Learning to write in the tropics

Back in September, during a somewhat inauspicious visit to the Edith Stein Archive in Cologne, I recorded a podcast with my good friend br. Thomas Mannion, Dominican Friar and University Chaplain in Edinburgh. It was the second we had done and since then we have recorded a third. As with so many of our encounters, these occasions are filled with joy and some pretty deep conversations intermingled with laughter. During the second recording, I briefly mentioned a theory I had about how unity in the Dominican Family was palpable in some concrete things, like the fact that we all follow the same rite of profession, well sort of- for starters as a Lay Dominican you promise to live a life according to the charism of St Dominic rather than take vows. For this reason, this was one of the topics we both agreed needed further thinking and investigating, some things such as obedience and poverty were promises that Lay Dominicans, many of whom are married, would not live in the same way nor was it...

After lunch today I meandered, after another frustrated attempt a solving a bureaucratic conundrum, into what I thought was the fifth floor of the library I am currently working in only to find all of my things missing. Being towards the end of the lunch hour, this level of the library was almost completely empty except for the most dogged of researchers, most likely PhD students. I began to panic, checked another aisle, then went back to the one I was sure I had sat in and check the drawers, as if all of the things could possibly fit into such a small space. Then I went to the storage room in the back. Nothing, I began to wonder what librarian to ask for help and if they were going to chastise me for leaving my things like that for over an hour. Since it’s a fairly closed off area mainly accesible by researchers only, I had done it, like everyone else, multiple times in the past, but you never know the temperament of the rotating librarians and their penchant for enforcing the rules w...

 Yesterday I landed in Bilbao airport, it has been a year since I moved back to Spain, and I couldn’t help wonder what was in store for this my second year in the north of Spain. Unlike last year, the autumn has already begun and the cooler air and sight of falling leaves made the return all that more poignant, the sense of a new beginning even stronger. I suspect this coming year will bring many good things but I hesitate to say much more, one never really knows what will happen. The past year was very different from how I thought it would be and while it brought mainly blessings and unexpected joys, it was also a complicated and difficult year. I have been learning for some time now, as all of us have to, that life, even our everyday lives is a mixture of joys, failures, disappointments and achievements, and it is so important to focus more on the joys and blessings sometimes also found behind those disappointments.  I was in Honduras for two very frustrating weeks in which ...

 This may not be the easiest post to read for some people I know and may seem infinitely naive for those few I know that are actually knowledgeable and much more practiced on the subject. Edith Stein once gave a talk titled in German Muttererziehungskunst- roughly translatable as motherhood kraft. At the start of it she humourously commented on the irony of a single female academic, who had spent the better part of a decade living in a Dominican convent and college, and a year or two later would become a Carmelite, being asked for a talk about motherhood. She of course had ample knowledge about spiritual motherhood, something she also commented on in this talk. There is much that one can learn from observation and talking to others about a certain topic, it isn’t only experience, though obviously experience gives a knowledge about some things that renders a depth that is missing without that experience. In the case of marriage, it is a curious thing, but the church has a clear idea...

Things have been quite busy and I have generally been avoiding the news, so my own world consists of pleasanter things than the trials of Trump, the crazy Tory policies, Ukraine, Israel, and the latest saga of corruption cases in Spanish politics, which reflect more personal vendettas than actual financial swindles. For not watching the news I seem to be quite up to date, I live with a family member that does stay up to date and she likes to comment. My information is partial. One of the most interesting moments in recent times was when a week ago I remembered a conversation I had with a Dominican friar from the Western Province of the United States based somewhere in California. It’s was way back in the final Autumn before the pandemic and some details are now hazy. He is attached or at least teaching at an institution, or maybe it was a parish as well, named St Catherine of Siena. He told me a story of  a lay Dominican he had once known that had moved cities every couple of years...

When a published book goes into several editions at some point the author thinks it is a good idea to update a bit the preface, which is something like “why do this in the first place?’ type of writing. When I began this blog some three years ago it was a bit of a pandemic project connected to an academic need. While the need still exists it seems slightly mind-boggling to think I was living at the time in a country that still required masks. Although, that being said, I am now currently living in a country that almost two months ago recommended making masks compulsory again during the combined flu/covid season we were experiencing. Now, some years on, it might be a good idea to rethink this whole thing again or not. Sometimes it’s simply fine to ‘spill my guts’ as it were on here expressing what needs to be ‘screamed’ to the world at any give time. Until the world becomes too much and hibernation is necessary. This happened between July and December of the past year. The news was so u...