iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 3h

It’s Psalm 123. I mostly meant I was following Augustine by choosing to preach on the psalms because he clearly loved preaching the psalms too

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 4h

What is his take? I am preaching when that text is in the lectionary in a few weeks. (I'll be preaching the Psalm though, like Augustine 😇)

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Every day, you could be asked to imagine something you did not know was possible. For me, today it was trying to imagine Simone Weil—philosopher, mystic, paranormal being—watching Charlie Chaplin in a movie theater

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I got to enthusiastically recommend Auerbach's essay "Figura" to someone at this conference. My work here is done

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

during the Q&A after the plenary this guy introduces himself as "an Old Testament scholar who is currently reading Augustine's On the Trinity" nature is healing

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Ephraim Radner is the main speaker at this theology conference and he came out guns blazing haha

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

the twentieth century should have decisively disproven this position for us. Art, culture, science and math do not protect against cruelty. They merely help people harm (or help) others with greater eloquence and efficiency.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I’m debating whether I should post a very critical review of a Christian book that everyone loves and make people very angry at me. I would *never* post it to Facebook (ha!) but maybe it could stir constructive dialogue here.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

excited to get back into one of my favorite authors!

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Western literature (I’m thinking of Augustine, Beowulf, Gawain, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Nietzsche) continues to pick at this merging of moral systems, pointing out its fissures and stitches, its unresolved contradictions and tensions.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Rome had a long, venerable, and highly sophisticated moral tradition of its own. The contest, then, was *between* two rival moral traditions, which eventually merged into one.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

But the more I read about ancient Rome, the more I am convinced that the collision between Christianity and Rome was not between morality and immorality.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

There’s an evangelical narration of early church history that is basically righteous Christians colliding with the licentious world of the pagans. There’s a tiny bit of textual truth to this, in, say, I Corinthians.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

wow. is there a conversation happening somewhere about the failures of narrative theology and what should replace it? And by narrative theology, do you mean postliberal theology?

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Wait wait wait. So Augustus launches this campaign to suppress the cult of Isis, the "queen of heaven," a mother deity, while the main villain in Virgil's Augustan epic is Juno, the "queen of the gods," *the* mother deity.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Just to make sure that I'm hearing you rightly, are you essentially saying that you have arrived at a fully affirming theology and exegesis of scripture, but that you find the Hays' particular way of getting there to be unpersuasive and faulty?

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Oh wow I did not even THINK about this glaring inconsistency! That is a very, very interesting point.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

But even allowing that the received and retrieved traditions of Christian figural interpretation are irreducibly Hellenistic, I would still choose these modes of rationality over common sense realist readings of scripture. I would still take Augustine over Hodge all day any day.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

(There have, of course, been minority dissidents within American scriptural interpretation, like the Mercersburg school.)

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Choosing figural interpretation of scripture today is on some level a willful choice for Hellenistic models of rationality over against the common sense realism of the Enlightenment, which has philosophically undergirded American evangelical interpretation of scripture since the colonial era.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This extended quest into Augustan culture is convincing me even more that figural interpretation was a deeply Hellenistic, historically contingent cultural artifact adopted by the early church. It was not *the* way to read scripture, but a thoroughly culturally contextual enterprise.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It’s taken 220 pages to get to this moment. And yet, having this much background on all the values of the Augustan regime *before* he tackles the poetry of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid is powerful.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

One of my friends is sending me stuff on premodern figural interpretation of scripture (in conflict with Auerbach and Frei) and I am feeling the siren call to return to my old ways. Someone tell me to turn back now while I still can

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

It's the CATA theology conference, which this year is on the Roberts campus. I'm excited to hear the keynote (Ephraim Radner), and I'm also looking forward to connecting with some local biblical scholars and theologians

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Another sign that things are very much getting out of hand... I just registered for my first theology conference in almost a decade

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The more you know, the more you know you don’t know: Today I learned that, to people in the field, “classical,” “Hellenistic,” and “Roman” are three distinct artistic traditions

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

It’s finally time to read this one.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

“Pax comes from pangere, ‘to make firm,’ and pacisi, ‘to make a pact’; it is the ‘pact’ one imposes on a conquered enemy.” —Galinsky, Augustan Culture

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

TODAY IS THE FIRST FALL DAY I HAVE TO WEAR A HOODIE. this is how I felt:

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

This would be after an anecdote about what he learned from being a bricklayer in Texas

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

well. after years of trying to fight it, I'm finally going to delete my Twitter account.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

dang. Didn't know this book existed. That list of contributors is way out of control

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

One of the biggest ironies of Rome is that they had this central ideal of the ancient Roman citizen farmer, farming his own land, while in reality Rome had to import basically all of its food from slave plantations in the provinces, managed from afar

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This might be the strongest evidence yet that I have left postliberalism behind. Hauerwas, forgive me

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

this morning I'm finding myself reading about grain supply logistics in the Roman Empire and wondering how I became That Guy. I always swore I'd never become a Roman history guy

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Reading medieval Hebrew poetry has offered a fascinating window into medieval Jewish biblical exegesis. At first it was mostly readings of Song of Songs, but slowly, I'm starting to see some patterns of exegesis of the prophets and the Psalms, as well.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Perhaps most important is what I would call the “dialogic subjectivity” of Dante—Dante can only discover who he is by talking with others, but it is in talking with others that great depths of his own being are charted.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

> The formula of the poet having negative feelings, then receiving a ritual action and a charge from his guide, then pressing on > The half-apologetic, half-boastful tone about the poet’s youth > Constellations and the recurring metaphor of sailing for the poet’s thematic travels

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

This passage in Ovid’s Fasti is *so* Dantean! It could have come straight out of Purgatorio or Paradiso. > The use of a novel and obscure epithet for a character, which the reader must puzzle out for themselves > Venus is playing nearly the same role as Beatrice

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The cat shoved Ovid deep under the couch, where I wouldn’t find it. (I saw her do it.) Gonna rename her Tertullian

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

One of the most important threads emerging in reading Ovid's Fasti is learning about Roman philosophies/theologies of time, especially as they compare and contrast with earlier Greek and later Christian views on time.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I need to post a correction: Several people have pointed out that there is no evidence that Augustus ever used this phrase. It appears that Galinsky was trying to be witty. I wish he had been more clear that he was making stuff up.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

One of my life goals I haven't gotten to yet: Rereading Quixote, but in the Spanish!! Someday.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

One fascinating anecdote about denominations & class: She said when Protestant missionaries came across the border, Presbyterians won converts among the highly educated, wealthy upper class, Methodists won converts among the middle class, and Baptists won converts from among “everyone else.”

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Talking with my grandma this morning, she was sharing stories about her Baptist church on the Mexico/Texas border, founded right before the Mexican Revolution.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

when ur tryna enjoy the mellifluous ballad but HE’S here

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Literally just randomly walked into some fantastic live jazz playing in the Chicago Cultural Center

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