March 2012
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Upcoming for the Month of May
Dear Readers,
Spring has sprung and I need to clean the dust from the lintel of this my diary. So, for the sake of keeping up appearances and to demote the greeting “Merry Christmas” from its place on high, I make a not so solemn vow to maybe do the following by the end of May, I think,
an article entitled, The Future of Reading, which will deal with the growing e-book trend as well...
December 2011
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Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas! Uh… No, that’s not right,
Happy Nativity! Oh, I mean,
Happy Holidays! Shit, um…,
Season’s Greetings!
Why has it become so hard to express the joy of this season, the celebration of life and redemption in the midst of winter’s death and forsakenness? I recently read an evangelical tract (I know not why?) that disputes the use of the phrase,...
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Act Now Against Government Censorship
I █████ ████ to ██████ ████████ ████ the ██████████ is ████████ to ██████ ████ ██████ and ██████████ on the ████████ and █████ ████ is not the ██████ of the law it ████ ██████ end as the ██████ of the law. Do █████████, ██████ it is too ████.
UNCENSOR THIS →
November 2011
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Our Carbon Emissions
I know it doesn’t factor everything in, but according to the EPA’s Household Emissions Calculator: Jennifer, Charles, and I contribute approximately 2,059 pounds of CO₂ per year per household member. Since Charles’ contribution is marginal, I didn’t factor him in; the sum total therefore being: 4,117 pounds of CO₂ per year. Since the average emissions per person in the...
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Cryogenically Frozen in the 1970s →
“Woody Allen: A Documentary,”on PBS on Sunday and Monday, spends most of its time on this filmmaker’s early works.
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The Educational Lottery →
“Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. National leaders, from Benjamin Rush on, oversaw plans for extending its benefits more broadly. In the 19th century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie famously conceived of schools as...
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“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our...”
– Issac Asimov (via philphys)
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The Bible of King James →
“You don’t have to be a Christian to hear the power of those words—simple in vocabulary, cosmic in scale, stately in their rhythms, deeply emotional in their impact. Most of us might think we have forgotten its words, but the King James Bible has sewn itself into the fabric of the language. If a child is ever the apple of her parents’ eye or an idea seems as old as the hills, if we are at death’s...
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Thanksgiving Day Repainted →
“I’ve been trying to imagine Norman Rockwell trying to paint the modern American family gathered around the Thanksgiving dinner table. For four decades Rockwell was the custodian of our domestic mythology, mainly with his covers for The Saturday Evening Post, which fixed in our collective memory the sacramental moments of small-town life—Bobby’s first haircut, Barb’s first prom—and its...
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Academically Adrift?
“In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but...
What have we done?
“What have we done? What have we done? Christ has left us. We have driven him away. Our hatreds, our pride, our pharisaical self-sufficiency have driven out the Spirit of the Gospel. And Christ has gone. Christ has gone. Oh, how satisfied we are with ourselves! We are the pure, we possess the truth, and we condemn others! But life and history go on. They are knocking at the doors of the Church,...
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Finding Their Kindred Spirits →
“The science-religion ‘debate’ is an abstraction, and a distraction. It isn’t true to the deep nature of science, or of religion, or to the history of interplay between them. These are convictions I’m left with after a cumulative conversation that began a decade ago. And after spending the spring traveling around the country talking about this in theaters packed with scientists and citizens,...
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What is Fundamentalism?
I recently watched a tedious “debate” from the UK-based Intelligence² arguing the motion, “Atheism is the new Fundamentalism”. The Rt. Rev’d Richard Harries and Charles Moore argued for the motion, while A.C. Grayling and Richard Dawkins argued against the motion.
My first comment is that this “debate” was a farce. While the “debaters” all made excellent contributions, there was a complete...
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Upcoming for the Week of November 13th
So, a word about original content coming this week…, maybe some of it next week…, definitely all of it this month,
the review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Preface, on Tuesday*
an article entitled, The Future of Reading
something about Waldorf Schooling
a couple of doodle illustrations that I’ve been working on
fundamentalism and the equities of engagement →
the Parable...
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Reflections and Reprints
Last year, around this time, I wrote the following reflection:
The autumnal colours burgeon in vibrant swathes of rusty red, burning orange, tawny yellow, ochre, amber, and bronze. The air — rarefied and crisp — berates the lungs with numbing breath. It is a fading twilit world, beautiful in its slow, unfolding death. It opens like an oriental fan — ornamented with glossy lacquers...
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Context
In writing a personal journal there is an element of necessary-narcissism, the journalist is staring into a mirrored pool wondering at the image he sees there in the distortions of rippling water. It is important to portray introspection in this way, since the Socratic “learn thyself to know” is hampered by the distortions introduced by self-analysis. When one’s eyes are turned backwards,...
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My recent op-ed, Openness, needs practical demonstration to be fully appreciated, so I have decided to do a complete cover-to-cover review of Richard Dawkins’ critically-acclaimed work, The God Delusion. Richard Dawkins’ is the perfect case study, since I am ideologically at complete odds with him.
I will write a review of each chapter, sometimes in parts, every week (I hope). I am...
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Watch“After residents of Tonawanda, N.Y., became sick, they rallied to fight high levels of hazardous chemicals emitting from a dilapidated plant. In doing so, they revealed weaknesses in the way the EPA regulates air pollution.
