I'm trying to read Hegel and books on Hegel for work that Eric Lee is doing -- particularly the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit and Alexandre Kojeve's interpretation of hiim. Second, I'm trying to get a grasp of the roots of liberal theology in the United States through reading Gary Dorrien's three volume work, The Making of Americal Liberal Theology. I'm trying to get a grasp of the analytic philosophical tradition, particularly that feeding into Wittgenstein and the transformation of his thought through Avrum Stroll's introductory book, Wittgenstein. I've begun reading Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions. Yesterday I received, and started to read, Charle's Taylor's new book, A Secular Age.

I'm also slowly making my way through works within the evangelic, orthodox, and catholic tradition -- very slowly through Augustine's On the Trinity; Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (examining the work of the eastern orthodox theologians Lossky and Zizioulas); Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue; Stanley Hauerwas's The State of the University: Academic Knowledge and the Knowledge of God; and, not least interesting, and maybe most importantly, Mother Teresea: Come be my Light: The Private Writings of the 'Saint of Calcutta.'

This does not include the technical readings that I've been doing on Qumran and the grading. Reading like this has obvious problems -- I'm switching from book to book constantly, and make slow progress through them all. Yet it also raises questions and pushes me to see connections. I hope to interact with these as time goes on. For instance, reading Hegel and eastern orthodox theologians at the same time have shown to me the radical difference between what our culture calls "mystical" or "spiritual" as an intuitive, immediate experience of an immanent whole" and what orthodox Christianity calls the mystical as anchored in the divine-human relationship seen in Jesus Christ where God is invisibly manifested in the particularity of the physical world in which we live.

Today will be grading, reading, preparing for the multicongregational service, maybe a PLNU soccer game, some napping and detoxification after another very taxing week. I am thankful for the opportunity to let this material swirl in the neural networks and see what happens as a result.