Author: Tim

• Challenge the Premise

  If you answer the question, you endorse the premise. The truth is, every question, in every conversation, places the two in the space the questioner has decided is important.  There is no logical or moral compulsion to buy that prior decision.  Often, to do so wastes time. Jesus seldom answered the question.  His reluctance to…

• “Sabi”: The Value I Like To Draw

  Sabi by itself means “the bloom of time.” It connotes natural progression-tarnish, hoariness, rust-the extinguished gloss of that which once sparkled. It’s the understanding that beauty is fleeting. The word’s meaning has changed over time, from its ancient definition, “to be desolate,” to the more neutral “to grow old.” By the thirteenth century, sabi’s meaning…

• Katsushika Hokusai: How long for artists to learn…

  From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects…

• Peter Kreeft: Modernism As Rationalized Promiscuity

  Every single one of the liberal heresies justifies sexual libertinism. Even scholarly issues like the dating of the four Gospels has a sexual payoff, as you will find if you talk long enough with liberal theologians. If the Gospels are not eyewitness accounts of Christ’s actual words, but the “consensus” of the “early Christian community,”…

• artist Julie Dermansky on discipline

  By Danny Gregory Inspiration is overrated. It’s all about discipline. There are glimmers of inspiration, when you lose touch with time and place but you can’t wait around for that. When I start working on something where I am so excited it’s like some sort of drug, I’m just alive. But the only way to…

• “…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…