Discerning an Interfaith Eremitic World Federalist Blogging Vocation with a Psychiatric Disability

12:20 PM Sunday. Greetings, Duffy.  Here we are on the first day of liturgical year 2026: the first Sunday of Advent and the week of Hope. According to Pope Leo XIV, we have 25 years until 2050 to achieve net zero climate emissions globally, and there is still time to prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. According to climate scientist James Hansen, more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is already inevitable, and net zero by 2050 alone is not enough to prevent the climate system from making a phase change to a hot house earth. Hansen believes we need to implement solar radiation management, i.e., geoengineering. According to President Trump, climate change is a hoax, and countries that buy into the "Green New Scam" are getting wrecked economically. Against this backdrop, what does it mean to have "hope" in the way that Saint Thomas of Aquinas defined it? This is the question I am asking myself as we embark on the first week of our retreat. To be perfectly chari...

4:18 PM Saturday. Blessings, Duffy. I have decided not to overload you with three posts in one day. Instead, I will end this evening's communications with this three-minute video from Pope Leo. It was addressed to the leaders at the UN Climate Summit in Brazil a couple of weeks ago. President Trump did not send an American delegation. Tomorrow, I will set to work on Part 2 of "Navigating Vatican-Trump Climate Politics."   End 4:36 PM.

3:17 AM Saturday. Blessings Duffy,  my contemplative Catholic accountability partner in Vermont. I hope this update finds you well. Our conversation on the phone earlier this Sunday was deeply meaningful, as always, and I look forward to our follow-up this Sunday or Monday as we embark on our first discussion of  Advent and Christmas with the Church Fathers: A Seven-Week Retreat on the Mystery and Meaning of the Incarnation . I've read the introduction to our guided retreat and want to share some initial thoughts about it a day or two ahead of our telephone conversation, but before I can properly do that, I feel the Creator is challenging me to unburden my heart of everything I have been working on since my last  major post  on Tuesday evening. It's complex, so I will try to break it into three separate blog entries. Sorry if it ends up being an email overload. Maybe we should think about finding me an agent and/or an editor. As an aspiring hermit I don't know that I...

9:20 PM Tuesday. My prayers are with my mom and the Vegan Christian Discipleship School this evening. I missed class this afternoon after taking my mom to get a biopsy at the clinic. The whole thing has been weighing on me a lot more than I realized. And now there is the waiting for the results. My mom, a stage 4 breast cancer survivor, is handling it remarkably well - in the midst of an identity theft crisis, no less. I am amazed by her resilience and feel terrible that I cannot be of more help. My therapist has gently nudged me to explore whether I have been pouring myself into my blog lately as a way to cope with some of that stress. But that is something to revisit in telehealth early tomorrow morning. Right now, I need to process some crossover thoughts I am having with respect to American political science and American spiritual formation.  My ball pitch to the imaginary panel of political and spiritual luminaries I cited in the title of this post goes something like this. Sh...

3:47 AM Tuesday. Well, I have made it through stage 2 of my quest to view Saturn's rings with my telescope. I am counting Sunday's post titled  Isolating Christian Astronomy: From Heliocentrism and the Primordial Singularity to the Rings of Saturn  as stage 1 of this particular endeavor. My telescope is a PolarLink 102 Refractor . I bought it at a bargain price through Amazon back in July of 2023, half assembled it as soon I received it and then let it sit until I took it out for the first time yesterday evening. It was meant to be a long-term investment, but I didn't think it would take me this long to get back to it. As a total beginner, there is a good argument that I should have gotten an AZ mount, and I have to confess that I am kicking myself a bit now, because this EQ mount is challenging me to think on an intermediate level. Then again, it is possible I am closer than I think to learning what God wants and needs me to learn from this particular aspect of Christian...

8:11 AM Monday. Regarding  How Trump's 28-Point Plan for Ukraine Shocked the World , I am wondering if Secretary Rubio and President Trump are expertly balancing a good cop-bad cop relationship with President Zelensky, or if Trump is caving to the Vance-Carlson wing of the GOP, which is presently swimming in some very dark waters (cf.  Why Republicans Are Fighting About the Nazis | The New York Times ). I don't know, what does Congresswoman Stefanik think about making an appearance on Tucker Carlson - would it be good for her electability in New York, or would it drag her down, unless perhaps Carlson admits that his interview of Fuentes was a bad judgment call? The GOP is not looking to mobilize the Groypers in New York, is it? These are disturbed individuals who need treatment. They are probably red flag cases. But Stefanik does not support New York State red flag law - she believes it infringes on the Second Amendment. I don't know, I tend to think that neo-Nazis need men...

