Category: My Commonplace Book

• 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…

• Studeo: eager to study

  First Things » Blog Archive » One College That’s Getting It Right Like many of us reading these pages, I was in the middle of that spring migration known as “bringing the kid home from college for the summer break” (and, we hope, the summer job). My daughter and I were having breakfast at the…

• G. K. Chesterton: “Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals…”

  Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible — at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name…

• Alice Walker’s distraction

  You remember that book “Intellectuals”, by Paul Johnson?  The one where he studied these famous ideologues to see how their private lives were so narcissistic and destructive, despite their public theories for re-arranging everyone else?  (Think Karl Marx.) Well, add Alice Walker to the list.  Seems like a pattern for famous artists in particular. How…

• Peter Leithart: Wedding Sermon

  Peter Leithart:  “Wedding Sermon” is just magnificent: ….As the Spirit joins Father and Son, so He joins fathers and sons across the gap of generations. No generation can be healthy if it is dominated by one spirit. A generation dominated by the spirit of sons breaks from the past in revolution, and a generation that…

• Goethe: “…talk less, draw more”.

  We should talk less and draw more. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• C.S. Lewis: on children’s fears

  “Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can’t bear…

• Dallas Willard: “…the good news of the presence…”

  “When all is said and done, ‘the gospel’ for [some preachers], and others on the theological right is that Christ made the ‘arrangement’ that can get us into heaven. In the Gospels, by contrast, ‘the gospel’ is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance…

• “Prayer of Incompetence”

    “Prayer of Incompetence The desert is a classic symbol of the monastic life and it is particularly apt in reference to monastic prayer. It is easy to be lyrical when speaking of prayer but the reality of praying is anything but lyrical. A realistic appraisal of the experience of prayer must lead one to…