In June of 2008, Father Neuhaus gave a major address on Orthodox-Catholic dialogue. St. Vladimir’s Seminary has posted the audio.

In this week’s Pittsburgh Catholic, I remember my patrologist friend Father Joe Linck. Of course I invoke the friendly Fathers.

Regular visitors to this blog know the name of the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame’s resident expert on patristics. It’s Dion — once of the Belmonts, singer of many number-one hits, starting in 1957, when he was seventeen years old. He’s the voice on “Teenager in Love,” “I Wonder Why,” “The Wanderer,” “Ruby, Ruby,” and “Abraham, Martin and John.” He’s one of only two pop artists depicted on the cover of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

The New York Times cast him as a reader of Augustine and even noted his connection to Yours Truly. His musical tribute to St. Jerome, The Thunderer, is available for download on Amazon. And, if you don’t own it by now … well, what are you waiting for?

Today’s mail brought Dion’s new album, which is a further foray in patristics — guitar patristics, that is. It’s called Heroes: Giants of Early Guitar Rock, and it’s a tribute to Dion’s favorite axemen from the 1950s and 1960s. Some names are familiar. Some will be new to all but the true aficionados — because in the days before Jimmy Page, the lead guitarist was another of the unknown backup band behind Elvis, Del Shannon, and Johnny Cash. Dion himself is an outstanding guitarist, but was told “Lead singers don’t play guitar.” Now he’s at a place where he can do both if he wants, and he does them with his inimitable style.

The songs are well chosen, an ultimate party mix: “Summertime Blues,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Runaway,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “I Walk The Line,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Dream Baby,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” and even Dion’s own “The Wanderer.” It’s all done with the Bronx attitude that’s won a half-century of loyalty from the listening public.

With all that good stuff comes a bonus DVD of Dion sharing memories of his guitar heroes. As they say on Amazon: Buy it now!

Obituaries are beginning to appear for my friend Father Joe Linck. Here’s a nice one in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (Though the writer missed his interest in patristics. How does that happen? Isn’t it the first question a new reporter is trained to ask?)

I ask your prayers for the repose of the soul of my friend Father Joe Linck, historian and (until recently) rector of St. John Fisher Seminary in Stamford, Connecticut. Father Joe died today after fighting an aggressive cancer for a year and eight months.

I’ve known Father Joe since he was a newly ordained priest serving as a university chaplain here in Pittsburgh. He later went on to teach at St. Vincent Seminary and Franciscan University. He also served in parish ministry in the Diocese of Bridgeport. Father Joe was the author of Fully Instructed and Vehemently Influenced: Catholic Preaching in Anglo-Colonial America.

Those who made the St. Paul Center‘s 2005 pilgrimage to Rome knew Father Joe as an outstanding confessor and preacher. It was heavenly for a bunch of patristics nerds to be with him for a week — in Rome! — for the feasts of Saints Irenaeus, Peter and Paul, Cyril of Alexandria, and the Roman Martyrs. (His master’s thesis was “The Trinitarian Dimension of Eucharistic Communion with God in the Adversus Haereses of Irenaeus of Lyons.” One of his favorite courses to teach was “Patristic Spirituality.”)

Father Joe had a remarkable spirit of service. In fact, I don’t recall that the man never said no to anything I asked of him. He was one of my regular sources on Church history when I was in newspaper work, and I did make a nuisance of myself. But he always made interruptions seem like a pleasure, not at all an inconvenience.

I miss him already. Most of all, I’ll miss his ability to make me laugh myself silly. I could use that today.

Please pray, too, for Fr. Joe’s mom and dad, who are mourning the loss of their only child.

P.S. How could I have forgotten to mention … Father Joe wrote the great foreword to my book The Mass of the Early Christians, and he plunked a very generous blurb on the jacket of The Resilient Church: The Glory, the Shame, & the Hope for Tomorrow.