“Video Credit: John Poole / NPR
“Want to know if plants in your town are a health risk? Zoom in on our interactive map.
“Poisoned Places, a four-part series from NPR News...
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Remember, remember!
All in good humour, I would like to feature a poem by a friend (who wishes to remain anonymous) parodying the well-known rhyme, “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot”:
Remember, remember, the fifth of November! Forget what did happen then not! Treason made just by a Jesuit’s reason, A triple-crown’d terrorist plot.
When the Romanist monster and...
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WatchChanging Education Paradigms by Sir Ken Robinson — Royal Society of Arts
Matteo Ricci
The 17th century Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci (known to the Chinese as Li-ma-teu), was governed by the question: Can a people be Christianised without being Westernised? Can the leaven of the Gospel be planted in an alien culture and grow without bringing with it the excrescences of the culture planting it?
Such a thing has almost never happened in Christian history. Certainly, as time goes...
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Silence
I just went outside to have my last cigarette of the evening (suspend the moralizing) and though it didn’t register at first, I suddenly realized that it was profoundly quiet. Not the sort of quiet where there is a complete absence of sound; there were leaves rustling, a cricket chirping, and the faint purring of a far-off car. It was the sort of quiet that defies those things, that seems...
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Openness
Proponents of the absolute relativism of truth need read no further.
Agatha Christie’s stage-drama, The Spider Web, begins with two gentlemen tasting port-wine; trying to tell the difference between a fine vintage, an acceptable middle-of-the-road variety, and an humble offering from the grocer’s shelf. They both make definitive assertions, demonstrating their exquisite palates...
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Watch“Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the real differences between the left and right halves of the human brain. It’s not simply “emotion on the right, reason on the left,” but something far more complex and interesting. A Best of the Web talk from RSA Animate”. — Royal Society of Arts
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On War and Redemption by Timothy Kudo →
“Back in the United States, I look at people and think: ‘You have no idea what right and wrong are ’. Much that I once held as matters of conscience is now just custom or culture. The challenging thing about ethics is you have to figure them out for yourself. What the war taught me is first: you should always strive to do the right thing even though you can’t control the outcome. Second, wrong...
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Last Acts by Elisa New →
refusing to relinquish vitality
“The great Jewish thinkers, poets, novelists, and critics of the second half of the 20th century are—at least they tell us so—dying, and if we are loath to believe them, it must have something to do with how many last rounds these guys manage to put on the Reaper’s tab. Turning last last acts into marathons, they write as though, by drawing it all out, one might,...
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Credo versus Credimus
abstract
Within the context of common prayer, there is not a significant enough difference in beginning the Nicene Creed with “I believe” or “We believe” to justify further congregational division as a result of insisting too strongly on one form or the other.
context
My parish recently transitioned, in a move that was appropriate, from using the the Anglican Service Book (a form which...
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The Four Loves
érōs
‘Dost thou love me?’ Saith the woman to the man. ‘I do love thee, ‘The heaven’s endless span’.
‘Dost thou love me?’ ‘With my body and my soul. ‘To possess thee, ‘Is mine heart’s unrivalled goal’.
‘So, thou needst me?’ ‘Like a fire needeth heat! ‘Yes, I need thee, ‘Thine heart, mine heart to meet’.
storgē
‘Dost thou love me?’ Saith the child to her mother. ‘I do love thee,...
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With an increasingly fragile global economy; distinguished by record unemployment, credit defaults, housing foreclosures, rampant inflation on commodities, and an atmosphere of political unrest, this year’s Christmas trees may be sparsely populated with gifts. Hopefully the toys listed below will elicit a smile from your toddler without rubbing a hole in your wallet. There is a...
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Watch“We have been given the ability to defy our nature”. – Unilateral Resolution to the Gallican Problem (Résolution unilatérale au problème gallicane), Section I, Subsection 3, Paragraph 8; given at the International Council of Terrestrial Gastropods (Conseil international des gastropodes terrestres) in Marseilles.
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Hello, Big Brother!
██ . ██████ , - ██ . ██████ *
If you are the representative of a country with powerful reconnaissance satellites; can issue military orders for and have clearance to access intelligence gathered from said satellites; then I will be standing at the above coordinates on Sunday, 6 November 2011 @ 2100 hours. I will be waving my hands like a ludicrous maniac, mouthing the words, “So long, and thanks...
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Benedict, on the New Evangelization
“In the course of history, this mission [evangelization] has taken on new forms and employed new strategies according to different places, situations, and historical periods. In our own time, it has been particularly challenged by an abandonment of the faith—a phenomenon progressively more manifest in societies and cultures which for centuries seemed to be permeated by the Gospel. The social...
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“That that is, is. That that is not, is not. That that is not, is not that that...”
– A word sequence that demonstrates lexical ambiguity and the importance of proper punctuation, i.e., “That that is is that that is not is not that that is not is not that that is is that not it it is”.
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Movember follows Octboober
Last month, millions of people banded together to raise awareness about breast cancer and women’s health. In the month of November, thousands of men in the United States and abroad will liberate their upper lips from the tyranny of shaving cream and the razor. Together we can get fuzzy, raise funds and awareness for men’s health (especially, prostate cancer), and look pretty dapper...
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