Dear friends in Christ,
The suffering continues. On Sunday, October 6, we will look at chapters 8-10 of Job: the first speech of his friend Bildad and Job’s response. There are signs here that Job is starting to succumb to the pressure of having everyone think he is guilty. You are welcome to join the class: on the 5th floor at 10 a.m.
A new class will begin on Wed., Oct. 9: a reading class on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae I. 12-13, the two questions on knowledge of God. In the first class I plan to work through, with the class, articles 1 and 2 of question 12. In the McCabe volume, that’s pages 3-10. If you’d like a free translation, you can find one here. But it is not necessary to have read the text beforehand—some do, some don’t; whatever works best for you. We’ll work through it in the class, in any event. I hope many of you can join us; the text we will be covering is short but important. Andrew Hall, 6:30 – 7:30, Wednesdays, Oct. 9, 23, 30 and continuing on the Wednesdays in November. (Note: we won’t meet Oct. 16.)
Good Books & Good Talk: the next seminar is Monday, October 28, on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif, a novel whose author has been called Pakistan’s leading English novelist. It is a grim world that we find in the novel. The action occurs in and around a Catholic hospital in a Muslim land, where the needs are staggering, the resources scanty, and the caregivers caught in various intrigues of corruption. In that sense, it is the book of Job: the reader wonders how God could have created a world so messed up. And then, along come small miracles of healing. And the reader wonders, is anything better as a result? Do the miracles make any real difference? It’s a novel rich, ambiguous, and cruel, yet in the end one that refuses to exclude the possibility of grace. If you read it, you are welcome to the discussion.
