Personal

  • Started learn­ing Spanish with the girls, sup­ple­mented with Duolingo.
  • Eagles played Vikings on MNF and it felt like re­watch­ing the 2017 NFC Championship.
  • Found out my dad had a dog when he was a kid: Duffy, a col­lie-Ger­man shep­herd mix.
  • Hosted Sunday School class for lunch: tacos.
  • Neighbor Sandy iden­ti­fied front trees as sil­ver maples: when they built the neigh­bor­hood, they planted two sil­ver maples in every front yard.
  • First shoutout on the Literary Life pod­cast (for ob­ser­va­tions of harpy im­ages with Mrs. Sparsit in Hard Times).

My Thoughts

  • Must be a heretic on some level to be hu­man: Protestant Reformation was heretics di­ver­si­fy­ing the Church.

Writing, Links, Podcasts

September 2022 Summary

Brian

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note

Notes

  • Ben De Bono
    • Metric is top-down and ar­ti­fi­cial. Standard is bot­tom-up, nat­ural, hu­man.
    • Liturgy/ritual is the un­spo­ken lan­guage be­tween the Church and God. The liturgy gets you out of the way, out of your own head, so you can re­ceive. The words are less im­por­tant than the spaces be­tween the words. Like a Malick film: the power is not in the plot but be­tween you and the film.
    • Herbert: ide­ol­ogy has gone too far when you’re em­bar­rassed by the past.
    • “To be a hu­man is to be a heretic on some level.” If you ad­here com­pletely to an ide­ol­ogy, you are a ma­chine. Being a heretic is dan­ger­ous (great saints and sin­ners are cut from the same cloth) but “be a heretic if you want to live.”
  • Bishop Bob Barron: The pro-life po­si­tion is not dogma but moral, so should be leg­is­lated. All laws im­pose moral­ity.
  • Michael Lynch (Ad Fontes pod­cast): clas­si­cal teach­ers taught Latin be­cause it was the lin­gua franca. Modern clas­si­cal ed­u­ca­tion should study English. Students should mas­ter it: vo­cab­u­lary, writ­ing po­etry and prose.
  • Cindy Rollins: you must let chil­dren be­come in­de­pen­dent. Let them make mis­takes, be alone, solve prob­lems.
  • Joffre Swait: Separation of church and state means no state-spon­sored church. It’s not a sep­a­ra­tion of state and re­li­gion, which is im­pos­si­ble (and if you try, the state be­comes the re­li­gion).
  • Doug Wilson: The Salvation of Emeth: Westminster Confession says sal­va­tion is or­di­nar­ily through the church. Naaman was saved with­out be­com­ing a Jew. Solomon’s tem­ple had Court of Gentiles. Luther was leery, but Zwingli said Socrates could have been elect.
  • Rogelio: Starting Strength is good (it’s based on Bill Starr’s clas­sic The Strongest Shall Survive) but not the One True Workout. Rippetoe’s “jump and shrug” power clean tech­nique is bad.
  • Angelina Stanford: woman were freer in Elizabethan England than in Victorian England. The “angel in the house” idea over­spir­i­tu­al­ized and ide­al­ized women; they could­n’t go out with­out a chap­er­one be­cause the might suc­cumb to tem­pa­tion. They could be ru­ined by even a ru­mor of a scan­dal.
  • Isaac Watts pub­lished a trans­la­tion of the Psalms in which every in­stanct of “Israel” was re­placed with “Great Britain”.
  • Exocentric verb-noun com­pound agent nouns: usu­ally English uses the noun + verb for­mu­la­tion: fire­fighter, naysayer. In the 19th cen­tury, many were formed verb + noun: pick­pocket, spend­thrift, swash­buck­ler, turn­coat, lick­spit­tle, skin­flint, turnkey, scofflaw, lack­wit, cut­throat, sell­sword, killjoy

Quotes

  • “I could not look on Death, which be­ing known, / Men led me to him, blind­fold and alone.” — Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War”
  • “It is very beau­ti­ful,” I said, “and, as you say, it is very English. Charles Dickens, who was al­most more English than England, wrote one of his rare po­ems about the beauty of ivy. Yes, by all means let us ad­mire the ivy, so deep, so warm, so full of a ge­nial gloom and a grotesque ten­der­ness. Let us ad­mire the ivy; and let us pray to God in His mercy that it may not kill the tree.” –G. K. Chesterton, “The Riddle of the Ivy”, Tremendous Trifles
  • “In Hard Times, the pedantry of the ob­struct­ing so­ci­ety is as­so­ci­ated with a util­i­tar­ian phi­los­o­phy and an in­fan­tile trust in facts, sta­tis­tics, and all im­per­sonal and gen­er­al­ized forms of knowl­edge.” –Northrop Frye