June 2010
52 posts
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“(and anyway, who promised us that reality would not be bizarre?)”
– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (2000)
May 2010
33 posts
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A complex system cannot be controlled, it can only...
One of the topics in which I am interested at the moment is the modernist ethos of control. It’s a product of hubris. It is literally lethal and ultimately unworkable because it is based on a false view of the world. It includes a quixotic pursuit of certainty and a presumption that we can stand outside the world and not be affected by our actions. But while the physical world is...
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“For all the math and the theoretical models, economics remains an intellectual...”
– Walter Russell Mead—The Top Ten Lessons of the Global Economic Meltdown (via T19)
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“Europe remains a union of convenience, which can be discarded by national...”
– David Ignatius. Kendall Harmon says rightly that there’s a metaphor here for the Anglican Communion.
TitusOneNine - The Parallels between the EU struggles and those of Anglicans
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“‘After four years of research, at least one thing became clear: Much of...”
– “Science vs. Religion” discovers what scientists really think about religion
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“The so-called new philosophy, ‘permissiveness’ if you like, seen from the right...”
– Martin Amis via Villainous Company: The Tyranny of Permissiveness
Marilynne Robinson has several essays showing that the Puritans were nothing like their caricature. The neopuritans are worse.
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“That’s the politician’s answer to every intractable problem: give...”
– The Thinker —James Taranto is quoting the blog of the Ayn Rand Center, which in this case is spot-on
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“When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around...”
– Peggy Noonan: He Was Supposed to Be Competent - WSJ.com — Noonan is erratic, but this seems right.
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Spirituality Without Spirits →
Personally, I’m religious, not spiritual. Perhaps a better way to put it is that my religion has a spirituality. It seems to work better that way. Mills at First Things explains why.
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What are they calling it today?
And then there’s this:
London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery—not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.
That last bit is just an example of the euphemism treadmill at work. We’re old enough to remember the “greenhouse effect,” which...
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The Flower of Hope
Among my favorite poems is George MacDonald’s lovely narrative piece, “A Manchester Poem.” In it, a married couple working in the textile mills of industrial Manchester, England, go for a walk in the country and find a snowdrop, the first flower of spring. They are much affected by its symbolism—“A longing, patient, waiting hopefulness.” Meek and humble and supremely confident.
With...
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“All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has...”
– Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse” (1982)
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“In Walker Percy’s diagnosis, to prescribe Prozac is to make the mistake of...”
– Read Mercer Schuchardt (slightly paraphrased), 2004
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“Few of us, creatures of the present age, believe in miracles—in occurrences that...”
– Leon Kass, “Science, Religion, and the Human Future,” 2007
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“It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in...”
– G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 8
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Sayers on Metaphor
Dorothy L. Sayers ranks among my favorite writers, so I was excited last year to come across a previously unread speech-turned-essay of hers in the third volume of her collected writings on Dante (here).
One of the things she is saying in this essay is that theology, in particular, is trying to address a reality that is well beyond human experience. But it must do so through ordinary language....
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“But where this position is not crude is with respect to the criticism...”
– Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford 1985), chapter 7
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“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“When we pass beyond pointing to individual sensible objects, when we begin to...”
– C. S. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes” (1939)
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“For [Walker] Percy, as for Peirce, meaning does not and cannot emerge from...”
– Douglas MItchell, Walker Percy’s Search for Community | The Mississippi Quarterly via BNET (2004)
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“The point I shall endeavour to establish is that these [creedal] statements...”
– Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (1941), preface
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“Newton summed up his lifework: “I know not what I seem to the world, but...”
– Herman Wouk, via CultureLab: Is God a mathematician?
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“Melancholy is a frivolous thing compared with the seriousness of joy. Melancholy...”
– G. K. Chesterton, on George MacDonald
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“Moreover, whether we are dealing with simile or metaphor, it has to be...”
– Dorothy L. Sayers, “Poetry, Language, and Ambiguity,” 1954
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“Formal operations relying on one framework of interpretation cannot demonstrate...”
– Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge
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“Nevertheless, it is advisable for everyone who has something to communicate to...”
– Dorothy L. Sayers, “Poetry, Language, and Ambiguity” (1954) 