My Blog Has No Longer Ceased!

Any follower of my blog knows I come and go. Well, since my last post in July 2018, I have been in hospital 12 or 13 times, usually for 5-6 days at a time. Just one thing after another. I don’t believe you can withstand cancer for nearly 40 years without a bunch of other stuff going wrong and indeed, it is the effects of the cancer causing most of my problems. Now, we are stuck in shelter-in-place in most parts of the world due to COVID-19. I’m hoping to use this enforced period of self-isolation to write some more and edit more of my dad’s stories.

I have also had a couple more books that were accepted in the Paul Bechtold Library Publications project before I had to resign to long-term disability, and everything else has had to wait on me getting those finished. I’m sure I wrote about the books we were publishing elsewhere, but the last two books in the project are awesome and I want to comment on them. The penultimate book is titled Hattie’s Book: A Woman’s Story in the City, by Beverly Phillips and is about the life of Hattie Williams, a woman who tirelessly, unceasingly worked for justice in the Bronzeville/Hyde Park/Kenwood parts of Chicago. Bev knew Hattie and her love for her and her work shines through every page. One of the really great things about publishing this book is that I met Bev. What a joy in my life—as far as I can tell by writing back and forth with her, her Christianity is exactly what I hope everyone would meet when they meet a Christian. What a lovely person and we exchange prayer for each other now without ceasing! She also introduced me to Holly, who designed the covers for the Hattie’s Book and the last book we published. 

The last book is a series of essays called Defragmenting Franciscanism, edited by Ed Foley, a colleague of mine from CTU, from two different symposiums held at Catholic Theological Union. This cover is outstanding in concept to me (execution as well)—Holly is just amazing and unless I get a fab idea, I’m going to see if she will design a cover for the second volume of short stories/anecdotes from my dad. While the first volume, Boy, We Had Some Good Times, had stories by my mom and dad, I’m afraid the second will only feature one story from my mom who doesn’t enjoy the process like my dad does. The story of my mom’s that will appear in the second volume is called “Me and My Music,” and I’ve been absolutely pressuring her to write this. What a musician she was and would be still if she would sit down and play! Anyway, I feel the story explains a lot about why I love music and in particular a certain repertoire so much. My dad has had a couple of stories from the first volume published in Military Magazine and he and my mom have given away over 100 copies of their book. All of these books are available through Amazon. 

So, I’m going to try to focus on editing my dad’s stories whilst still doing some writing I want to do (mostly writing about for my Heaven Playlist segments of my blog and doing some work on effects of long-term suffering and also some theologizing about suffering and finishing my long article on the British middlebrow fiction writer of the war eras, Angela Thirkell—it’s about her theology of heaven, not surprisingly). Here’s to hope that I will remain out of hospital now for a while (the last visit was a few months ago) and that I’ll be able to start cranking out some more blog posts, the first one I plan to be another installment of heaven hymns! Of course, I can’t leave well enough alone and I took on the job of editing a long article by an Islam scholar about stoning as punishment through the sources who came right after Muhammad and the beginning of Islam. It’s a challenge but the writer is excellent and I am certainly learning a lot. 

By the way as an update, 1) I have finished up all the editing for my wonderful daughter-in-law Lauren who finished her master’s in linguistics. Boy, did I learn a lot editing her work. I rather miss it! My son Niall also finished his MBA, though he never wanted my help (long story here and not one for my blog). They live in DC where I went for Thanksgiving—since they make absolutely the finest Thanksgiving dinners, and post-Thanksgiving dinners (turkey enchiladas to die for) possible, I have no complaints! I went back to DC in February and it appears I am moving there. Niall and Lauren have now purchased a house in the NoMa neighborhood and have asked me to live in the ‘garden’ apartment which is kind of half in/half out of the basement. I really like the ones I saw with the realtor. So, I’m going to do it. I found a church home on the first try! I’m going back to the Episcopalian church and maybe I’ll be introduced to some new heaven music—anyway, the music at this church is heaven on earth to me! My daughter Maeve also finished her PhD in Neuroscience in London and is now living and working in Liverpool where her husband is currently a zoological archaeologist. So, now the only ‘family love’ editing I have on my plate is the writing my dad does. 2) I jettisoned Spotify and have gone back to iTunes. I despair of ever having my music organized the way I’d like it to be. This is clearly the librarian in me coming out! 

The first blog post of resumption is one on Angela Thirkell as a hymnologist. This is sort of a tag onto my heaven playlists as it discusses the hymn, Jerusalem the Golden. Also, it’s sort of a side account to my LONG scholarly article on Angela Thirkell as an eschatologist (which may turn out to be a multi-part blog post. Or maybe I’ll just post it to my academia.com page and quit worrying about sending it off to a journal for publication.)