Change of (Physical) Address

Gentle readers, I write to you from the centrally isolated portion of a large Northeastern State, where I am recently come to live and work. At present, my new home county and townlands are on edge, awaiting the arrival of the transient population of undergraduates and some graduate and professional students, which swells the population of the county by 20% and the population of my city of residence by perhaps 70%. The crippling increase in traffic that shall arrive in coming days only will be the beginning of the oppression of the collegiate year, which, by all accounts, is filled with rudeness, public intoxication, vandalism, and civil disorder. If it did not snow here, the townsfolk would have to invent some other suitable form of containment for the young and privileged good-for-nothings that inhabit the Palatine and Capitoline for two semesters each year. Since I look very much of the age to be the object of local ressentiment and am employed by one of the kindly mothers of studies upon these hills, I walk the streets feeling dangerously suspect. On one hand, the employment and limited incubation of entrepeneurial endeavors provided by the institutions here is essential to a local economy whose days of skilled, heavy manufacturing are over and whose labor's conscience may or may not object to the hydrofragmentary rapine of the neighboring plots of Earth for natural gas. On the other hand, college students raise rents, assert privilege, and cause trouble. I, however, have risen far enough in academia to know that my sympathies lie just on the side of the town.

My new parish is distinctly lovely and hospitable to newcomers and to the poor. Her grossest liturgical abuse is the Gospel sandwich. Her preaching focuses on culture and contemplation more than policy and politics. Her social teaching, if I may speak of such a thing, is very little different than my former parish, but it is lived out in harmony with tradition rather than conflict. As much as I dearly miss my friends in Christ in Laodicea, I am content with the change in sea from the Ionian to the Aegean.

In the next week, my new boss comes to town in company with her charges in statu pupillari . I have a new research project and research group dynamic to forge in the coming weeks. So my updates likely will be infrequent as they have been for some time to come. They should be less polemical, though.