Reading in Exile

I have finally completed David Foster Wallace's magnificent novel Infinite Jest . It took me eight months, but I read many other novels and other books during that time as well. It's a book worth taking slowly. There's a great deal that could be said about it, but for now I'll just say a little. Much has been written on the themes of the book: addiction in general, America's addiction to entertainment in general, the conflict between the freedom of pure license and obedience to a higher authority, how playing high-level competitive sport both shelters us from the horror of the freedom of pure license and also is a horror and an addiction in itself, the spiritual depth of twelve-step programs, the need to overcome an ironic and cynical stance toward the world in favor of a heartfelt, even naive, sincerity, etc. Much has been written on the form of the novel: its cyclic structure, its encyclopedic accounts of tennis and drugs and Alcoholics Anon...

I've recently been asked to write two papers, one on Max Scheler's theory of value perception for a forthcoming volume from Oxford University Press on spiritual perception, and the other on Dietrich Von Hildebrand for a special issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly . This has led me, especially during the last week, to revisit a lot of material I haven't looked at closely in some time. While I've dealt with these thinkers in my  papers on personalism , I haven't concentrated on Hildebrand  since my undergraduate days at Franciscan University of Steubenville , and not on Scheler  since I was working on my dissertation. In my professional writing, I've focused more recently on Thomistic metaphysics, especially the Thomism of the 16th and 17th centuries, and on more contemporary French phenomenology. It's been quite a treat this week revisiting in a focused, daily way, this older, more realist, more German phenomenology. The fundamental idea...

Today, the Church celebrates the Feast of Corpus Christi; indeed, not only is today given over to the celebration of the most holy Body and Blood of Our Lord, but the next seven days as well, after which we shall be presented with the holy mystery of Our Lord's Sacred Heart (to which my family is consecrated.) To receive a Sacrament is to be initiated into the power and energeia, the activity, of God. I know that I too often think of the Sacraments, even the Blessed Sacrament, occasionalistically--that is, I think of my reception of the Sacrament just as an occasion for God to act upon me, rather than thinking of the Sacrmanet as really having the causal power to bring about God's power and activity in me. But God's action upon us is nearly always mediated by creaturely causality. And in the Sacraments God does not just act upon us in the way He does in all natural events, moving creaturely causes to their natural activities as the primary cause of all creaturely events ...

I'm beginning this blogging exercise on Trinity Sunday , which I think is an auspicious day for an Anglophile like me. This exercise is meant to help me write a little everyday, to establish more regular writing habits during this summer, and to help me write on topics other than those I'm currently writing on professionally. I hope some of you will read along with me, and offer your own thoughts on what I say here. I'm starting with what will probably be a longer post that what I'll normally write, but I wanted to get some thoughts out here about some directions I think I'll be taking my thoughts on this blog. Over the last year, I've become involved in an ongoing research project on spiritual perception --that is, the sense-like perception of God and other spiritual things. It seems obvious to me that many people spiritually perceive--that is, that many people see or hear or taste God, whether in Himself or in created things. But I'm currently perplexe...