Check out the details here.

Join us in the ruins!

It’s a great slate of talks, and a beautiful opportunity for conversation. And there will be door prizes donated by the Ancient Coins in Education program: books, more books — and, of course, ancient coins.

Check it out — and join us!

In addition to Patristipalooza, there are two other events.

Jim Papandrea will perform Friday night, October 12, in an Adoration Concert to benefit the Women’s Center and Emmaus Ministries. The concert’s at St. Lambert, 7-8:30 p.m.

And Sunday, October 14, I’ll be speaking about the Mothers of the Church at Our Lady of Ransom Parish in nearby Niles.

Please tell all your friends in Chicagoland! I hope to see you at ALL the events.

Brian Caulfield interviewed me for the Knights of Columbus’s Fathers for Good site. He led off with the rather provocative question: “You did a book on the Fathers of the Church, and now on Mothers. Is there real substance to the lives of early Christian women?” He got my Irish up. It turned into a great conversation.

Kathleen Manning reviewed the book in the pages of U.S. Catholic magazine.

I’ve also been doing a lot of radio on this topic. Nothing I’ve done has drawn so many callers. When you think about the great women of the early Church — Thecla, Perpetua, Agnes, Macrina, Marcella, Paula, Eustochium, Monica, Olympias — it’s easy to see why.

All you holy women, pray for us.

Anyway, I love this book. Sense-Nonsense makes readers re-consider their most basic categories for understanding the human condition, human behavior, and human destiny. For many people, “to think” is to move from unexamined assumptions to inevitable conclusions without ever asking why — without ever knowing how to ask.

Francisco asks the hard questions and proposes exhilarating approaches to new answers. Like Pascal, he packs his ideas into paradoxical aphorisms that provoke a reconsideration — and re-valuation — of even the most ordinary things.

It’s a book for a culture whose standard ideas have proven dismally wrong in practice. It’s a book whose time is now.

Check it out on Amazon. It’s available as paper or as electrons. (I own both.) You can also check out the website my Beloved Son created for the book.

UPDATE: Here’s a thoughtful review of the book at Aliens in This World.

Bulgarian archaeologists have uncovered what they believe is the oldest Christian monastery in Europe near the village of Zlatna Livada in southern Bulgaria.

According to latest archaeological research, the St. Athanasius monastery, still functioning near the village, has been founded in 344 by St. Athanasius himself, reports the BGNES agency.

Until now, the Candida Casa monastery, founded in 371 AD in Galloway, Scotland, was believed to be the oldest Christian monastery in Europe, followed by the St. Martin monastery in the Pyrénées-Orientales, France (373 AD).

Archaeologists have examined objects in a hermit’s cave and shrine located near the present St. Athanasius monastery in Bulgaria, and found evidence that the great saint might have resided there.

Additional studies in archives at the Vatican have confirmed that St. Athanasius was present at the Church Council in Serdica (modern Sofia) in 343 AD.

He then travelled on to Constantinople and is believed to have stopped in the area of present Zlatna Livada, which is located in Thrace on the ancient way between Serdica and Constantinople.

Some others, too:

Bible History Daily: Ancient Gravestone Epitaphs Give Insight into Early Jews and Christians.

Haaretz shows us Jerusalem as Melito and Jerome knew it.

And the Revelation of Gabriel has made it to Rome.

If you don’t know Signs and Mysteries, though, do check it out, if only for Lea’s artwork! (If I hadn’t given up punning for Lent, I would have said czech it out. Isn’t that prague-ress? … Oh, there I go again, back to Ash Wednesday.)

To Train His Soul in Books is a volume of essays written in honor of Sidney H. Griffith. Most scholars of late antiquity have encountered at least one arm of Griffith’s scholarship. He is well-known for his translations and exposition of Syriac texts, which have given Syriac Christianity the attention it deserves to stand alongside Greek and Latin Christianities. Specifically, within this field, he has contributed ground-breaking scholarship on Ephrem the Syrian and on Syriac asceticism. Griffith is known too for his studies in Arabic Christianity and Christian-Muslim dialogue from the ancient to the contemporary period. The reach of his scholarship has been as wide as it has been deep…

The essays in the volume represent extensions of Griffith’s work on Ephrem the Syrian and on subsequent traditions of Syriac-speaking Christianity. Like the scholarship of Griffith himself, some essays make available new translations of Syriac texts. In chapter one, Joseph P. Amar provides readers with an English translation of the Vespers liturgy for the feast of the Announcement to the Bearer of God, Mary. The translation is accompanied by a nice discussion of intercalated psalmody in the liturgical tradition of the Syriac Maronite church. In chapter two, Francisco Javier Martínez translates into Spanish three of Ephrem’s Hymns On Virginity, introducing his translations with a discussion of extant manuscripts and of the hymns’ relation to Syriac ascetic and liturgical traditions. Finally, in chapter nine, Monica Blanchard translates into English selections from a yet-to-be-published Syriac manuscript by East Syrian monk Beh Isho’ Kamulaya, selections in which the author focuses on “purity of heart.”