Really, I'm working on it. In my head. You know, brainstorming. FYI, the novel is Terry Pratchett's Thud (2005). Highly recommended, particularly for its understanding of prayer. And fencing.
Here be dragons. And doves. Human beings long for transcendence. Such longing is, for the world, always out of fashion because, of course, it is not a longing for the world, and the world knows it. We know what the world wants. The world—by which we mean Satan, the Lord of the World—wants above all our obedience, a jewel so precious that he will do anything to get it: lie, steal, murder, bear false witness, pretend to social standing, pretend to insider knowledge to get us to consent to his influence. “God lied to you. You will not die.” And suddenly we are anxious about having other people dislike us, about losing prestige in our social circles, about other people being more popular or influential or successful, about other people having secret knowledge, about our own influence and fame. “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” And with that temptation, our first parents fell. The irony is cosmic. There they were in the Garden, privy to conversation with God face-to-face, ...
Welcome, Milo fans! One of you over on the Facebook thread had a good question about my previous post : "Lots of people died for freedom of speech before USA existed. Then [an]...argumentum ad Adam and Eve..?" I agree, I needed to give you more links between Milton and the First Amendment. That was the original plan for the post, but then Milton took over, and as often happens when you actually read the primary sources, I found myself in places I had not intended to go but discovered (much to my delight) were far more compelling than the argument I had thought I wanted to make. (Seriously, the tension between freedom and compulsory virtue goes back to our first parents and their relationship with God? How's that for the importance of culture?!) This happens--a lot--when you take the time to settle in with the texts, which is what makes being an historian so much fun, even better than being in a Dan Brown thriller, because the clues you are following are really out the...
Enough dancing around , let's just say it. It is one thing to say that the peoples who inhabit the westernmost parts of the Eurasian continent--the majority of whom during recorded human history happened to be white or at least what we would now call "white" (although they didn't think of themselves that way until more recently)--have had a disproportionate effect over the past five hundred or so years (give or take a couple of centuries) on the development of the world as we now know it. It is wholly another thing to say that they have had this effect because they were white. The former is a statement of historical reality: the world would not look the way it does now--our cities, our industries, our clothing, our populations, our governments, our health care, our technologies, our educational institutions, our transportation systems, our communications, our food--if not for the effects of what economic historian Dierdre McCloskey has called the Great Fact, t...
It sounds like such good advice: “Just do the best you can.” It is the implications that are somewhat worrying. Yes, it’s the beginning of the tournament year, and I’m back where I was in July, wondering what the point is. Okay, so one of the reasons that I lost that pool bout 4-5 was because my weapon failed on the last touch and my parry-riposte, clear as day to look at, did not register on the box. (My opponent remised, and there we were.) What was I doing letting things get to 4-4 in the first place? Well, I had been behind 1-4 and come back, but never mind. I lost the last touch because I did not know how to clean my tip properly, and that, plus one thing and another (both of my other weapons failing because the body cords were loose and so my attacks registered nothing but off-targets), I only won 3 of my 6 pool bouts, putting me in the middle of the field (16 out of 32) for the D-E round. And then I lost my D-E to the girl who had seeded 17th. So there I was sitting at the...
Learn to discern. We all know what sin is, right? Right?! Once upon a time in the desert , the hermit Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) set out to make a list of the most deadly ones, albeit he called them “deadly thoughts,” not “sins.” You probably know the list, even if you don’t think you do: gluttony, impurity (a.k.a. lust), avarice (a.k.a. greed), sadness (a.k.a. feeling sorry for oneself), anger or wrath, acedia or sloth, vainglory, and pride (two different things). Not quite the list you were expecting? That is because some centuries later—we’re talking ancient times here, when centuries passed like decades do now (or vice versa)—Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) revised the list, somewhat accidentally, in his commentary on Job. Gregory had been expounding Job according to its multiple layers—yes, that’s right! Job, like Shrek, has layers! —and he happened somewhere in book XXXI to mention the “seven principle vices” to which Pride, the “Queen of S...
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F.B.