Stepping away from social media for Lent; see you all later

One of the things I heard from Fr King at Georgetown was that when he taught books he didn’t like, the students could tell he didn’t like them when he taught the books he thought were great, the students went along for the ride a lot more often.

Sed contra: Your primary objective as a professor should be to convey how wonder-full your subject is and how much you love it. Your students might not get the same thrill as you do, but they should recognize that you do get that thrill. Our subjects are not just true, they're also beautiful.

The OP is going to get dunked on plenty, so I’ll just piggyback on Scott to say that one of the most foundational gifts an education can provide is the repeated experience of discovering you want to know about things of which you were previously unaware.

Happy semiquintencennial, America

Weigel’s reaction to Caritas in Veritate remains one of the stupidest things he has written (the other being his defense of the Hiroshima bombing that was grounded solely on proportionality from a few years ago)

I'm in www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgMb...

Apparently the Highlander reboot is finally happening? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlan...

AI can’t make my job obsolete; only the currently-irreversible trend of religious disaffiliation in the US can make my job obsolete!

Grading at Panera this morning, listening to the complete symphonies of Tchaikovsky, and the first movement of Symphony 1 is a banger.

Okay, TradCaths, let me get this straight: you want a hemisphere-wide Catholic empire, but you don’t want to have to hear people speak Spanish?

On 2/17, Professor Emeritus M. Shawn Copeland will receive The Univ. of Scranton’s annual Pedro Arrupe, S.J. award for Distinguished Contributions to Ignatian Mission and Ministry. Dr. Copeland’s lecture is titled "Healing and Creating in History: The Redemptive Praxis of Christian Community.”

When I was at the Univ of Chicago, the Newman center there (Calvert House) had Fulton Sheen's Emmy trophy sitting on a table in the basement. www.osvnews.com/venerable-ar...

thank you bad bunny for allowing all the thirty eight year olds on bluesky to do the leo pointing meme at the television

Ok that Coinbase ad was great (I’m at a big outdoor block part watching and people/me were into it)

There’s so many AI commercials that I’m reminded of several years ago when it was all crypto commercials

Joe Montana looks like Gul Dukat.

Reminder when you watch the Intuit Super Bowl ads, they have Super Bowl ad money because they are a successful rent seekers who have worked for decades to kill free, quality, public tax preparation services donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-death-...

This is the sexiest national anthem performance I’ve ever seen

/r/WallStreetBets asking the important questions

Feel free to use this in your next presentation

We need a moratorium on the following depictions of AI: gleaming white robots, floating blue holographic brains, glowing amber lines connecting a dark globe, Lawnmower Man style 1990s computer graphics, semitransparent screens floating in the air showing vector art faces, robot & human handshakes

One thing about having little kids is realizing they will graduate in a futuristic sci-fi year like 2044

To follow up, this episode of the defunct podcast Surprisingly Awesome on “Tubthumping” remains one of my favorite episodes of any podcast soundcloud.com/surprisingly...

Every night my three year old requests Tubthumping by Chumbawumba before bed, during which he dances and then throws himself to the ground every time they sing “I get knocked down”

For all my fellow Catherine Project people @catherineproject.bsky.social

Something I pray isn't true, that I fear *is* true, is that the good bishop is willing trade the monstrous treatment of immigrants and citizens for the sake of defending a worldview he finds more amenable to Catholicism. A greater testimony to the cross would be to risk our own collapse instead.

A really good and thorough critique of Bishop Barron’s piece in Fox about immigration and ICE in Minnesota. it’s hard for me not to read Barron’s piece as the 2026 version of A Call to Unity

❤️

“Men pay heavily for their atonement” -Agamemnon, Iliad Bk IV

This machine yub nubs fascists.

Yesterday in class I went on a tangent talking about Abraham and Sarah and the two times Abraham told Sarah to say she was his sister when they went to a new place so Abraham wouldn't be murdered. Much of the discussion was about the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Holy moly this chart: Cumulative US measles cases

As an author, I feel I am lucky to have had a chance to establish my voice through trial & error before the invention of LLMs. Even if you don’t use them for writing, unless you are very careful, you start to pick up ambient Claudish or GPTish phrasing from all the other AI work you read.

There’s an important little check-in acronym for this: HALT Am I… H ungry A ngry L onely T ired

This is one of my favorite Hoppers and I had it as the background on my laptop for years

“Let America know and ponder on this: there is something more frightening than Cain killing Abel, and that is Washington killing Spartacus.” — Victor Hugo in an open letter seeking the Pardon of John Brown

Christ in His compassion put His body between you and all the forces of hell. Now it's your turn to do it for your neighbor. That's absolutely what you sign up for at baptism.

“The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. … No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you; in the name of God I command you to stop the repression.” - St. Óscar Romero

An evergreen reminder from 2016 Hans @litpress.bsky.social

I have maybe six regrets in life. Not buying this jacket is one of them.

Going through my 2016 photos for the trend and I found this act of violence

“The basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person.” Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, #6

It’s actually a central part of Catholic spirituality that almost any kind of work (barring something that’s unethical) can have great meaning and value if we do it with love and a sense of calling.

employment.marquette.edu/postings/24275 employment.marquette.edu/postings/24274 I'm involved in the search so can't share too much but happy to answer general questions about the department/MU/Milwaukee here or privately..

Marquette Theology is hiring for two tenure track positions, in New Testament and Historical or Systematic Theology. We have a Ph.D. program, reasonable cost of living in a vibrant city, and obviously, awesome colleagues. Please share! 🧵

The two big tells in Barron's piece: 1) CST is applied here to public corruption (which is fair); CST is not referenced at all with respect to immigration 2) Agrees w/ USCCB on border and immigration law; no reference to other 7 paragraphs in the USCCB's statement (www.usccb.org/news/2025/us...)

Mafia goon: Nice house you got here...it'd be a shame if something happened to it Media outlets: Mafia goon rules out use of force. Expresses regret at the mere thought of it