Brian Hamilton

The New Yoder

Brian Hamilton — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:00:03 +0000

http://memoriadei.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/the-new-yoder/

The immediate vision of God

Brian Hamilton — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:12:02 +0000

The church is a collective subject

Brian Hamilton — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 04:14:25 +0000

Reading the medievals as philosophers

Brian Hamilton — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:17:11 +0000

Indeterminate rights

Brian Hamilton — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:19:47 +0000

New blog: Memoria Dei

Brian Hamilton — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:34:32 +0000

Just before scattering for the Christmas holiday, a few friends and I started tinkering with the idea of a new group blog written by a handful of theology grad students at Notre Dame, and that blog has now begun in earnest: we’re calling it Memoria Dei. Besides myself, there are two other regulars so far. Andrew Prevot is a third-year in systematics, and Noel Terranova a second-year in liturgy—but both are incurable generalists, so their areas of concentration don’t mean much. I hope you’ll add it to your readers, follow along, comment, etc.; it promises to show quite a bit more life than this place has of late.

Which discipline?

Brian Hamilton — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:59:48 +0000

For the most part I’m quite happy with my decision to end up studying ethics, rather than philosophical or systematic theology, since it’s nearly always the material meaning of philosophical concepts I’m interested in emphasizing. But I do sometimes have a pang of regret, not knowing when it is I’ll finally have a chance to do the kind of reading I’d really like to do in Trinitarian debates, fundamental ecclesiology, etc. It may actually be that I occasionally regret not being a philosopher: what really fascinates me in the Trinitarian debates is the viability and consequence of the thought of the infinite, and my real interest in fundamental ecclesiology has to do with the essential relation between individual and the collective subjects… Though in a philosophy department of the sort that intrigues me, I doubt if I would have been able to think those questions in an unapologetically theological frame; or at least, a great deal of prolegomena would always seem necessary.

Not really saying anything. Especially after a long conversation this afternoon about “making ourselves marketable” to one institutional niche or another, just once again feeling the strictures of academic life that, as often as not, severs thought into so many discrete lifeless pieces.

More on Property

Brian Hamilton — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 04:59:45 +0000

Property

Brian Hamilton — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:42:28 +0000

I confess that over the past several months, I have set myself a very determinate research agenda into various theories of property for no good reason whatsoever, except that I was annoyed at having no determinate research agenda at all. Turns out almost nobody has a research agenda until they force one on themselves third or even fourth year, which makes me feel better. But imposing some kind of focus has been fruitful. By the end of the spring term, I’ll have essays on property in early Marx, Locke/Rousseau, Aquinas, and Bonaventure—the last of which I’ll be presenting for a session on Franciscan political thought at Kalamazoo next May. I just finished up with Marx a couple weeks ago, and even though I’m not terribly happy with the paper, I have the unfamiliar but very pleasant sense that it’s going somewhere. As it happens, this is extremely good for morale.

(Note: I’ve posted a slightly more substantial explanation of why this is coming to interest me over at Memoria Dei, and more posts on this theme can be expected over there as I work through Bonaventure this spring.)

Even philosophers

Brian Hamilton — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:26:25 +0000

Posted at Memoria Dei, an offhand quotation from Louis Althusser about Marx’s early works.