Watched it tonight. Amazing. A good priest who both advises a wife to talk to her husband and who can quote Kierkegaard. A popular prime-time television show quoting Kierkegaard??! Sustained reflections on death. A teenage girl assuring a dying little boy that there is a God and that God is with him.

Now, the parts where God talks to Joan sometimes are a little lame, to be sure. ("I can't tell you why there is evil because you wouldn't understand.") But you really can't blame anyone for that. The problem of reconciling a single all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving deity with the existence of evil hasn't been solved for a good three thousand years now, and it's not going to be solved in a CBS TV show. (An aside: the question of evil is not my area of study, but I think that Augustine in City of God takes as good a crack at it as anyone.)

But good show! CBS. You have given us honest dramatizations of serious human emotions in a package that the whole family can watch. That in itself seems almost a miracle.

A break from blogging has been good in more ways than one. The most important way is that my dissertation is well on its way to completion. Such a project takes sustained concentration, and it hurts. Blogging is way more fun because it's so much easier just to throw out words into the ether and know that my future and my family's future isn't riding on them.

So here are some words thrown to the wind. No one's reading this anymore, probably, not even friends. But that way the pressure is off to update every day, certainly.