Just another writer
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Dewey Decimal Project: 270.1 DAM When the Church Was Young
After reading, The Gospel of the Lord, I was really curious to read more of the church fathers and eagerly awaited my arrival at this part of the Dewey Decimal system. Of course, dealing with the vagaries of selecting books from the local public library, my choices aren’t always as broad as I would like,…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 262.13 PHA Heirs of the Fisherman
I expected something a bit different than this. There’s an awful lot of cut-and-paste to fill out the pages of the book with the full texts of the last few popes’ wills and while the accounts of the behind-the-scenes of the elections were intriguing, they ultimately were a bit disappointing. When I was doing a…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 253.252 AND Priests in Love
An Australian book, Jane Anderson has a definite opinion on priestly celibacy—viz, she ’s opposed to it as a matter of principle, In this book Anderson is looking at cases of priests who have chosen to remain in the priesthood while simultaneously also entering into romantic relationships. For the most part (or in all cases?…
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2016 in rejections (and acceptances)
I set a goal for the year of 200 rejections (with the idea that the number of acceptances would likewise increase). I fell well short of my goal, however, with only 144. The number isn’t reflected in the chart above since it also includes rejections from queries and poetry (more about this later). I tweeted…
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2016 in reading
My diversity report for the year: Women authors 48% (down from 51.4% last year). Non-white authors were 16.4% of my reading (up from 14.8% last year). I chose my book to hit diversity targets 25% of the time, down from 37.5% last year. I think part of that is that I’ve been more reluctant to…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 241 CAM 20 Hot Potatoes Christians Are Afraid to Touch
When my wife was an undergraduate , she and a group of her friends decided to do an event with the lure being Tony Campolo giving a talk. Of course, Campolo was not remotely within their budget so they came up with the idea of asking if Campolo would record a video message that they could…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 230.0732 The Collar
An amazing book. It was captivating to read about these not-so-young men on the road to the priesthood. Englert, after a number of attempts, managed to find a Catholic seminary willing to let him spend a year following the students who attended. Where he ended up was a non-traditional seminary, one catering to “second career” would-be…
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Salinger Revisited: For Esmé with Love and Squalor
This is, as far as I’m concerned, Salinger’s greatest title (and he has some mighty fine titles, especially once we get into the uncollected stories). The structure here is a bit unusual, With the first part being a first-peron recollection of the narrator’s meeting with the titular Esmé (and her younger brother Charles). Esmé is…
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Salinger Revisited: Down at the Dinghy
The first Glass family story without a Glass fatality. I found Salinger’s use of indirect storytelling reasonably effective here. Even though we’re never in the point of view of Lionel, we still manage to get a sense of the world through his eyes. The opening section of the novel, a conversation between two of the…