5. Dog & Duck. Second best fish & chips in town (the best are at BD Riley’s). Good optional choice of sitting outside or inside. Roughly 15 beers on tap.

4. Flying Saucer. Very cool bartenders. Knowledgeable about beer (and they enjoy talking about it!), but not arrogant. Excellent food as well. Roughly 70 beers on tap.

3. Draughthouse. The most hobbit-like place in town, in my opinion. Folks sitting out on lawnchairs, or in the beds of their pick up trucks, etc. Some of the bartenders can be a bit acerbic, but once you get on their good side (this can take years: you must be perceived as a good-tipping regular), the benefits of membership are bountiful. Maybe 75 beers on tap.

2. Gingerman. Only place I have ever seen Live Oak Pale Ale 0n tap (nor have I ever seen it in a bottle, mind you). Indeed, I have never desired a beer on tap that they don’t have (including two or three barley wines, to boot!). About 80 beers on tap.

1. Opal Divine’s (6th St.). I confess: I love Opal’s partly because of nostalgia, due to years and years of great conversation and good memories. But their food is great, and their bartenders & waitstaff are interesting and fun. Wednesdays are two-dollar Texas pint nights! Yeah! About 25 beers on tap.

Coming soon: top five best running trails in Austin.

From an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, posted on the American Anglican Council website (in which he reaffirms, in addition to the following, his staunch opposition to virtually all forms of abortion), dated Dec. 12, 2007:

Asked about his support for gay clergy, he replied: “I have no problem with gay clergy who aren’t in relationships, although there are savage arguments about the issue you might have heard about. Our jobs mean we have to adhere to the Bible. Gay clergy who don’t act upon their sexual preferences do, clergy in practising homo-sexual relationships don’t. This major question doesn’t have a quick-fix solution and I imagine will be debated for many years to come.”

Bella on a date with Daddy at Barnes & Noble.

It has been six months since my last blog post. (Thanks to Tommy Crawford for helping to resurrect my blog.) A lot has happened in six months:

1. I traveled to England and met three of my favorite theological thinkers: Andrew Louth, Catherine Pickstock, and John Milbank. This was a wonderful and quite helpful time for me. I spent about an hour with Andrew Louth, about two hours with Catherine Pickstock, and about four hours with John Milbank. While I have decided not to pursue graduate work at this time, nevertheless the conversations and relationships that began clearly showed me a theological and relational trajectory that I need to follow. I am so psyched that John Milbank has traded several email with me before and after our meeting, some of which are really really long! I will never forget the tour of Southwell Cathedral he gave me, especially our conversation about the Green Man, of which there are many in the 13th century chapter house of the minster.
2. My wife got pregnant! (Yeah!)  When we went to the oldest pub in Europe, “Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem,” Bouquet sat in a chair inside the pub above which a sign reads, “Warning: Legend has it that any woman who sits in this chair will become pregnant shortly thereafter.” My wife sat in the chair, wiggled around and (partly due to the fervent prayer of dear friends) tested positive for pregnancy the day we arrived back in Austin from the UK.
3. I survived summer Greek at UT. This 12-semester hour course in classical Greek (which meets 30 hours / week for class, on top of necessary studying) was one of the highlights of my life. We read Herodotus, Lysius (”sophist” who figures prominently in Plato’s Phaedrus), Homer, tragedian Euripedes, and Plato’s Apology, about the trial of Socrates.
4. The PCA General Assembly took a horribly depressing action in its meeting this summer. Swayed by an emotional appeal to fear by RC Sproul (one factor among many) the General Assembly passed an overture which in effect condemns the theological position of the so-called “New Perspective on Paul” (one of whose chief proponents is Bishop NT Wright) as well as the “Auburn Avenue” theology, otherwise known as “the Federal Vision.” (Thankfully, our presbytery, the South Texas Presbytery of the PCA, decided to resist and to defeat an attempt to do something similar at the level of presbytery.)
5. I firmed up my decision to leave Christ the King Church in my role as assistant pastor next summer, 2008. We will deeply miss our wonderful friends and brothers. We will also look forward to building the Kingdom, in concert with them, in new and different ways in the future. (More on that to come. Stay tuned.)

