Personal

  • Drove with Lydia and Amber to Louisiana to watch the Super Bowl with my par­ents and broth­ers.
  • Visited the US Space and Rocket Center with Tim.
  • Finished the House of Humane Letters class How to Read Fairy Tales.
  • Started the Couch to 5K pro­gram.

My Thoughts

  • Roman Catholics crit­i­cize Protestants for sim­plis­ti­cally ar­riv­ing at solid doc­tri­nal po­si­tions, where the Roman church al­lows a range of opin­ions by only defin­ing bound­aries through neg­a­tive the­ol­ogy. They also crit­i­cize Protestants lack of a cen­tral­ized au­thor­ity, which pre­vents them from from ar­riv­ing at solid doc­tri­nal po­si­tions.
  • People like Peter Enns crit­i­cize Iron Age man for their prim­i­tive the­ol­ogy. From early scrip­ture, they thought of God as a per­son (walking in the Garden with Adam, eat­ing with Abraham). Later men de­vel­oped the idea of God as a su­per­man (like the Greek pan­theon). The Greek philoso­phers rea­soned that God was tran­scen­dant, the first cause of the cos­mos. And when mankind had ad­vanced and fig­ured all that out, God be­came a man. Truly one of God’s best jokes.
  • The irony of say­ing “I don’t be­lieve in Christianity be­cause it’s just a bunch of rules”, but then mak­ing sci­ence your high­est be­lief sys­tem, which is just a bunch of rules.

News

  • Eagles lost the Super Bowl
  • Tom Brady re­tired again

Writing, Links, Podcasts

February 2023 Summary

Brian

Permalink

Notes

  • Wes Callihan: CS Lewis called him­self the “last of the di­nosaurs”. Dorothy Sayers, GK Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Williams, George MacDonald, and Edmund Burke were his fel­low “last di­nosaurs”.
  • Charles Haywood:
    • Today’s American lib­er­als get mean­ing from pol­i­tics. Conservatives get mean­ing from reg­u­lar life, like fam­ily, re­li­gion, and mak­ing things.
    • Computer skills are im­por­tant be­cause com­put­ers aren’t go­ing away.
  • Angelina Stanford:
    • CS Lewis wrote that char­ac­ters ex­ist for the story, not vice versa. He cited three au­thors to sup­port that view: Aristotle (in Poetics), Bocaccio (medieval tra­di­tion), and Jung (whose ar­che­type the­ory was fur­ther de­vel­oped by Northrop Frye.)
    • True art re­flects truth. Not what we want, but what is.
  • Jonathan Pageau:
    • Stories are events con­densed into pat­tern. Even when telling a “factual his­tor­i­cal ac­count” we choose which facts to in­clude and as­sem­ble into a nar­ra­tive. The cre­ation story is heav­ily com­pressed.
    • Bibles with foot­notes like “this pas­sage is found in X man­u­scripts” are miss­ing the point.

Quotes

  • “It is in Apple’s DNA that tech­nol­ogy alone is not enough–it’s tech­nol­ogy mar­ried with lib­eral arts, mar­ried with the hu­man­i­ties, that yields us the re­sults that make our hear sing.” –Steve Jobs

Words

  • Brick: a gen­er­ous, help­ful, re­li­able per­son