phantasmagorical

"This is why I keep going back to the concept of a “centred set”: the church being defined by its..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:33:35 -0500

“

This is why I keep going back to the concept of a “centred set”: the church being defined by its centre, not by its boundary. Now of course, the centre of the church is Christ, but in this discussion we’re concerned with the centre in terms of the church’s confession of Christ. (I also apologise now for my unsettling use of British spelling for “centre” (sw).)

This allows us to be both very detailed in describing the centre, but also very broad in who we accept as Christians (even if we regard them as “off-centre” to a greater or lesser extent.

To put this in concrete terms: if I’m asked to say where I think the centre is, I’m going to use a definition that will not be accepted by everyone. I’m going to choose the teachings set out in Luther’s Small Catechism, which I regard as the best exposition of “mere Christianity” ever written.

That would justly produce howls of outrage from those who disagree with Lutheran teachings on the sacraments, were I saying it represents the boundary outside which no-one can be called a Christian. But I’m not: I’m saying this is where I believe the centre to be. I’ll leave it to God to decide where the boundary is and who is on or other side of it, and indeed who is closer or further away from the centre itself.

”

- John Halton. See also “The Church as a Centred Set”.

Biblioburro: a different sort of bookmobile. Via Text Patterns.

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:14:17 -0500

Biblioburro: a different sort of bookmobile. Via Text Patterns.

"The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me,..."

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:25:30 -0500

“The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat—that tells you that this isn’t a will-power problem. We didn’t get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the will-power to keep their houses free of rats. Fat isn’t moral, it’s epidemiological. There are a small number of people, a tiny minority, whose genes are short-circuited in a way that makes them less prone to retaining nutrients. That’s a maladaptive trait through most of human history—burning unnecessary calories when you’ve got to chase down an antelope to get more, that’s no way to live long enough to pass on your genes! So you and Perry over here with your little skinny selves, able to pack away transfats and high-fructose corn-syrup and a pound of candy for breakfast at the IHOP, you’re not doing this on will-power—you’re doing it by expressing the somatotype of a recessive, counter-survival gene.”

- Cory Doctorow, Makers.

"[Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora Radio] likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in..."

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:28:54 -0500

“[Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora Radio] likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’””

- “The Song Decoders”, the story of Pandora Radio.

"For all their shortcomings, the Great Books—along with many other varieties of middlebrow..."

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:41:00 -0500

“

For all their shortcomings, the Great Books—along with many other varieties of middlebrow culture—reflected a time when the liberal arts commanded more respect. They were thought to have practical value as a remedy for parochialism, bigotry, social isolation, fanaticism, and political and economic exploitation. The Great Books had a narrower conception of “greatness” than we might like today, but their foundational ideals were radically egalitarian and proudly intellectual.

As Beam concludes, “The Great Books are dead. Long live the Great Books.” And, I might add: Long live middlebrow culture.

”

- Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor. This would have to be balanced by what Lewis said about people reading for its hygienic value, which is not true reading but mere status seeking.

Hand-binding the Pictorial Webster’s. Via Text Patterns.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:58:28 -0500

Hand-binding the Pictorial Webster’s. Via Text Patterns.

via Text Patterns

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:58:01 -0500

via Text Patterns

Via Inhabitatio Dei

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:11:24 -0500

Via Inhabitatio Dei

"We don’t remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our..."

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:44:06 -0400

“We don’t remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our memories together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with the present, which is lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psych prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with delicious lunches in front of them are asked to remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good lunches have more positive memories of breakfast than those who have bad lunches. We don’t remember breakfast — we look at lunch and superimpose it on breakfast.”

- “Happy Meal Toys Versus Copyright” in Content: Selected Essays by Cory Doctorow.

"In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the..."

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:03:16 -0400

“In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear. For to him who does know, children can sometimes seem like innocent delinquents, sentenced not to death but to life, who have not yet discovered what their punishment will consist of. Nonetheless, everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: “Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse - until at last the worst of all arrives.””

- That Schopenhauer - he’s such a barrel of laughs.

"Thales is credited with the theory that everything is “really” water. What does such an..."

