Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

Blogging has been quite inconsistent over the last six weeks, but I doubt that the two of you out there who check in regularly have lost much sleep over that. Bottom line is that I have worn my temporary bachelorhood neither well nor gladly, and it’s been difficult to motivate myself to do things like this. The good news is that Flesh of My Flesh gets home on Thursday; the bad news is that I’m going to have to move the books I’m reading off of her side of the bed now.

A brief update on Cappella Romana’s The Divine Liturgy in English: you can now pre-order it from their website, and there is also an absolutely gorgeous pdf of of the liner notes. I’d also bookmark this page for the future. Noting that the ship date for online orders is one week from today, I’m looking very much forward to posting a review of this sometime by the end of the next week.

My French class has been a good opportunity to formally review some things with this language, and to have a chance to start getting a bit of a sense of what kind of scholarship is out there in French in my areas of interest. As it works out, I’ll be translating a short article by Fr. John Meyendorff for my final project — it’s called “The Image of Christ According to Theodore the Studite.”

Along related lines, I have decided to swap out Coptic for Modern Greek this fall. Ultimately, I have a tough time making a case for Coptic in terms of being directly related to my areas of interest; if I were more interested in early monasticism or gnosticism or such things, that would be one thing — and if it were actually going to be fulfill a degree requirement (which, in the alternate universe where I was admitted to the M.A. program here, it does), that would be something too.

But I’m not, and it isn’t. I may keep the textbook for purposes of picking through it later if I ever figure out how to motivate myself independently; we’ll see.

By contrast, I can make a much better case for Modern Greek being directly related to my interests. There is scholarship in Modern Greek, it will be a good thing to be able to speak if I’m ever fortunate enough to be able to travel for research reasons, and in the more likely scenario that someday we’re at a church where Greek is the primary language of the people. Also, it is at least strongly related to something with which I already have some familiarity, so I won’t be starting over completely from scratch.

And, finally, a 12:20-1:10 timeslot is simply a heck of a lot easier for an 8-5 working man to manage than 8:00-9:15. Y’know, practical matters like that have to intervene at some point.

On a matter completely unrelated to academic or ecclesiastical pursuits — through a stroke of absolute dumb luck, I am going to have, shall we say, a rather early dark (k)night, and I’m expecting it to be cool to the (i)max. I’ll have more to say about this Wednesday morning, I expect.

Finally (for now), I’ll note that my stock has risen some in the last couple of months. If only I could figure out which ATM machine I’m supposed to use to get access to this…