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Spring into Sitting and Study

“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?”

Tolkien's Philosophy of Stories

A couple of weeks ago, I sprained my foot badly  -- somehow I managed to make sitting in my study chair into a dangerous athletic endeavour, and tore at least a couple of ligaments while trying to stand up.    Also, our elderly car went back to the repair shop.   

This has changed my Lent in several ways.  One of them is that I am sitting down a lot more than I had planned, especially considering that spring seems to have arrived here and there is a vegetable garden to plant.   And Lenten practices have to be the kind you can do wearing an air cast, meaning mostly sedentary.

While sitting around, I started reading a large book, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.   I got sidetracked, though, after I found an article by Fergus Kerr called Christians in a Secular Age.    This led me to his page on Academia, and then to his list of books.    Anyway, in the end I acquired After Aquinas:  Versions of Thomism.     There is a short review here, and a longer and very informative one here.  

These are the first difficult books I've read for some time.   So it's going slowly.   I haven't been writing on here as much as I intended to, though I have scribbled quite a lot of notes.    A lot of the stories of the past few centuries can be traced through old philosophical disputes and confusions, so the topics aren't abstract.  

Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end? -- Sam Gamgee

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