As some of you know, I am planning on applying to PhD programs in the fall of ‘08 (the five programs — two of which are ancient philosophy and three of which are theology — I intend to apply to are: Texas (joint program in ancient philosophy and classics), Kentucky (David Bradshaw), Durham (Andrew Louth), Nottingham (John Milbank), Cambridge (Catherine Pickstock)).

If you held a gun to my head and said, "Right now, give me your statement of intent," here is how I would respond:

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Social, economic, and political order rests on a prior moral or metaphysical order. Virtue is the craft of bringing the former in line with the latter. Hence fundamental metaphysics, especially an informed understanding of its history, is as important today as ever.

One recently attempted way of getting at this is by way of reverence, “schematized” by Paul Woodruff as “the well-developed capacity to have feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have.” Reverence is what Socrates experiences before the good and what, in the Phaedrus, his interlocutor (and all modern representatives of philosophic sophistry, including Jacques Derrida, as shown in his reading of this dialogue) lacks. Reverence is in short supply today, as Woodruff observes. The result is that “we don’t really know what we are doing in much of our lives, and … we are in no position to think about how to do it better.” If this is so for the individual, how much more so for the multifarious communities which dot the lanscape of our radically pluralistic society?

The source of our confusion? Layered and complex though the story be, it nonetheless seems to me that Nietzsche’s reduction of antique virtue (with its ultimate principle of logos or reason providing order to a chaotic world) to difference (the overarching principle of modernity, subsuming both reason and chaos in violent conflict) plays a central role.

Nevertheless there is something greater, something beyond, these two alternatives. If modernity (a la Nietzche) has, in fact, called antiquity’s bluff, then what will succeed modernity? What can get us beyond the emotivistic nature of moral disagreement (to use Alisdair MacIntyre’s phrase) in our day? Only a construction of reality which denies the necessity of violent difference, something which can provide an account of difference (groped toward by MacIntyre himself) which is truly beneficent and peaceful.

To put things another way, I suspect that, the validity of his move notwithstanding, Nietzsche does not have the last word (no matter how clearly his voice is still perceptible today across the dominant spectrum of philosophy, both continental and analytic). I suspect that, deep within the layers of antique virtue itself, there is always already a tendency to deconstruct what some (following Nietzsche) perceive as the ancient and pervasive hegemony of an allegedly neutral logos.

To return to the above example, consider the attitude of Socrates in the Phaedrus. In contrast to the impious stance of his sophist-sympathizing interlocutor, Socrates stands in reverence before myth. Not only does this posture save erotic love from reducing down to some kind of utilitarian (and therefore nihilistic) transaction, it instructs us on the ecstatic nature of the good, which, unlike Phaedrus’ ideal, is particible in time.

What is it about myth (specifically the three myths invoked by Socrates in this particular dialogue) which commands his devotion?

This participatory aspect of the ancient Greek philosophy, (deepened by neoplatonism in such developments as the theurgy of Proclus and Iamblichus), has been  utterly lost in the West. How? Perhaps it was Augustine’s injection of divine simplicity (inherited from the god of Plato’s middle dialogues) early on into the stream of western thought. Giving rise to an incipient realm of autonomous human reason, this trajectory includes Aquinas and the scholastics, early modern philosophers such as Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes, on down to Nietzsche, who truly heralds a new and secular age.

With the advent of the “death of God” western philosophers no longer pretended to work within the horizon of Christianity, and the path of a truly post-Christian world was blazed.

The merits of this genealogy notwithstanding, classical Greek participation (especially that of Socrates) in all its modes (the ecstasy of the good, the dialectic of community, the concept of _energeia_ already latent in Aristotle’s thought) provides rich resources for the future of philosophy and culture in the West.

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Any comments anyone has are greatly appreciated.