Eric McDonnell

Thrilled to have this piece out in the world.

True happiness is realizing that with a decent set of glosses you can read Middle English texts pretty clearly without a translation.

(I’m late to the game discovering Hopkins’s incredible poetry—what a treasure!)

Celebrating the end of the semester with G. M. Hopkins’ celebration of the beauty in overcoming hard things: The glory of the bird who flies straight into the wind, the shine of the rusty plough after colliding with gravel, the bright vermillion glow of a gray fire as it collapses.

Good God, it is so easy to be cynical. But it is so much better to be alive.

Course notes for class this week. A habit of slow, careful reading, the refusal to give in to distraction and instant gratification—in short, philology—is not a bad practice these days

Today one of my students told me I should start a TikTok channel called “Unnecessary Philological History with Dr. M.”

I’m flattered, but I think they’re overestimating the size of that market.

We keep reading, and it turns out this is something Moses has in common with God. Look at all these sensory verbs: seeing (emphatically!), hearing, knowing.

God and God’s prophet in this story are figures who know how to slow down and pay attention. It’s a skill in short supply these days.

Exod 3 is the reading for class today. I’m always drawn to the description of Moses’s encounter with the burning bush.

It’s off his path! He has to make the decision to turn aside and pay attention. It’s easier to trudge along without looking. But Moses is the kind of person who looks.

From Ryan Ruby’s poem about poems, Context Collapse.

(Yes, it’s composed in a tone that can only be described as “eager to impress graduate student.” Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed it anyways)

At minimum, these are the disciplines learning an ancient language requires of us and sharpens in us.

Anyways. Lots of these folks will go on to be pastors, leaders, community organizers. And perseverance through this mess will require nothing less of us than the capacity to be attentive, to be rooted, to be willing to be vulnerable, to do something hard over and over again.

Are we sticking our heads in the sand when we do this deep work? Or are we spreading roots that keep us stable in this windy mess of a tempest we’re in?

We’re spending time at the beginning of class each week to think and chat about what it is we do when we buckle down to cultivate our attention toward this deep, difficult, slow work. Memorizing paradigms, vocab, rereading the same pages in the grammar over and over again.

How to think about deep work / language learning when the world seems on fire… I’ve been trying something new in my intro to Hebrew class this semester.

I'm partial to bîdi (<*bi-yadi, loss of morphemic boundary, & vowel syncope?)

Social media novice here. Expect partially-formed thoughts on teaching, reading, what I'm teaching and reading about the Hebrew Bible, and whatever poetry has got stuck in my mind for the day. Today, Rob Frost:

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me