On games
For the last few years, my go-to game for wintertime has been Factorio. It scratches a very deep itch for me, and I am very careful not to start playing until the decks are completely clear of work or other responsibilities. This happens most often in the winter when yardwork is on hold. Since complex mechanics seem to be a thing for me, I decided to give Dwarf Fortress another try, this time via Steam. So far…it’s ok. I’m slowly - very slowly - getting a sense of how deep it goes in terms of complexity, but it hasn’t quite gotten ahold of my nerd-nerve like Factorio’s optimization problems did. Plus, you know, there are rail networks to automate.
I’ve managed to keep my first Dwarf Fortress alive for a year of in-game time, which I know is barely scratching the surface. The population has grown a bit, and I can sort of see the farming, hunting, crafting, and defense management cycles forming. To be fair, I’m starting on a nerfed world with low-aggression monsters and whatnot. I’m nowhere close to kicking it to the curb, but I may restart it again on normal settings across the board and see how it runs without the training wheels. But I also just applied the 2.x update to Factorio and am eyeballing the Space Age expansion. The weather this weekend is looking grody, and we may be sort of locked in for a day or two. Pity.
Anyway, PTO is over, so the daily routines are more or less back in place. Paradoxically, with the holidays behind us, things feel a little more relaxed. I got a lot done and am in good shape to resume classwork towards the end of the month as we enter the homestretch. Some business travel is coming up, but I’ve got plenty of reading, so we’re good to go.
Currently reading: The Religion of the Day by University of Mary 📚
Currently reading: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa 📚
Last day of PTO, and I spent it doing all of those fiddly things that I never have time for during the rest of the year: rearranging and cleaning a bit of the office, planting seeds I want to germinate outdoors, running stuff to the dump, that sort of thing. All the other to-do stuff got to-done. The only thing I didn’t get to was the garage, which can wait. Still enjoying Absolution and we are having a lot of fun with Bad Monkey. Lots of weird/gonzo Florida in the air around here in the dead of winter, which seems about right.
A low-key NYE for us: served at the vigil mass, lots of tacos, and a colossal bonfire which has become a tradition. A toast at midnight, then off to sleep. Puttering around with house cleaning today and catching up on the horrible news out of New Orleans. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis
We pledge that the Catholic Church in Kentucky and Tennessee will continue to accompany and serve migrants with every possible resource. We will continue to advocate for your just treatment and dignity as our Catholic Social Teaching instructs in every way that we are able to do so.
The Church recognizes the right of individuals to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their family members. The Church also recognizes the responsibility of nations to control their borders and create migration policies. However, the Church teaches that this right is not unlimited and must be exercised with respect for the human dignity of each person and the common good.
The Church in the United States has long advocated for comprehensive immigration reform that includes pathways to citizenship, family reunification, and protections for those fleeing persecution. It emphasizes the need for just and humane treatment of all migrants, including access to legal protections, and due process. The Church recognizes that basic human rights are based on the dignity of being created in the image and likeness of God.
from “Statement of the Bishops of the Province of Louisville on the Feast of the Holy Family,” 2024
Currently reading: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer 📚
Currently reading: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 📚
Essays on eschatology and salvation turned in. Need to do one more small project to close out another class and I’m done until late January.
Somebody figured out the connections in the Beatrix Potter story universe and the graph is just delightful. (h/t MetaFilter)
This post is a round-up of tools and tidbits that have been useful to me over the last four years of formation. If you are in discernment for the diaconate or in the midst of aspirancy, some of these things might be useful to you. Diocesan programs can obviously vary from place to place.
If your formation program includes access to a library - especially a seminary library - take the time to become familiar with the various databases available for access. Many times, things that are not available in one database are actually sitting in another one. Some of them will give you online access to complete books, though the path to getting there might not be immediately obvious. My first go-tos tended to be Atla, JSTOR, IxTheo, and the Oxford eBook collection, but access and mileage varies according to your particular institution.
We had a “get acquainted” session with the librarian at one point early on, but I don’t think I really got the hang of online research until I was in my third year. Our librarians can also get scans of physical texts if they’re in the holdings but not online and can usually turn around requests very quickly.
