About

Welcome to Quaerendum, my personal website. There is a blog, and some tools I have put together for learning ancient languages.

My name is James Duguid. I am an assistant pastor at Wallace Presbyterian Church, and a scholar of the Old Testament, as well as ancient North Africa-West Asia. I have an MDiv from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD in Semitic and Egyptian Langages and Literatures from The Catholic University of America.

I’m a big fan of ancient languages (especially Hebrew and Egyptian), theology, philosophy, and biology, so any or all of those things might show up here.

I designed this blog myself, by stealing from 16th and 17th century books. Pretty much every flourish you see here was found in an old book at some point. Many of the illustrated capital letters came from the delightful 1592 edition of John Calvin’s Institutes, printed by Iohannes le Preux.

The name Quaerendum is a Latin future passive participle, and refers to something which ought to be or must be searched out. It is not uncommon in Latin literature, but I first came across it in Alexander Comrie’s 1734 dissertation De moralitatis fundamento et natura virtutis, where he uses it to refer to seeking out the ground of morality, for example in Section 2, §2:

Cartesius quidem agnoscit discrimen inter bonum & malum a legibus & institutis hominum non dependere, sed unicè in Deo quaerendum esse

“Descartes certainly recognizes that the difference between good and bad does not depend on human laws and institutions, but must be sought only in God.”

So this blog is about searching - following the rabbit-tracks of whatever questions I happen to be interested in, tracing the principles hiding behind the details, looking for the foundations it all goes back to.

For another example, with a rather different vibe, the term is used by Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.43-44, on finding the right woman:

Haec tibi non tenues veniet delapsa per auras: Quaerenda est oculis apta puella tuis.

“She won’t come floating down to you out of thin air: a woman fit for your eyes takes some finding.”