Lesser Feasts

From an early MS of Anselm's last work,  De concordia I'm about a thousand words ahead of my goal, which is fantastic, because next week I'm attending a virtual conference and will be pressed for time to get writing done. In addition to having over two-thirds of Chapter 3 written, I have some of the Further Reading section drafted. I'm also making the list of illustrations. The book doesn't really need much in the way of illustrations, and the press has told me not to add illustrations just for the sake of having them, but a few of them might add some interest. Certainly there should be an illustration from a manuscript, like the one above. (Too bad they'll all be in black and white.) A map of the key places would be helpful. Right now I just have an instruction for them to find or produce a map that includes all the places mentioned in Chapter 1. Since I have yet to write Chapter 1, this directive will need a bit of tweaking before I submit the list on July 15....

  "Pilgrim's Porch, Canterbury" Sir David Young Cameron (1865-1945) Today the Church celebrates Saint Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604), Apostle to the English and First Archbishop of Canterbury, and I celebrate finding a way to draw together today's saint with my love of Scottish art and my work-in-progress on another Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Anselm (1033-1109). This morning I attained my goal for the week, so I have some hope of getting ahead. (Creating some slack in the schedule would be very useful.) I'm in the middle of chapter 3, which is mainly about the ontological argument. (I've given up on saying "the so-called ontological argument," because as stupid and uninformative as that label is — Kant is to blame for so many things — we're clearly stuck with it.) I think the way Anselm's ontological argument is usually presented is just wrong, but in fairness to the reader, I have to give the standard interpretation before I offer wha...

"Where Sinks the Voice of Music into Silence" Ancell Stronach, 1924 (The image has nothing to do with anything. I just like it. The auction catalogue notes, "Stronach's poetic title does little to reveal the meaning or moment that this work depicts, but it assists in evoking the atmosphere that the painting itself conveys. The feeling is symbolic and meaningful with a sense of mysticism, creativity, and spirituality.") The goal for this week was 6000 words written and Chapter 2 fully drafted. These were meant to be the same thing, though Chapter 2 is done at 5300 words and I have another 1000 written on Chapter 3. So I'm nicely on schedule at the moment. Since I didn't have any desperate catching up to do, I took the morning to rehearse with my violinist friend for the first time in months. The voice of music very much did not sink down into silence. A snippet from the week's work:              Anselm probably never met a professed ...

Anselm presiding over my study (Warning: This is a pretty boring post. But it will set me up for some decently interesting posts later on.) I'm spending the whole summer with Anselm. I have two projects due at the end of the summer. The first is a slender (indeed, skinny) monograph,  Anselm: A Very Short Introduction , for Oxford University Press; the first draft of that is due August 1. The second is a rather large volume of translations,  Anselm: The Complete Treatises , for Hackett Publishing Company; the final draft of that is due September 1. The translations are actually all finished. Most of them have appeared in Anselm: Basic Writings , which the Complete Treatises  will replace, and the rest (amounting to about 150 closely printed pages) is all at least drafted, and a fair bit of it is fully polished. So that part is fairly low-key. The VSI, by contrast, is getting written from scratch. If you don't know the Very Short Introduction series, you should; they're qui...

 My friend Jared Cramer has posted a characteristically thoughtful essay on what we Episcopalians should, and should not, be looking for in our bishops. I hope to engage with it on this blog before too long, but in the meantime, I encourage you to read it.

  "Today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts." Hebrews 3:15 (AV) Today, Lord:     today I want to hear your voice. Teach me how to hear it,     how to listen for it. Not the demanding voice of deadlines     or the seductive voice of pleasures; Not the clamoring voice of self-assertion     or the intriguing voice of what-ifs and why-nots. No, but your voice,     still,     small,     winsome,     light made music,     radiance captured in words          that are not quite words. Today, Lord:     today I want to hear your voice. Sharpen my ears to hear it;     soften my heart to receive it. If it is a voice of judgment,     soften my heart to accept your rebuke. If it is a voice of encouragement,     soften my heart to embrace your loving-kindness. If it is a voice of forgiveness,     soften my heart to fe...

  How exactly YouTube works is, of course, a great mystery. Some video clips show up because they're closely related to other things I've watched. I went through a few days when various renditions of "Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego" kept popping up, clearly because I had watched this: (None of the subsequent versions could displace this one as my favorite.) But it's suspicious that videos about Scottish Gaelic started showing up, given that all of my admittedly strange efforts to learn Gaelic had been taking place on another site entirely. But I did have a certain feeling of achievement when I saw the title of the video at the top and knew exactly what it meant ! Indeed, I do  want to speak in Gaelic. I want to learn the language. I want to be in a place where they speak it. Summer, maybe? It will be a while before they let Americans in without a ten-day quarantine. In the meantime, I have plenty to keep me busy. It's Lent, so there's a Lenten study to d...