Fencing Bear at Prayer

While talking about Dorothy Sayers' argument in favor of reviving the medieval educational model of the trivium : 1)  She's right.  We should be teaching grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric as the tools of learning, not worrying about false dichotomies between the "sciences" and the "humanities" (both "subjects" in her terms, not "tools"). 2)  We would be much better off thinking of teaching in terms of the medieval scholastic practice of disputatio --defining terms, distinguishing parts of our argument, testing our reasoning on the basis of syllogisms--rather than claiming we are teaching by the "Socratic method," whatever that is.  3)  Thinking about teaching and learning as exercises in developing tools makes it possible to correct our students (and ourselves) without worrying about hurting anybody's feelings because it makes one's corrections concrete ("You need to define your terms," "There is a fa...

"It is not true at all that dogma is 'hopelessly irrelevant' to the life and thought of the average man. What is true is that ministers of the Christian religion often assert that is is, present it for consideration as though it were, and, in fact, by their faulty exposition of it make it so. The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God [take that, Dan Brown !--FB]; if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe at all. And in that case, it is wholly irrelevant to chatter about 'Christian pirnciples.' "If the 'average man' is going to be interested in Christ at all, it ...

How do you tell the difference between procrastination as such and the dithering that would seem to be necessary to any work of the imagination? The mess (or, at the very least, my perception thereof) has subsided; my son has arrived safely at camp where he will be for the next four weeks (gasp! my little boy isn't so little any more); the floor in my office on campus has been swept (mostly) and the rug cleaned (sort of); I have my new glasses so can see clearly again (even if this pair is supposed to be my spare; my proper frames are now being fitted with, yes, progressives) ; I am rested, well-fed, not too battered by Sunday's tournament ; I've read that book about Mary that I've been carrying around in my book bag for months. As the baboon said to the lions, " It is time ." But I'm scared. It's hard being both melancholic and the one who has to do the jump-starting. Much better to spend the morning reading this amazing webcomic about The L...

Having finished Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2004) a few days ago, this morning on my way to yoga and fencing I started listening to Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (2006). The contrast could not be more telling. In Robinson's book, the aged narrator John Ames is recounting for his young son memories of his life as a congregationalist pastor. Both Ames' father and his grandfather had been pastors before him, if of a very different type, the younger a pacifist, the older a fiery abolitionist who had served as a chaplain in the American Civil War. I've known about Robinson's work for years and have greatly enjoyed reading her essays , but still I had been nervous about taking on Gilead . What if it was too Calvinist? What if it conjured up for me all of the memories that I have of my childhood, growing up Presbyterian without the aesthetic richness of the liturgy I have come to enjoy? I recoiled at the thought of immersing myself in this restricted im...

There's something that really puzzles me about our culture. On the one hand, creativity is something that we encourage--ad nauseum--in our children: "Use your imagination! Express your creativity!" And yet, on the other, to be creative--an "artist"--is somehow the last thing that we want them to become: it's so impractical; you might never get a break; artists are more likely to go crazy and commit suicide than, say, doctors or lawyers or businessmen.* We are willing to allow a few people to be extravagantly creative (musicians, film makers, authors of best-selling novels) while labeling all others who engage in creative (a.k.a. artistic) work as childlike nerds who live in a world of their own fantasy.** We are constantly incited to develop our own creativity: "Express yourself! Try something new!" And yet, to enjoy the products of others' creativity is considered "escapist" or, at best, a waste of time; there's nothing pr...

I don't like the way I write. At least, not as much as I like the way some of my favorite authors--Barbara Newman, Elaine Scarry, Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien--do. Somehow the words just never come out the way I want them to; and yet, every time I try to write in some other way, it just seems fake, not my voice at all. I could try writing like my sister , more observationally, less argumentatively, which is not to say that she doesn't make arguments, just that she is not bound as I am to make apologies (like this one) for every claim that she makes. I wish that I could write more like my friend Barbara ; if you know her work, you will know why. She is so subtle and yet so profound in the problems that she sets; you think you are reading something simply about a particular text, and before you know it, the whole structure of medieval religious thinking has been turned inside out and laid bare. Scarry is another matter altogether: she is dense and difficult right from the...

I have a rant. Why is it when you tell people that you are managing to write a page a day of good academic prose (about 400 words, not including notes) they immediately seem to assume that you're having trouble because you're not writing fast enough? What is "fast enough," people? Okay, maybe not you, my blog readers, but some of my friends, who will go unnamed because this really isn't about them. It's about what we expect of our lives and our creativity, and the idiotic pressure to do everything FAST. Isn't it better to write books that we take our time over rather than just churning out prose as fast as we can so as to fill up our c.v.s? There's already more out there than any of us can manage to read, even in our own narrowly-defined (and, therefore, mind you, academically effective ) fields. I really don't want to waste my time reading articles and books that colleagues have not taken the time to research and write well. There's a ...

This post would be much more lively if that's what I'd actually been doing. Navel gazing, that is. As it is, rather than sitting with my beard* pressed hard against my chest, my body curled in upon itself and my lips saying over and over again, " Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me "--the prescription for navel-gazing as championed by the fourteenth-century Orthodox hesychasts --I've been reading Gaudy Night (1935) and wondering what the point of it all is. Not the story, everyone knows that: will Harriet finally say yes to Lord Peter's proposal of marriage? But the setting: the life of the mind as practiced in Oxford and the lure of scholarship as one's "proper job". It's clear to anybody who knows anything about Dorothy Sayers' career that in this novel she was asking herself some hard questions about her own career, thus far given to writing mystery novels, like her character Harriet, but soon to be given over to the work of wri...

Every so often, unpredictably and in no particular order, I reread the whole of Dorothy L. Sayers' series of Lord Peter Wimsey novels. I cannot remember ever intending, once I had read them all, to sit down and systematically read them all through again. It's just that, suddenly, I'm in the mood for one of them in particular--this time I think it was The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), the last time I think it was Murder Must Advertise (1933)--and, gradually, over a week or three, I make my way through the lot. This is not the way I tend to reread, say, Elizabeth Peters' or Terry Pratchetts' novels. With theirs, I tend to start at the beginning and read all the way through to the end (although, in the case of Pratchett's books, I may do this in lots--first the witches, then the guards, then Death & Susan, then the wizards), but with Sayers' stories, the compulsion to read is somewhat different and I'm never really sure, until I get ...