At a recent symposium I met up with a colleague, and promised him some information that I had stashed away in my office back at Marquette. One of my dear teachers, James A. Weisheipl, OP, had written a nice piece about the history of the Thomistic revival, and I assured my friend that this would be a good resource for a project he was working on.

Life is full of surprises.

I got back to Milwaukee, and went hunting through my “Weisheipl” folders in my office, and came across the piece in question. The article is a small pamphlet of a presentation he gave, as it happens, here in Milwaukee in 1965: “Thomism as a Perennial Philosophy” (PDF/online). But as I pulled the pamphlet out of the folder, out popped two pictures of Fr Weisheipl that I hadn’t seen for at least a decade!

My immediate reactions:

1. “Huh? What the heck are these?”
2. “OMG! I haven’t seen these…in like…forever!”
3. “Gosh, he was a handsome devil!”

You can be the judge, of course. I’m estimating that the picture on the left dates from the early 1960’s, while the one on the right dates from the early 1980’s—I remember Fr Weisheipl sending me off with a copy of the second picture, asking me to send it to Catholic University of America Press, for use on the dust jacket of his Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages (permalink/publisher).

La vita é bella. Every now and then life makes you smile—even if you still have tears in your eyes.