My favorite Advent hymn

(I'm posting this again this year to redeem the musical selections from our parish this year. Really? "City of God"? Are you serious?) I doubt this will be played at all but .05% of Masses this weekend, and those will probably be monasteries. But, "Lo, He Comes" is a tune that is both beautiful in …

Back from vacation

We just got back from a restful vacation and it was a very restful week. I managed to read (by the end of this evening) six books this week. It was a good time. Work begins on Monday and the grace of my time off is very clear. Archbishop Dolan has this to say about …

Recommended blogs, The Philosopher Mom

Here is Round Two of the Recommended Blogs posts. Today I want to point everyone to The Philosopher Mom. Written by an undergrad companion of mine and dear friend, this blog is dedicated to pondering the great questions of life even through the ordinary and mundane. The Aherns have just welcomed a third little lady …

The end of the blog

There is a season for everything, they say, and this season as a blogger is at an end. This fall, I will begin clerking for a judge who has a policy that his clerks are not allowed to have blogs, Facebook pages, etc. It's a sensible policy, and I'm all for it. But due to …

That's all she wrote

My law school career ended with a rather anticlimactic eight-hour take-home exam today. I spent the whole time in my office at school working through all the complex issues of federal jurisdiction raised in the questions. And after it was all over, there were no fireworks, no joyous celebration. It kind of ended with a …

Back in action

I started working out again. One motivation for this, beyond the obvious need to be healthy, came from a sermon I heard from Msgr. Pope in D.C. (available here).  The basic point: "Christ did not come and die so that you could be mediocre. You should have great expectations." That little bit of encouragement really …