Thursday is Trash Day

With the help of Maura, I was able to finally get my garage clean on Sunday. It has not been clean since I moved in and it really is neat to have so much room in the garage. I really just wanted to make a public thank you to Maura for helping out. The fourth weekend was something else. Starting off on Friday (after a 3 hour essay exam in Chicago that actually took 3 hours) with dinner and drinks at the pub--partial purchased by a very nice priest who got us wasted. Finding myself at 5:30am in a strange building in downtown Rensselaer on Saturday was another joy. The next stop was Lafayette to find some crazy imported beers. Sunday was communion and cleaning the garage! Then Monday a wonderful cookout and I broke a curse that has been hovering over my house for the past year! All in all a good weekend.

In more academic news, I've started reading Post-structuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross by Stephen Moore because of a suggestion from another blog I read. I've only read the Introduction so far and I'm not sure I like his writing style. It's kind of flippant and quite possibly overly pretentious. I'll probably wait to actually get into the chapters of that book until after I'm finished with Foucault's The History of Sexuality Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. I'm almost the end of the section on the Economics of chresis aphrodision (use of pleasure). It really is amazing how patriarchal the ancient Greeks were when it came to ordering the oikos, household. What is fascinating is that the "restrictions", the suggestions for moderation for the men were concerned with physical health (too much sex an you loose your life force) and with the role of a ruler be able to moderate himself if he was to subject others to his will. Sexual pleasure, aphrodisia, had no inherent moral worth or ailment associated with it. There were no pedagogy for sex being anything but natural and as such never morally evil. Despite the social constructions of patriarchal power structures, it seems the Greeks had it right in regards to how chresis aphrodision fit into a healthy society. Moreover, this is what the Church should be purporting (at least from my reading of Scripture) but it has become corrupted by the codification of morals and seared those codes by the age of reason.