Jim Davila reports that the ancient Assyrian monastery of St. Gabriel is back on the losing end, as a Turkish court has turned its forest lands over to a governmental agency.

A trusted friend directed me to a Spanish-language site on early Christianity, Primeros Cristianos. It includes good resources on the Fathers, the persecutions, Church growth, the catacombs, and much more.

Pope Benedict XVI has named an American, Dominican Father J. Augustine DiNoia, secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments. Father Gus (now Archbishop-designate Gus) has been with the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 2002, and before that he was the doctrine guy for the U.S. bishops. When I was doing newspaper work, he was the perfect source, peerless in clarity and brevity. When I’ve visited Rome with my friend Scott Hahn, Father Gus has always been a gracious and entertaining host. Catholic News Service tells the story of his well-deserved promotion and points us to sound files of his lectures.

My two oldest daughters are happy and they know it. Their puppet video is part of some contest. I think they get bonus points if you view their video, and they get thrilled if you comment. So make them happier still!

Eldest now tells me that the grand prize is a guitar. I wonder if it comes with headphones.

UPDATE: my daughters say an explanation is in order. Their video is actually a parody of the work of a “screamo” group. Screamo is a combination of “scream” and “emo” (from emotional, with teen connotations). This helps, I suppose. I had thought it to be an exploration in epistemology, perhaps Augustinian for its emphasis on happiness. How do we know we’re happy?

Tiber River asked me to recommend a good course of introductory reading on the Fathers. Here’s my best shot.

Yesterday I had the singular honor of giving the high-school commencement address at Aquinas Academy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In case you didn’t know: Aquinas has the highest SAT average in its region and for four years in a row has been ranked one of the Top 50 Catholic High Schools in the United States. See what happens when a school incorporates my books (The Resilient Church and The Fathers of the Church) in its religion and history curricula?

I served on the board of Aquinas, way back at its founding (1996).

BMCR reviews the new 20th-anniversary edition of Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. Brown’s 30th anniversary edition of Augustine of Hippo: A Biography included some important retractationes. I wonder if this one does, too.

Al Ahram serves up a feature on the archives at the Coptic Museum in Cairo. If you’ve never browsed the museum’s online gallery, you’re missing out on a beautiful portion of the patrimony of the early Church. I reviewed a lovely book from the museum in these pages.

Many apologies for the slow blogging. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. My friend Bob Lockwood and I spent a chunk of last weekend at the great annual gathering of the Pittsburgh Catholic Men’s Fellowship. Last night, Bob and I were honored, along with Dr. Susan Muto and Father Mark Gruber, O.S.B., during the Catholic Historical Society’s celebration of Pittsburgh’s Catholic writers. (Afterward, I took the kids to see the dazzling Brenda Polk as the Fairy Godmother in a local production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.)

If you don’t mind, I’d like to share with you my remarks from the dinner last night. It’s not patristic, except in an extremely accommodated sense. But hey.

Three weeks ago, when I saw the ad for this event in the Pittsburgh Catholic, with my photograph placed alongside those of Bishop Zubik, Dr. Muto, Fr. Gruber, Mr. Lockwood, and Mr. [Regis] Flaherty, I remembered a story about the poet Howard Nemerov.

In one remarkable week in 1977, Mr. Nemerov received word that he had won the Pulitzer Prize … and then the National Book Award.

His reaction was exuberant. He cried out: “Overrated! At last!”

I took those words as my own. “Overrated! At last!” A writer knows when he’s outclassed by present company. But he lives for such moments. So I thank God, and I thank the Historical Society for inviting me to share such an Olympian table. I am happy to be overrated if it means I am allowed to praise this city’s Catholic culture — if I am allowed to praise our communion of saints, the Church of Pittsburgh.

I didn’t have the privilege of growing up here. But that hardly matters. To grow up when I did was to live off the largesse of Pittsburgh’s Catholic literary scene. My friends and I, like millions in our generation, learned our early lessons in the faith from the picture books produced by that prolific priest of Western Pennsylvania’s coal fields, Father Lawrence Lovasik.

Father Lovasik had an almost-papally infallible instinct for identifying the facts that would resonate with kids. We consumed his Picture Book of Saints, his catechisms and prayerbooks, and his primers on angelology and sacraments. As we grew older, Father Lovasik offered us spiritual direction in the finer points of kindness and Eucharistic devotion. He guided us along simple paths to the divine life, to the familiar places in our neighborhoods where heaven meets earth.

When we went off to school — if we went to Catholic schools, as my mother insisted we must — we took our lessons from Pittsburgh authors. If our school was struggling, we were still using textbooks produced in the early twentieth century by Pittsburgh’s Father Jerome Hannan — his Bible History: A Textbook of the Old and New Testaments; and his excellent The Story Of The Church, Her Founding, Mission And Progress. In my hometown, these books retained canonical status — more than half a century after their first publication — because Father Hannan had eventually become bishop of our diocese.

If a school of my generation was more well off and up to date, then it could afford the state-of-the-art textbooks, like the Cathedral Basic Readers produced by Monsignor John B. McDowell. They were no less Catholic than their predecessors, though they bore more modern-sounding titles like Cavalcades; All Around America; Fun with Our Family; and Fun Wherever We Are.

