Well I am finally done with my first year of grad school and it is time to celebrate.  This will probably mean that I play lots of guitar and maybe enjoy this fine city I live in.  Mostly, it means that I read whatever the hell I want.  So here is what is on the agenda minus m.a. comprehensive exam reading.




apparently, Marquez is regarded as the second best spanish writer next to Cerventes (Don Quixote) so I figure he's worth a look at.




After reading Kierkegaard's "The Sickness Unto Death" and listening to a Speaking of Faith podcast about Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton I decided that I needed to see what all the fuss, both good and bad, was about. 




That's right.  Marxism.  Liberation Theology.  Education?  A classmate of mine recommended this one to me.  Says it changed his life.  I want to be an educator and I think that education is one of a number of factors that can drastically change lives.  Who better than a South American liberation educator to drive that point home?




I've been wanting to read Mark Lilla's book since I first read about it.  It's highly recommended and so far has been a very good read.  Lilla has an incredibly accessible style which is helpful considering the rough terrain he intends to cover.  More or less, this is a history of the conflict between political theology and political philosophy; an inquiry into the place where god, man, and country intersect.

Break has been very kind to me in terms of giving me time to read.  I picked up Shane Claiborne's book Irresistible Revolution and read it in a day.  It's quite poorly written but for the most part I enjoyed it.  It certainly made me think differently about the way I live and I think that was the intent. However, as we all know, being poor is so hot right now


The time has come to switch over to reading for school.  I'm taking three classes, two of which I'm sure about.  The first one I'm taking is on Kierkegaard, a constant companion in my philosophical journey and I'm really excited about it.  I became especially excited when I found out that I was going to be reading these books:







The other class that I'm sure I'm taking is Hermeneutics of the Heart with Kearney.  It looks interesting largely because of the books we're reading.




I saw Steinbock give a paper at SPEP and it was perhaps the best paper on philosophy I've ever heard.  It was clear and articulate, thought provoking, and applicable to real life and not just academia.  So I'm excited to see what this book has to offer.






Scheler was talked about in my Heidegger seminar last semester.  It looks interesting as well.





Edith Stein is an interesting story.  She was a student of Husserl, the father of phenomenology, and then went on to become a Carmelite nun.  This book was her dissertation which was directed by Husserl. 

These books make me want to look at doing a phenomenology of community.  What makes something a genuine community?  In what ways does a community give itself?  That is, in what ways does a community reveal and conceal its identity?  Looks like somebody's got a new project

peace and fertility in 2008   

So classes are done with and papers are written.  I'm excited to read whatever the hell I want to now.  Moreso than before with the Ricoeur and the Phenomenology.  So I decided to pick up some 'light' reading and by 'light' I mean Greil Marcus's

The Shape of Things To Come: Prophecy and the American Voice



and I'm reading The Republic of Plato




  
So, still doing philosophy for reading but I have to.  I've got this bigass test in a year and a half that I have to read all these books for and so I think starting early is a good thing.  I've already got Augustine's Confessions done with so this is book number 2 of i think 15 or 16 that I have to have done.  Oh well...happy holidays all.

I've decided to try and use this one as a place to talk about what I'm reading since I'm doing a lot of it.  (it's kind of my job in a way). 

With that said...here goes nothing:

Right now my homework oscillates between Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity, and Richard Kearney's The Wake of Imagination.

However, I'm also reading some pretty foundational texts from Derrida and Ricoeur.  I'm looking at the way they perceive metaphor and imagination in essays from the books Margins of Philosophy (Derrida) and From Text to Action (Ricoeur).  Both writers offer fascinating views on the work of metaphor in thought and how it shapes the way we act. 

I've also picked up Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer again largely because the idea of an intentional community keeps getting brought up by my friend Kate's roommate Beth (who lived in one for a while).  I figure that its a foundational text for the idea of community and, outside of something pre-existing like what was at GC, I feel it is also necessary to continuously rethink what it means to be in community.  What Bonhoeffer is calling us to is a way of life far more than just a decision amongst other decisions.  It is more about treading a path that will shape decisions than it is about picking one thing and doing it and than picking something else and doing that...all the while not seeing how interconnected these decisions are.