Familiarize yourself with any in-house style guides. The individual instructors will tell you in their syllabi what, if any, formatting expectations they have, but it’s very good to know what the institution expects as well. St. Meinrad’s in-house guide is largely based on Turabian, with some important deviations peculiar to theological texts, biblical citations, magisterial documents, and primary sources. In some cases, they defer to the style guide used by Liturgical Press (abbreviations and so forth). Refer to these guides early and often as you’re writing, particularly anything around citations. Get used to doing things according to the institution’s way, and life will be easier.
If it’s been several years since you’ve been in school (and who among us, amirite), find a blank MLA template for Word (or LibreWriter) and use it for all your short-form stuff. If you’re a weirdo, you can find MLA templates in LaTeX. I nearly wrote my closure papers in LaTeX, but I couldn’t work out some tiny quirk with footnote formatting, so I dropped back to LibreWriter
For formal papers, getting a handle on citations is a must. There will be lots of them, and I found Zotero invaluable. If you’re familiar with Mendeley, you should be able to pick up Zotero pretty quickly, and the price is right: it’s free. Both are databases for tracking research sources. You can annotate PDFs in Zotero, which connects to Word and LibreWriter for inserting citations and auto-generating bibliographies. Once you get the workflow down, using it is a breeze. I have saved almost everything I’ve read for school (as well as all the books I’ve bought) in my Zotero database.
Grammarly has been invaluable in correcting some bad habits. I have also used Claude to review papers for flow and structure. A prompt I used recently went something like this and turned out to be very useful in tightening up a few things.
This essay is for a masters-level theology course I am completing as part of my preparation for ordination to the diaconate. I would like suggestions regarding structure, flow, and any minor grammatical or spelling errors. I want to leave the text as intact as possible, so please do not suggest substantive changes beyond structural/organizational, or the grammar errors I have already mentioned. If you have other suggestions beyond what I have specified, inquire first before showing them to me so that I can opt to decline seeing them.
Quizlets are useful for generating flash-cards and practice tests. Basic, limited access is free. We also used Google Docs to collaborate on study guides for tests.
If you need to suss out a piece of music real quick, but can’t read sheet music well, Sheet Music Scanner might be worth a look. Take a picture of the music, give it a second, and it plays it back to you. This has been especially useful for the weekends when I get assigned as cantor for mass.
Happy Memorial of St. Nicholas, who allegedly decked Arius' halls at the Council of Nicaea.
One of the papers I wrote for my closure project was an analysis of City of God as a template for the modern apologist. Augustine didn’t mount a courtroom-style defense of the faith like Justin Martyr, nor did he use the language of statesmen like Tertullian. Instead, he met pagan arguments on their own terms, without appealing to external authority. In fact, the authority he quotes most often is Varro, who tried (and generally seems to have failed) to systematize pagan belief.
The lesson for the modern apologist, I think, is to survey the landscape around us like shipwreck survivors and make use of the things lying around the shore. It’s almost a commonplace these days that the world is slowly careening into the darkness of a post-Christian era. You’re either lost to the zeitgeist or hunkered down as part of a vital remnant. I’m not sure that either of these views is particularly useful. The deep yearning for the transcendent hasn’t gone anywhere, and neither have the urges to worship or at least make use of the forms of worship and ritual (see Charles Taylor). This ought to give us tremendous hope and optimism as evangelists and apologists. An alternative to the immanent frame will have to be proposed from the highways and hedgerows, not the doorways of the narthex (see James Shea).
Just asked Claude for book recommendations based on things I’ve enjoyed in the weird/magic realism genre…this is what it came back with:
- The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
- Little, Big by John Crowley
- The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
- 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
We got our grades back for the last exam, and I’m satisfied with mine, so I’ll pass on the corrections opportunity offered by our instructor. All that remains is a pair of essays; he sent the prompts for those just now. Those aren’t due until early January, but I’ll probably start working on them this week. S̶t̶i̶l̶l̶ w̶a̶i̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ o̶n̶ g̶r̶a̶d̶e̶s̶ f̶o̶r̶ m̶y̶ b̶i̶g̶ p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶s̶.
