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...