Fencing Bear at Prayer

I've been struggling more this past week thinking of things to blog about than I ever have in the (brief!) history of this blog. It's an important discipline, writing. You have to be willing to write even when you have nothing to say or, rather, feel like you have nothing to say, like doing your scales or rolling that yoga mat out or settling in for just a few minutes to say Morning Prayer even when you don't really want to. If you're not there, nothing can happen. Nor does it help to wait for the right mood. If you wait, the mood never comes; being there even when you aren't in the mood is the trick. But neither do I want this blog to become a stream of consciousness record of what I've been thinking. I'm not sure you're really interested nor do I think you really should be. Stream of consciousness is---as C.S. Lewis put it so well in his A Preface to Paradise Lost (at work, so I can't check the passage right now)--a fiction, an artifice hav...

Fencing Bear 2018, with the book that I was starting on the summer I wrote this blog post It is difficult to describe how heart-constricting this question is for a scholar at my university. It is, in a word, the single most damning thing that someone can impute of another's work, suggesting at a stroke not only that one's material is uninteresting, but, even worse, that it is insignificant, irrelevant to the Big Questions that Real Scholars should be asking themselves. Having struggled for eight years to transform my dissertation ("narrowly" focused on the way in which the Song of Songs was used in praise of the Virgin Mary for the better part of seven hundred years) into a Big Book (physically, at least; almost 700 pages) on the origins of the early and high medieval European devotion to the Virgin Mary and her son Christ, I had thought myself at long last immune to this question. Naively, as it turns out. There I was this spring at a reception for some of...