6:28 AM Monday. I have started to enter into a deeper line of dialogue with the Messianic Jewish movement in America thanks to the wonderful work of MJTI and the brilliant Torah transmission of Dr. Stuart Dauermann, who just completed teaching a four-week Panim el Panim class last night. This is a conversation in which a Gentile friend of Israel ("Israel" here defined as all Jews in the state of Israel and in Diaspora throughout all time) seeks to understand and co-evolve with the Jewish meaning of the Messiah from a wide variety of perspectives, mostly derived from YouTube lectures, without privileging a minority viewpoint within the Jewish community, and at the same time without denying that some Jewish believers in Yeshua might genuinely belong to a post-missionary Messianic branch of Judaism or maybe even a mystical cross-denominational flowering of the Jewish faith. I want to be careful here, because I am not yet convinced that Messianic Jews are authentic pre-Nicene Je...

6:14 PM Sunday. Now that I have made separate spaces and project lines under my Music of the Spheres area of responsibility for Big History, Christian Astronomy, and Abrahamic Astrology, I can begin to better untangle what I mean by Christian Geology and Christian Biology here in my course on Christian Earth Science. Eventually, I may need to treat Christian Geology and Christian Biology as separate courses, and even add a third, which would be Christian Climatology. I guess I might as well get the ball rolling now and label this entry under Christian Geology. All I really want to accomplish on this project thread this evening is to stake out two Christian views of geological time: Old-Earth Creationism and Young-Earth Creationism.  (Ancestor Simulation is currently a techno-niche hypothesis that I find very intriguing but probably won't address in this study - even if I think it is at least as plausible as YEC).  Old-Earth Creationism agrees with both the Standard Cosmologica...

1:12 PM Sunday. Looking back over my notes in Christian Earth Science, I see that I failed to properly isolate Christian Astronomy back on 16 August 2025 when I wrote  In Pursuit of Wisdom: Catholicism and Science Through the Ages . Now I see that I need to maintain Christian Astronomy as a project. In part this field of focus includes Christian scientists from Copernicus to Lemaitre: https://share.google/aimode/howldhZYohgb7UfGd   And in part it includes my quest for astronomical evidence of Christogenesis as defined by Teilhard de Chardin: https://share.google/aimode/0AWvqdXiY6H1X1X5w I am presently looking at this in terms of Clairvaux's three-Advent model: https://share.google/aimode/v6i5t9m6DIwuWNWT7 I am inclined to say that the 21 December 2020 Great Conjunction was a sign of the Middle Advent: https://share.google/aimode/GzbGT5PFqr81jetmm On a more tentative note, I am inspired (perhaps recklessly) to extrapolate that the Final Advent, or Omega Point, could take place ...

6:57 AM Sunday. After a good bit of hemming and hawing I have decided to reframe my work on Christian Earth Science as a course in Big History. I started my formal decision-making process early on Saturday morning with a review of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart . This led to the following series of questions for Google Gemini: Are Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic all eras in the Phanerozoic Eon, and if so, what defines each era? Are these subdivisions of time considered part of the Standard Cosmological Model, or does that only apply to physics, not geology? Is there a term for the understanding of objective reality that is provided by the scientific worldview overall? Are there any alternatives to scientific realism that are accepted within the consensus scientific community? What about consciousness-based approaches - are they generally outside the scientific consensus? Say more about physicalism and its relationship to theology - how have theologians grappled with this ...

9:49 AM Saturday. My goal this weekend is to spend the bulk of my time working in my Music of the Spheres area of responsibility. I am long overdue on blog updates for each of my four projects in this area, and my Music of the Spheres webpage could use some updating, too. End 10:02 AM.

3:10 PM Friday. President Trump and Mayor-elect Mamdani are meeting in DC as I write. Here are two backgrounders: A crowd chanted death threats outside an NYC synagogue. Mamdani found fault with both sides | The Times of Israel 'We need to make them scared': NYC synagogue protest crosses new red lines | The Times of Israel And here is my latest question thread: Tell me more about the protest in front of a NYC synagogue [Wednesday] - was it legal? Had the protesters filed a permit or is that not required in NYC? Can Mayor Mamdani and/or the NYC Council potentially ban all protests in front of NYC synagogues until further notice and have any Jewish leaders requested something along these lines? Do we have any video recordings of the protest clearly showing that the NYPD failed to make appropriate arrests? Has the NYC Police Commissioner addressed the situation? Is DOJ investigating? Has Trump met with Mamdani yet or does that happen at 3 PM Friday - is this issue likely to come u...