Yellow Brick Road


With Joy, into the future!

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Credo ut intelligam

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It is difficult to describe the crisis I have been living through these past several weeks. The drawing by my office door Short version : Don’t call out the Devil if you aren’t ready to bout .  Alternative short version : “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” —1 Corinthians 1:20 There has been much bitterness. There have been feelings of betrayal. There have been feelings of being lied to while watching people whom I thought were my supporters fall away. Friends warn me about overreacting. At which I overreact. “Academic freedom means nothing if the faculty do not stand up for it.” I believed that. Someone whom I have trusted my entire academic career told me that. I still believe it—but do my colleagues? “Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.” I heard someone say that recently on his livestream. Someone whom my friends tell me I s...
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“Hail, Mary, full of grace, punch the devil in the face!”

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Once upon a time, there was a man named Theophilus who made a bargain with the devil. Thank God that Our Lady was able to help him! Do you want to know the full story? Listen here ! * The Prayer of Theophilus O miserable wretch that I am, what have I done and what have I wrought?...  Where shall I, unhappy sinner, go, who have denied my Christ and his holy mother ( Christum meum et sanctam eius genitricem ) and have made myself a servant of the devil ( seruum diaboli ) through a chirograph of wicked warrant ( per nefande cautionis chirographum )?  Who, do you think, will be able to pull it away from the hand of the devil, the destroyer, and help me?  Why was it necessary for me to become acquainted with that wicked Hebrew who should be burned?  (For this same Hebrew had been condemned a little while before by law and judge.) Why indeed? For thus are they honored, who forsaking God and the Lord, run to the devil....  Woe ...
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By the Book*

A friend of mine who has been following my posts of late has been anxious to remind me that fencing is not something that you can learn by reading a book . In his words: "Fencing is so 3-D and reactive it is impossible to articulate into book learning." Rather, it is something one learns only by doing, more particularly, through the physical lessons that we have with our coach: "Everything you will need to learn about fencing he will teach you. There is no need to look elsewhere." Fencing, of course, is not the only activity to suffer this limitation. Tennis, knitting, singing, playing a musical instrument, walking, speaking a language, prayer: none of these activities is accessible to us in any way other than through practice itself. Far from being able to teach us "how to", books of themselves cannot even teach us how to read, as any one who has gone to a library and picked up a book without knowing the relevant conventions of translating phonemes...
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Draco Layer Four: The Anagogic or Mystical Sense

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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, ...
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Piercing No. 7

The euphoria's wearing off a bit and my ear has started to throb, ever so slightly, but I'm still really glad I did it yesterday. "Why?", you may ask, as, in fact, one of my friends at fencing did the other night at practice when, showing off my new navel ring, I mentioned that I was thinking of getting another piercing at the top of my ear: "Is it that you want to feel young again?" You'd think so, yes? Piercing is one of those things that the young are really into; mature adults like my 44-year-old self should not be adding holes to their bodies. We should--if this is true--be content with the ones we already have, right? Well, I don't know. Certainly the majority of my piercings (two each in my earlobes) I got when I was young, the first set in middle school when I was old enough that my mom could be persuaded to drive me to the mall, the second set in high school when I could drive myself there. I once had a third hole in one of my lobes, b...
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