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I took this photo while on my most recent morning run: There's also a "James Street" about a mile from where this photo was taken.

Since I'm on break and the weather has warmed up, I've been out running the streets of Englewood and Tenafly again. Both towns are home to some beautiful old Victorian homes, which remind me of the haunted houses I enjoyed reading about--and wouldn't have minded living in--when I was a kid. My favorite house in the area is the one below, which I believe is serving as an annex for a synagogue. It reminds me an awful lot of this house. If it looks familiar to you, then you probably remember the TV show The Munsters from the mid 1960s.

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." Thus begins James Joyce's virtually impenetrable masterwork Finnegans Wake . For reasons of which I'm not really aware, I've been taken by a desire to revisit FW for the first time since I was an undergrad. That class was actually one of my favorites--Yeats and Joyce it was called. We read a full anthology of Yeats, as well as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Ulysses , and portions of FW . Maybe I just need to read something that is not explicitly theological over the summer before the seminary reading onslaught begins anew in the fall. Two students from my Barth class plan on reading six pages a day of the 10,000-page Church Dogmatics until they finish it...four and a half years from now. Although Joyce wrote FW in his own secret language, I think I prefer its 600 pages, however much I enjoyed B...

The most interesting person I've met on campus thus far is an older ThM student from Korea named Sung. Well, his Korean name is Sung. His English name is a bit more colorful...Rainbow. I've yet to hear anyone call him Rainbow, but that's how it's listed in the directory. I first met him in my class over the winter short term. He and I were in the same group for a group presentation in Christianity's Cultured Critics. My group was like the UN. We had two Koreans, one Indian, one Nepalese, and two Americans. Although English was not his first language, Sung had an economy of expression, a way of maximizing the meaning of each word he uttered. Our project involved presenting and critiquing the work of John Dominic Crossan. At one of our preparatory meetings, Sung was saying how he understood that the disciples would want to lay low after the crucifixion (before being emboldened by the resurrection) because "they were cowards...like me." That "like me...