Reminder: the footnotes comes from reading notebooks mostly from thirty to forty years ago. From Therese of Lisieux’s autobiography written in the late 1800s. If I open a book, even the most beautiful or touching, my heart closes at once, and I read without being able to understand; or if,  I understand, my mind is […]

One of the categories I intended to use for this blog was “The Word.” There were two things I wanted to do with this label. One was to keep a weekly post going that was part of the Wesleyan “pre-bulletin” (forgive me for that clever but ugly play on pre-owned) I published for the Wesleyan […]

I was walking in a gallery with a Mandarin speaking student. He looked at the English label identifying a ink painting from ancient China. He got rather sad at the “translation.” “Three pines by a river” was an accurate word for word translation but he said it missed almost everything of the Chinese title. There […]

It is very hard for modern people to read anything written even a little way back in time. Even the recent past fades fast so we do not understand who the people are in the text or what the event is that the text talks about. Worse, we bring our experiences to the text first […]

Some great literature begins with a sentence about getting lost…and how did we get here? Peggy Steinfels has a Commonweal article, about how her Catholic life in Chicago and some great teachers and great questions. One of her teachers was John L. McKenzie…a priest who knew so much about the Bible he did a huge […]