Scatterbrained

I seem to be so scatterbrained, less focused than I used to be.  Or, maybe I'm just older and more aware of how scatterbrained I've always been.  Not sure which.

I read Karol Wojtyla's Love & Responsibility a second time through, and I felt that I had internalized many of the Pope's points on the matter of Love & Responsibility.  So, I thought I would summarize them on this blog.  I got a rough draft of the the first chapter, but in the midst of the second chapter, I got distracted.  And, now, coming back to it, I don't feel the motivation to finish it.  So, I won't... maybe someday, I'll come back to it.

In the meantime, I started another multi-year project, that of reading through the Bible a second time, but this time, carefully following the study notes on the new Ignatius Catholic Study Bible.  I am up to Genesis chapter 20.  It is quite an undertaking, because the study notes fan out into paragraphs of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I try to look up.

Prior to all of this, I had the idea of a catholic Bible Study based on John Eldredge's book Resilient.  I got a few chapters in, and then I started to realize that I was needing to cover things that I would rather put into a Bible 101 series.  I need a 5 week Bible 101 series. I mean, Eldredge is doing the typology of the River of Life in the Garden of Eden, but it would be good to cover typology at a higher level first, right?  right.  So, I paused the Resilient study work, but then I got completely distracted by Karol Wojtyla's Love & Responsibility.

However, just before starting to put together Bible 101, I went with Paul to Steubenville to pick up Joshua from his summer internship at the Saint Paul Center.  Joshua was able to get me a copy of Before Church and State by Andrew Willard Jones.  So, I started reading that, and I was reading it through my beach vacation.  I'm up to page 256.  I have to finish it.  I can't not finish a book.

And, that's how my brain works.  It moves around... I don't often complete something, when it comes to pursuing my own interests, because my interests keep shifting.  I do seem to have some focus, because I did just get through Love & Responsibility a second time.

So, now, I will probably finish Before Church and State before returning to put together a Bible 101 study and see if I can lead that at my parish.

Why, you might ask, am I reading "Before Church and State."  Well, it is the precursor to two other books with I've wanted to ready that explain the historical / theological/ philosophical origin of the historical critical method of scripture study.

Oh, and I need to stop writing this, or I won't get to 5pm mass tonight.  But, I really can't do the things I want to do, because, I'm not a theologian or a philosopher by trade, I am computer programmer, and I will have to get back to work on Monday morning, adding new functionality for the onboarding of new states for our Unemployment Insurance solution (https://www.geographicsolutions.com/Unemployment).