Month: July 2008

• “…a complicated theological justification for why we should do the exact opposite of what Jesus said.”

    “No matter how trivial, simple, and painless a saying of Jesus might be, there is always someone out there with a complicated theological justification for why we should do the exact opposite of what Jesus said.” From a comment on an old blog post; the site is long dead.

• Douglas Wilson: “Fathers are jovial and open-handed”

  This is ostensibly about food, but read and think about parenting in general, and specifically Christian parenting of the strict sort, where it seldom is grasped that the  function of the father is to GIVE.   And giving that isn’t jovial (love that word) doesn’t touch the receiver as a gift. BLOG and MABLOG What…

• Owen Barfield on the language of poetry

  Leithart quoting Barfield.  Bold is mine. leithart.com » Blog Archive » Technical terms They express, as nearly as any word can do, a concrete, particular thing, and not an abstract, generalized idea. . . .it may be worth pointing out here an instinctive tendency in poets, and others, to use general term of things which…

• Michael Lewis: Two teachers, but in this order.

    “It is often said that great achievement requires in one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can…

• Notes from Neil Postman: “Amusing Ourselves To Death”

  The Typographic Mind:  “…the capacity to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally.” The Peek-A-Boo World:  The invention of the telegraph made possible, for the first time, people to get lots of information every day which they need do nothing about. This is Postman’s central, most useful concept, what he calls the “information-action ratio”.   The information…

• Artists make pretty things for friends

  In the West the creative impulse has come to reside, for the most part, in the space between the artist and his world.  By “world” I mean all that is outside what Martin Buber called an “I-Thou” connection.  That world can be urban or rural, it can be empty of people or can be a street…