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...

Tess It's been three months since I last posted. The blog rather slipped my mind, actually. Things have been busy, and today I felt the need to get some things "on paper" before getting back to my spring break tasks, which consist largely of getting caught up to where I should have been last week. Or last month, more like it. Anyway, the big news is that in January we welcomed a dog into our home. The shelter had given her the name Sweet Caroline. Her foster dad felt that that wasn't her name and tried Care Bear instead. We settled pretty quickly on Tess (we're a very Victorian-novel sort of household), and she recognized it as her name within a day or two. We were told she's an American Staffordshire Terrier and Australian Cattle Dog mix--we're awaiting DNA testing to confirm that--and about three years old. She's sweet, relaxed, nonreactive, and affectionate, and I am utterly smitten with her. In the meantime, I had work to do on two search committee...