After going back to Colonial yesterday morning, I'm even more convinced that this is what I've been grasping after for years now. "My" church, the one my parents belong to and took me to growing up, is a very independent, very liberal Protestant place that always tries to act like a corporation, changing itself to cater to the vagaries of the ( Read more... )

Well, it's over. I left Rome; I came home. (Such possibilities for bad puns in those two word rhyming.) Mixed emotions abound ( Read more... )

I hate getting too busy to take time to write. I really should have written at least three recently. I'm getting too far away from my original ideal for having a livejournal in the first place. This should be an easy way of recording my thoughts as I have them. Fat chance ( Read more... )

I hate nasty arguments over religion. Who really cares, anyway? You're never going to convince anyone that you're right and they're wrong. People are way too uptight about the details. Why can't anyone ever just accept the fact that someone else believes something different than you do and that they get just as much fulfillment out of it than you ( Read more... )

Sometimes I wonder if I might not end up a Catholic. And sometimes I'm dead certain Catholicism is everything that's wrong with organized religion today ( Read more... )

And Greece was just about everything I could have asked for. I didn't leave until Monday, which meant that I had the weekend to relax and get a paper out of the way. I was a little nervous about how everything would work out - for instance, my tickets were hand-written. Very strange. I hate it when things like that happen, it makes me feel sick and ( Read more... )

So, I really should have written about Sicily right when we got back, but the insanity of this week has prevented that. First things first ( Read more... )

Definitely a highlight of the semester so far, we went by charter bus to Palestrina, this ancient hill (more like mountaintop) town just south of Rome with a fabulous temple of Fortuna way up at the top. Indeed, this is not your ordinary temple, for it spills down the hillside and has this fabulous double ramp (two ramps sloping up towards each ( Read more... )

I went up north on Friday morning (no classes on Friday for once) and met a friend of mine in Pisa. He's studying classics for the semester at the university there, so he showed me around the university and introduced me to a few professors. One of them took us out to lunch, so she got to work on her English and I got to work on my Italian ( Read more... )

I take back some of what I said yesterday about fresco. It becomes very lifelike, which is a much harder effect to achieve in oil (although when it's done well it's stunning ( Read more... )