[update: they came in, and I crushed them]
In other news, we came through Thanksgiving weekend just fine. It may snow a little tonight, but nothing dramatic. Looking forward to some time off again later this month and closing the (calendar) year out.
My formation cohort is about a year away from ordination, and we all seem to be hitting the ‘ready to be done with academic work’ wall about now. At the same time, it’s clear to me that once all of the school overhead has cleared away, I’ll need to come up with some other self-directed plan for continued (but lighter) study and hopefully more leisure reading. I’d like to go back and dip into a few things we touched on over the past few years - books that were required but from which we only read selections, that sort of thing. First test will come this spring - we have some travel planned, and by then, everything should be wrapped up and done. Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer is at the top of the list for certain.
Currently reading: The Once and Future King by T. H. White 📚
Turkey: seasoned. Grill: cleaned out. Served at mass this morning then took care of some year-end admin stuff for work. Everyone seems to be laying low, as it should be. Another wave of cooking will start later. Tomorrow morning is the Turkey Trot, followed by food & football. God bless you all!
Another formation weekend is behind us, and all that remains of Trinity and Salvation are a couple of papers to submit sometime before the end of December. Plenty to think about, especially the stuff on eschatology.
Our next class is a Liturgical Practicum, and the various rituals have been sitting here for a while now. We just need to review all the praenotandae and any general instructions beforehand. The final for that one will be to record an instructional video on some facet of what we’re studying, which will wrap up the semester. Looking ahead, our final semester will be Moral Theology and Canon Law, two weekends apiece.
This past weekend was one of our potluck sessions. One weekend per semester, our families join us for Sunday mass, bring a covered dish, and then we all get together and eat. It’s all great fun, and for our kids, it’s one of the highlights of the year. I came home from that, lazed on the couch a little, dipped into Four Quartets, napped, and watched football. Grandkids and in-laws rolled in a bit later and a good time was had by all.
Georgia won yesterday, so life is good. Regarding pro teams, I’m kind of non-committal. I’ll watch whoever is on. The kids root for the Titans, which makes sense, and the Vols, which does not. My wife and I both went to Georgia. None of the kids go to UT, though several go to MTSU, which is having a dismal season as usual. We were a house divided when the Dawgs ran roughshod over Tennessee last weekend.
So this morning, for the first time, I preached (or more accurately, ‘delivered a reflection’). It went well and I avoided heresy. Got several compliments and good feedback from Fr. Last night at OCIA we discussed the liturgical calendar and I went way too deep on the dating of Christmas.
I spent last week in Las Vegas for work. The event was fine, but I’m not big on the whole hotel/casino/resort thing. I get it: the business is gambling, and all things are ordered to it, but that means there’s nowhere to chill inside without betting on something. I get it; just don’t like it. 2/10.
The forgiveness of particular venial sins comes about only through an act of fervor in the charity already possessed habitually. Aquinas rightly points out that this movement of contrition does not always occur. He writes, “it can happen that after someone has committed a venial sin, he will not actually think anything about abandoning the sin or holding to it, but he thinks perhaps that a triangle has three angles equal to two right angles; and in this thought he falls asleep and dies.“²⁷ Obviously, according to Aquinas’s argument, this geometer has not yet been forgiven for his sin. The guilt remains. Nevertheless, because he maintained the love of God, he would ultimately still be destined for the beatific vision.
— Fr. Luke Wilgenbusch, Saved as Through Fire: A Thomistic Account of Purgatory, Temporal Punishment, and Satisfaction
The clear takeaway is that excessive, habitual thoughts about math are not necessarily good for your soul. The footnote references Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences, lib. 4, dist. 21, q. 1, a. 3, qc. 1: “Potest autem quod aliquis postquam veniale peccatum commisit, nihil actualiter cogitet de peccato vel dimittendo vel tenendo; sed cogitet forte quod triangulus habet tres angulos aequales duobus rectis; et in hac cogitatione obdormiat, et moriatur.”
Christian life on earth is eternal life already begun. Sanctifying grace and charity endure eternally. St. John of the Cross speaks thus: “In the evening of our life we shall be judged by our love for God and neighbor.”
— Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.