Monsignor McDowell, too, would go on to become a bishop — an auxiliary here in Pittsburgh. And I know him well enough to know that he would pass along any credit for Pittsburgh’s Catholic literary culture to the generations before him. In fact, over the last decade, he has devoted his own literary labors to that end: writing histories that give cultural credit, across the centuries, wherever it’s due.

He would have us hear the voice of Pittsburgh’s church in those who lived here, and wrote here, and have been raised to the altars: John Neumann, Francis Seelos, Maria Theresa Gerhardinger, Katharine Drexel — but also in those whose fame was more local, though no less fascinating, and maybe no less important to history — and whose lives, in some cases, were perhaps no less holy than those who have been canonized: Michael O’Connor, Suitbert Mollinger, James Cox, and Adrian van Kaam.

If we draw the genealogical lines, we would all, I think, find our way back to a remarkable man of the nineteenth century, Monsignor Andrew Lambing (1842-1918), a prodigious and prolific man of letters. Not least among his accomplishments was the founding of the Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, which still sponsors an annual lecture in his honor. Monsignor Lambing wrote the foundational histories of Allegheny County and of Pittsburgh — and he wrote histories of the Dioceses of Pittsburgh and of Allegheny. He wrote serious theological studies in pneumatology (the science of the Holy Spirit) and mariology (the study of the Blessed Virgin), as well as a handbook of comfort for children who had lost their parents.

Academic history was his avocation, which he pursued in addition to the running of parishes and an orphanage. A giant of a man, grown fit through his early work on farms, in brickyards, and in an oil refinery, he served as a priest for 30 years before he missed a single day on account of illness. He is reputed never to have taken a vacation.

In the multivolume History of Pittsburgh and Environs published by the American Historical Society in 1922, Monsignor Lambing is listed prominently among the region’s “MEN WIDELY FAMED.” How prominently? Well, he appears just after Charles Schwab and George Westinghouse, but before Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. He’s number three out of forty men identified as builders of this region.

I get exhausted just thinking about Monsignor Lambing’s literary accomplishments, which seem to have been an afterthought to his pastoral work and brick-and-mortar administration.

But I can’t help but be grateful to him for setting the high standard for the next generations — for Father Hannan, and Father Lovasik, and then Monsignor McDowell and so many others.

Twenty-three years ago this month I dropped, as if by a providential parachute, into this wonderful culture when I took a writing job at a high-tech company in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. My wife and I fell in love with this place and this church. Here we’ve raised our six children in the faith — on a hearty diet of Lovasik and Hannan and McDowell — not to mention Muto and Gruber and Lockwood, Lawler and Wuerl and Hugo. We cannot quite imagine leaving. 

It’s good to be here, as everyone in this room well knows. 

It’s a privilege for me to speak here tonight and get all these mushy affections out of my system. If I have to be overrated for a moment to seize the opportunity, so be it! 

As for my own accomplishments, I’ll prefer to recall an experience I had speaking to a group of Catholic high-school students here in the city. It was a career-day sort of thing, and I was supposed to talk about my important work as a writer. I rattled off the titles of my books as if they were a long litany, figuring the kids would be impressed.

Then I invited questions about the writing life — I was ready to play the seasoned sage — and after an awkward pause a hand went up in the back.

“Yes,” I said as I pointed to the young man.

And he asked me a question it’s good to remember as I stand here among my heroes, past and present. He said: “Um … have you ever written anything that anyone would actually read?”

Perhaps for the first time in my life I was left speechless. And I’ll take this moment now to begin the second time.

Thank you for being here, and for listening.

My beloved daughter gave me her old iPod when she got a new one. I can’t work to music, so I’ve been using it only when I exercise — but that’s meant a daily lecture on the Fathers. And so far I haven’t paid a penny. I burned through the Louth lectures right away. Then, on iTunes, I found free downloads by John Cavadini, Robert Louis Wilken, Jaroslav Pelikan, John Peter Kenney, and many others. I loaded up, and I haven’t heard even half of the material I found. If you have an iTunes account, it’s really worth your while to go searching after terms like “patristics,” “Christian history,” and “Augustine.”

I missed this when it appeared last week: Why Was Jesus Crucified?, by Larry Hurtado.

I leaned upon his excellent book  The Earliest Christian Artifacts as I wrote  Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols.

It’s April Fool’s Day, and the blog is three years old. This is post number 1,800. Of the 150 million or so blogs tracked by Technorati, this one’s ranked 43, 173, with an authority of 104. And I’m a Marauding Marsupial in the TTLB Ecosystem. Three years of doing this, and I still don’t understand what any of that means. I don’t think I even have a working hit counter since my last one went out of business.

I do enjoy the company, though, so thanks for dropping in as often as you do. It makes the nerd’s life a lot less lonely, doesn’t it?

Dr. Paul Arblaster has posted a nice capsule review of my book The Mass of the Early Christians.

Amy Welborn posted my reminiscences of her late husband, Michael Dubruiel, who was my editor for many years. (In case you missed my post: Michael died suddenly on February 3 at age fifty. Danielle Bean has set up a fund for the benefit of Mike and Amy’s very young children. If you can give a bit, please do.

You can also “give a bit” — and get a lot in return — by buying Michael’s books. I recommend especially The How-To Book of the Mass: Everything You Need to Know but No One Ever Taught You and A Pocket Guide to the Mass. These are the best step-by-step introductions to Catholic worship I’ve seen.