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:18:10 -0400

“Thales is credited with the theory that everything is “really” water. What does such an assertion mean? Why should it ever have occurred to anyone to say that everything was “really” water? On the face of it, the theory is a statement about the physical world as conceived by the Greeks of the sixth century B.C.: it means that, of the four “elements”, three are forms of the fourth: earth is solidified water, air rarefied water, fire (aether, the hot sky of the eastern Mediterranean) rarefied air or twice-rarefied water. But merely in these physical terms the statement is inexplicable: for not only does it contradict the evidence of the five senses, it also seems to lack any necessity. Why should earth not be earth, air air and fire fire, as they seem to be? Now the inexplicability is in the idiom; the novelty is the language of physics, and in order to see what is meant we have to translate it back into its original language, that of metaphysics. Translated in to the language of metaphysics, “Everything is really water” reads: The world we perceive is characterized by great diversity, but this diversity is not fundamental; fundamentally the world is a unity. But notice that this unity is precisely what is not apparent; what is apparent is the reverse, the diversity of the world, and the object of the hypothesis is to assert the apparitional nature of this diversity. In its last significance, therefore, “Everything is water” means: The world of diversity is an apparent world; in reality the world is one. Thus we find at the very beginning of philosophy the assertion that there exist two worlds, the “real” and the “apparent”, that everything is “really” something else and not what it “appears” to be. If we are willing to call the language of physics employed by Thales the content of the thought, and the metaphysical basis of this language the form of the thought, we can say that the difference between scientific and pre-scientific thought is not so great a gulf as it is often supposed to be; the content of the thought is new, but its form remains the same, namely that there are two worlds, the one perceived, the other a mystery. Only if Thales had said “Everything is really what it appears to be” would the form of the thought have changed.”

- R.J. Hollingdale, in the introduction to Essays and Aphorisms of Schopenhauer.

Do you snack while you read? If so, favourite reading snack?I don’t snack while I read but I...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:23:47 -0400

Do you snack while you read? If so, favourite reading snack?

I don’t snack while I read but I do often read while I’m eating meals. Except dinner, of course. I don’t think Rachel and Darcy would appreciate that.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

It doesn’t horrify me as much as it used to, though I still don’t do it. When I want to make notes in books I use post-it notes.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

Dog-earring is book abuse. Laying a paperback flat open creases the spine, which is also book abuse. I usually use receipts or scraps of paper as bookmarks. But not those bookmarks with yarn tails. Again, book abuse.

Fiction, non-fiction, or both?

A few years ago I was heavily non-fiction. These days it’s the opposite.

Hard copy or audiobooks?

Of course I’d love to have hard copies of all the books I’m interested in but budget constraints won’t allow it. Therefore I listen to a lot of audiobooks checked out from my excellent public library. I commute for one hour every day so audiobooks allow me to read much more than I normally could. They also keep my mind occupied on those rare occasions when I exercise. Prevents me from continually asking myself why I’m walking, with gusto, to nowhere.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

At any point, though I’d rather make it to a natural break.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?

Not usually. When I do, though, I usually use http://www.m-w.com/. I prefer that site because you can hear the pronunciation. I never really bothered to learn how to use pronunciation symbols.

What are you currently reading?

Wuthering Heights in hard copy. The Essential Edgar Allan Poe on audiobook. Also dipping into a volume of filthy limericks.

What is the last book you bought?

I bought several books last Friday at the Red Cross book fair. Some highlights: Folktales of England; Essays and Aphorisms of Schopenhauer; Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth Miller; Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Jung; Indiana Folktale Reader; Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; Bulfinch’s Mythology; Early Irish Myths and Sagas.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?

Usually several at a time, a few of which I end up abandoning completely.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?

In the mornings and during my lunch hour for print books.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?

Probably stand alone books. I’ve started several series and never finished them. If you can’t tell by now I don’t have the greatest attention span.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?

I’ve become an evangelist for Neil Gaiman this year.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)

Generally by subject. I reserve the right, however, to keep all my Penguin Classics together or have a shelf reserved for all my Wendell Berry first editions or whatever sounds good to me at the time. I’ve been known to reorganize my books during lazy afternoons.

Cover art for volume two of the Library of America’s...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:33:31 -0400

Cover art for volume two of the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales.

Cover art for volume one of the Library of America’s...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:32:48 -0400

Cover art for volume one of the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales.

I found out about the R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) Challenge from Stefanie and thought I’d...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:12:31 -0400

I found out about the R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) Challenge from Stefanie and thought I’d join in the fun. I’ll start with the Penguin Classics Three Gothic Novels, which includes The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, and Frankenstein. I’ll read the first two and listen to B.J. Harrison read Frankenstein during my commute. Also, a few days ago I mooched Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark so I’ll try to read that. I’m next on the library request list for the Good Omens audiobook by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. If I get it in time I’ll start listening to it after Frankenstein. Sounds like a fun run up to Halloween.

