This year I have to be a little extra creative to make sure I get in my continuing ed time  before September 1st, when I start on my third year of employment at Ascension. I finally settled on a reading and writing project. On Thursdays for the next 9 or so weeks, I am going to work on a self-study project. I will pick back up on the writing I started last year with Collegeville and have made less progress on than I coulda, shoulda woulda. I am grateful that there is a fine editor in town who I look forward to working with.

I am also adding another layer to my project. Way back in my days as a seminarian, I did a really cool independent study course with a woman called Sue Armentrout, where we had a semester-long discussion about a book by a French philosopher called Paul Ricouer. He had just published the first part of the first volume of a set called Time and Narrative. It was a wonderful discussion and I have wanted to go back to his work for a long time now; I went on a tad of a shopping spree last week. I have no idea if his work will in any way inform my writing, or if in fact, it will be the reverse (though I am not holding my breath that I have anything at all to engage with Ricouer). I should probably count myself lucky if I manage to work my way through the three volumes of Time and Narrative.  It is so well worth the effort, though…

To make this even more official (and in a perverse sorta way, thrilling), I have procured a carrel in an out-of-the-way corner of the library of the Supreme Court of Alabama thanks to the generosity of their librarian, Mr. Tim Lewis, Esq. At least in the morning, but probably for most of my Thursdays, I will be squirreled away doing my readin’n writin’. Totally cool.

Then, this evening I saw something that was truly the icing on the cake or the exclamation point on a particularly well crafted sentence. An online friend, Katherine,  linked an article about Macron and Ricouer. You can read it here. So, in a friend of a friend, existential kind of way, it’s like I get to hang out with Macron as well. Not shabby company. Sweeeeeet!