Well, the Web is back with at least a few searchable, complete texts of at least some of the Greek Fathers. Check out Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. It’s a research center at the University of California, Irvine, and it’s been working since 1972 to collect and digitize literary texts written in Greek from Homer to the fall of Byzantium in AD 1453. “Its goal is to create a comprehensive digital library of Greek literature from antiquity to the present era.” TLG has posted quite a few sample texts, most of them classical, but not a few patristic. On a quick scan, I found Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Maximus Confessor, Romanus the Melodist, John of Damascus, Cyril of Alexandria, and Ephrem of Syria. Happy browsing!

Hat tip: David Scott

Today, June 26, is the memorial of St. Josemaria Escriva, the 20th-century priest who founded Opus Dei, a path to holiness through ordinary work, family life, friendship, and such — the stuff of everyday life. His is a decidedly modern spirit, but he conceived it as a retrieval of the way of the “early Christians” (his preferred term). Opus Dei was, he said, “as old as the Gospel and, like the Gospel, ever new.” He often cited the authority of the Church Fathers. A quick scan of his books online at EscrivaWorks yields many passages from Clement of Alexandria, Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, Ambrose, Justin Martyr, Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, Leo the Great, Jerome, lots and lots from John Chrysostom and Gregory the Great, and dozens from Augustine.

These early Christians were not mere ornaments on his pet project. His vocation was itself a return to the sources — the pre-Nicene sources of the life and labor of ordinary, faithful Christians. The journalist John L. Allen, in his book on Opus Dei, described just how radical St. Josemaria’s vision was: “The idea of priests and laity, men and women, all part of one organic whole, sharing the same vocation and carrying out the same apostolic tasks, has not been part of the Catholic tradition, at least since the early centuries.”

Back in the 1990s (before St. Josemaria’s canonization), the theologian Domingo Ramos-Lissón wrote an excellent study of the man’s patristic influences. It’s titled “The Example of the Early Christians in Blessed Josemaria’s Teachings,” and it’s available free online at the website of the magazine Romana.

Scott Hahn has written what I consider the finest appreciation of St. Josemaria’s reliance on the Fathers. It’s in his recently released book Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei. The whole book is great. You really should own it!

Don’t forget: Sister Macrina is still posting detailed reporting of that conference she attended on the Syrian Fathers. If you apply, a respectable university might give you three credits for reading her accounts of Simeon of Taibouthèh and Isaac of Nineveh.

One of my favorite bands in the 1990s was Stinging Rain. I just discovered that Pauli Fry, SR’s bass player, is blogging on the band’s music. Their last album is available for download here.

I’d classify their music as alternative rock, with patristically informed lyrics.

The Tablet published an op-ed that more than hints the Fathers were anti-Jewish. Globetrotting gurublogger Gashwin Gomes gives good graces back to the ancients, linking here once, twice, or thrice along the way.

I think it’s bad form to judge the Fathers anti-Jewish — or, for that matter, the rabbis of the Talmud anti-Christian. Neither the Fathers nor the rabbis were playing by our 21st-century rules. There are no third-century examples of bureaus of interreligious affairs, staffed by career clerical diplomats. Our ancestors, Christians and Jews, did religious controversy the rough-and-tumble way. I don’t want us to return to their modes of argument, but they might eschew ours, and for good reasons.

I’m glad Gashwin quoted Jacob Neusner, who wishes that both Jews and Christians would respect each other’s desire to live by their respective rules. Christians have a mission to all peoples. It’s not anti-Jewish to include Jews in that number and even to pray for their conversion when we pray for everyone else’s. By Christian principles, it would be anti-Jewish not to. I don’t expect my Jewish friends to think I’m right in the matter of Christian mission. If they did, after all, they would be Christian. If they pray for my conversion, even publicly, I’m happy that they wish me the greatest blessing they know.

It’s not anti-Jewish to pray, in St. Paul’s words, that “all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:26), any more than it’s anti-Christian for Jews to wish we wouldn’t.