prove to be wildly overambitious. What what the clothes I need for the un-Florida-like weather I can expect, the books I have to have for various projects, and the music I'm determined to practice (you can see the piano tucked away in the back -- I hope it doesn't sound appalling), there will be quite a lot to take. And if I could somehow manage to...