"It’s really sary that a retin like Glenn Bek is one of the gatekeepers of what used to be alled..."

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:35:00 -0400

“It’s really sary that a retin like Glenn Bek is one of the gatekeepers of what used to be alled ‘onservatism’ … Boy, it sure is good to know that a lever and reative lown like him is one of the prinipal framers of our national disourse on what it means to be really truly an Amerian itizen. I so believe he’s not just some hattering ukoo. For as we know, being onservative overs a multitude of sins and automatially makes you a ompetent and apable thinker and not a mere rabble-rousing lunati.”

- Mark Shea (via ayjay) If you’re not in on the joke it’s a reference to this video.

Tom Stoppard’s book satchel. Alas, the manufacturer...

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:34:05 -0400

Tom Stoppard’s book satchel. Alas, the manufacturer stopped making them over twenty years ago. via more than 95 theses

"As head of [a newly united Germany, Otto von] Bismarck saw that his historic role would be to create..."

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:30:26 -0400

“

As head of [a newly united Germany, Otto von] Bismarck saw that his historic role would be to create Germany not simply as a legal entity but as a political, financial, and cultural union. One way to do that was to provide benefits for people in every region of the Reich - to give Bavarians, Hanoverians, Frankfurters, and everyone else a sense of belonging, of gratitude, toward the new national government in Berlin. And thus Bismarck invented the welfare state. He pushed through an “Accident Insurance Law” – in modern parlance, a workmen’s-compensation system – to provide medical treatment and financial payments for workers hurt on the job. He created an old-age pension system – a social security system. And he authored the Sickness Insurance Law of 1883, to assure that any injured or ailing German could obtain medical treatment.

…

For the past century or so, historians have been debating why a crotchety, tax-averse, right-wing aristocrat like Bismarck would invest so much of his political capital in welfare benefits for the working class. Some of the explanations involve practical politics: Bismarck’s new national government needed to win the allegiance of the entire German population, and a welfare state helped do that.

…

Beyond all those pragmatic explanations, though, it seems that Otto von Bismarck was driven as well by a charitable impulse, perhaps a product of his Lutheran upbringing. When the chancellor first proposed his welfare state to the Reichstag, in 1881, he described it as a means for the more fortunate Germans to care for the least of their brethren; public welfare, he said, should be viewed as “a program of applied Christianity.” Defending his medical and unemployment insurance schemes in 1884, Bismarck argued that “the greatest burden for the working class is the uncertainty of life. They can never be certain that they will have a job, or that they will have health and the ability to work. We cannot protect a man from all sickness and misfortune. But it is our obligation, as a society, to provide assistance when he encounters these difficulties. … A rich society must care for the poor.”

”

- T.R. Reid, “The Healing of America”, pp. 72-74.

The Book Bench

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:37:18 -0400

The Book Bench

"The point of all this is to say that when the New Testament calls us to imitate God, it is clearly..."

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:42:00 -0400

“

The point of all this is to say that when the New Testament calls us to imitate God, it is clearly calling us to take on the agapeic qualities of Christ. For the New Testament authors, this is what God is like. To be like God is to live in and practice the radical agape of Christ through the Spirit of Christ whom God has sent to us.

As such, any image of God which seeks to curtail, modify, or circumscribe this vision of God-as-agape is to be rejected. Any portrait of God’s moral character that seeks to “balance” the love of God as revealed in Christ with God’s “other attributes” is to be rejected out of hand. The litmus test for this lies in the call to be imitators of God. Would anyone be pastorally comfortable calling people to imitate God’s supposed overflowing wrath against sinners? Of course not. The claim is then made that we are not to imitate “those” aspects of God—those are God’s prerogative, not ours, it is claimed. However, the New Testament does not make any such distinction between God’s supposed attributes. The New Testament simply calls us, as those led by the Spirit, to be conformed to God’s own moral character, which is the character of Christ. We are not called to imitate God’s “nice side” and leave God’s “dark side” alone. We are called instead simply to imitate God. And for the New Testament this means manifesting the radical agape of Christ. This is what God is like and anything that seeks to balance or mitigate this is foreign to the New Testament and the nature of Christianity itself.

In short, if your theological image of God is one that you’re not willing to call people to imitate, you probably have some false ideas about God. Any God that cannot be imitated in a way that is moral, righteous, and worthy of praise by human beings is not the God that the writers of the New Testament knew.

”

- Halden Doerge, “Imitators of God?”