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YOUR HOST JUST FINISHED his first semester studying Hebrew with Citizen Cafe Tel Aviv. I wanted to take a moment (ie, a Blog Post) to endorse, recommend, and otherwise invite. Citizen Cafe promises to get you to fluency in local, spoken Hebrew. They do not focus on reading or writing (at least in the early…

An essay from my Live Journal Days, dated 29 Aug 2004, my 40th Birthday. I called it the beginning of midlife. I’m kinda past that now a few years away from Officially Old. So, reposting. Hmmmmmm. Lessee… Let Midlife BEGIN! Ten years ago I was trapped on Fire Island. T was sitting in a hot…

This post is from 17 Sep 2002. Still relevant, it seems. I’d been Orthodox for maybe 4 months by that time – and still struggle with some of the things referenced here. THERE’S A SONG BY THE EAGLES that I heard on the radio today that put a lot in perspective for me. The thing…

THIS PRAYER IS NOT the most faithful of prayers, but for most of the last what? 20 years? This prayer has offered one prayer, over and over: send revival to San Francisco. Let there be revival from the ferry tower to the Sutro Tower to the Sutro Baths and the Zoo. Let your Spirit pour…

At the end of Messiah Handel composed a four minute long Amen that fugues its way through some classic baroque forms and progression ending, finally, with five very firm Amens presented as 3 and 2, with a break of four beats in total silence between them. Listening to the entire piece, it seems that silence…

Monastics in the earliest Christian Tradition were all hermits. They lived alone or perhaps in groups of two or three, but each in their own cell. In the Egyptian desert, these cells were often not much more than lean-tos against rocks or a small tarp tied up with some woven branches. Although they lived alone,…

Devotion to the elements of Our Lord’s Passion aside, it is in Eucharistic devotions that there is a most clear division between east and west.  Although both teach exactly the same content, both use very different words to very different ends.  Thomas Aquinas and his students made this most clear in their ideas of what…

Random biblical nerdery: today I learned that the meaning of the Greek word “anathema” had shifted during the time of Biblical composition. We see both usages in the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures which actually predates the current Hebrew version of the Old Testament. The LXX was composed and compiled in…

When a person is brought to enter the Dominican Family, he or she kneels or prostrates before the person who is to receive them – the local or regional superior – as well as before the rest of the community. The superior asks, What do you seek of God and his Church? The response is,…

As the Class Clown (1972), George Carlin asks a sarcastic question probably already old at that point, “If God is all-powerful, can he make a rock so heavy that he, himself, cannot lift it?” It was funny in the right context but some folks actually offer it as a serious question, intending by the illogic…

The Readings for the 32nd Thursday, Tempus per Annum (C1) Wisdom 7:22-8:1 Luke 17:20-25 Est enim in illa spiritus intelligentiae, sanctus, unicus, multiplex, subtilis, disertus, mobilis, incoinquinatus, certus, suavis, amans bonum, acutus, quem nihil vetat, benefaciens, humanus, benignus, stabilis, certus, securus, omnem habens virtutem, omnia prospiciens. In Wisdom is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold,…