What I’ve Been Working On

Because it’s been a while since I’ve updated the long-suffering people of Substack (hey, that’s you!) on my various projects and endeavors—and because these projects and endeavors have been consuming an inordinate amount of my time, and because these demands will, over the next two months, significantly decrease what I’m able to produce here—I felt it was time to catch everyone up. Sound good?

The biggest thing at the moment is that I now have about two months to finish the manuscript of my next book—the book about discipline. This is the first book project that was pitched to me. I would, personally, have felt a little too cheeky proposing a book on this topic—look at me, and how disciplined I am; pay me to write a book about it! Yeah… okay.

That said, I do think I have some interesting things to say about discipline and productivity, and about how all of this ties into the Catholic spiritual life. The book will be largely practical—not too heavy philosophically—but I’ll be drawing throughout on the traditional notion of freedom in the history of Catholic thought: freedom for excellence, as opposed to freedom of indifference, to help contextualize the practical how-tos.

I’ve also been drafting a number of academic articles, ranging over all manner of topics. I have pieces in the works in meta-ethics, epistemology, and metaphysical grounding. It will not surprise my readers to hear that they generally relate to classical theism, as each aims to show how the doctrine of divine simplicity, in particular, offers resources for various lingering issues in these areas—significant ones, I think. Nor will it surprise anyone to hear that these articles are effectively spin-offs from topics being researched and written about in my dissertation—indeed, my forthcoming article with ACPQ on the argument for divine simplicity was itself a development of a section of the dissertation.

Honestly—if you’ll permit a brief aside—I often question why I’m even bothering to do the PhD, rather than just focusing on publishing, practicing guitar, or buttering toast. I never planned to—certainly, I never planned to be a professor or anything like that (a now-retired professor friend of mine strongly discouraged me from such a pursuit, insisting that the last thing I needed was a kind of academic “union card”). But the opportunity presented itself in such a way that I effectively couldn’t say no. Aside from simply wanting to do it for the sake of doing it, I don’t think I have a terribly good answer; if anything, it interferes with my other, considerably more important (at least economically) projects. But whatever. Sometimes you do things just to do them.

Music, too, has been (mostly joyfully) eating up an enormous amount of my time. Here in the Milwaukee area, I’m in two bands and lead one of them. The latter is a Van Halen tribute called Top of the World—we have a gig tonight, in fact. This is not easy stuff to play. It takes a lot of time to keep the material tight, and even more when learning new songs. As spring and summer draw closer, the gig schedule increases dramatically. I’m going to have to find some way of achieving better balance. I always say this, but never do.

Here’s a (poorly recorded) clip of “Unchained” from our last rehearsal.

Kids are good. Family is good. Right now, I’m listening to my son practice piano while his siblings finish their morning chores in the kitchen. My wife is reading beside me, spectacles on (she’s cute). It is a perfectly fine Saturday morning.

P.S. In case you missed it, I recently had a lively (and lovely—oh, yes!) conversation with Suan Sonna about my book The Best Argument for God.