April 2022 Summary

Personal

• Article with Dad’s in­ter­view pub­lished in Defense Times: Here’s the new name of the US Air Force’s next-gen nuke
• First church Wednesday night sup­per
• Attended first Literary Life Conference
• First com­mu­nion by intinc­tion on Maundy Thursday
• Easter!
• Melissa had two kid­ney stones
• According to the DNA test, Dad is 1/4 English. Probably from his ma­ter­nal grand­mother, Ella May Risser.

News

• I’m still mad Tom Brady and Sean Payton are not Dolphins.
• Eagles drafted Jordan Davis, traded for AJ Brown.
• Sixers elim­i­nated Raptors.

My Thoughts

• Of all de­nom­i­na­tions, Baptists place the great­est im­por­tance on the method of bap­tism, and the low­est im­por­tance on the ef­fect of bap­tism.
• Great events don’t cre­ate great men, they re­veal them. The man was formed in a hun­dred small ways be­fore the apoth­e­o­sis.
• Nothing kin­dles gen­er­ousity in me as much as a meet­ing re­quest for next week.

Writing, Links, Podcasts

Notes

• Angelina Stanford:
  • Literature won’t lead us to virtue. Literature is meant to de­velop a moral imag­i­na­tion.
  • Stories don’t ex­ist for char­ac­ters. Characters ex­ist for im­ages and metaphors.
  • Nature also gives us sym­bols (“the book of na­ture”).
  • Teachers as just fa­cil­i­ta­tors of dis­cus­sion is mod­ern and wrong.
• Seth Studer:
  • Moderns di­vided flesh from thought, “inventing” the mind. Also in­vented time as a se­quence; progress and regress; lin­ear nar­ra­tive; char­ac­ter de­vel­op­ment; di­vi­sion be­tween his­tory and myth, nat­ural and su­per­nat­ural, fact and fic­tion; uni­verse in­stead of cos­mos.
  • Believed phys­i­cal things are al­le­gories for higher ob­jects.
  • Believed God’s ex­is­tence was self-ev­i­dent.
  • Crusades were mil­i­tary cam­paigns for spir­i­tual and fi­nan­cial profit. Atrocities were sim­i­lar to other con­tem­po­rary wars. Offensive not de­fen­sive, be­cause Muslims held the Holy Land for 500 years.
• Cindy Rollins:
  • Don’t make chil­dren judge lit­er­a­ture char­ac­ters.
  • Modern ed­u­ca­tion makes chil­dren the judge of moral­ity: what do you think? What would you do?
  • “It’s all about the re­la­tion­ship” is wrong be­cause re­la­tion­ship does­n’t ex­ist in a vac­cuum.
• Ben De Bono:
  • The flaw of post­mod­ernism is not claim­ing un­truth, but claim­ing a truth and deny­ing all other truths. (For ex­am­ple, reader re­sponse does mat­ter to lit­er­ary analy­sis, but so does au­tho­r­ial in­tent.)
  • Diversity and eq­uity are op­po­sites.
  • Communism and cap­i­tal­ism de­stroy di­ver­sity.
• Thomas Banks:
  • When Dickens died, a lit­tle girl stopped Trollope in the street and asked if Father Christmas would die, too.
  • E. M. Forster kept a com­plete set of Jane Austen’s books in every room of his house.
• Vigen Goroian:
  • The ugly duck­ling ex­pe­ri­ences what C. S. Lewis called “sehnsucht”: non-util­i­tar­ian long­ing for in­her­ent good, sad­ness to be sep­a­rated from it, and joy when the long­ing is ful­filled.
  • The ugly duck­ling was al­ways a swan; his trans­for­ma­tion is to be­come more of a swan. Contrast with the Frog Prince and the Beast, hu­mans changed to and from an­i­mal form.
• C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books”:
  • Classics are read­able be­cause great writ­ers write clearly.
  • Old books are wrong, but they’re wrong in ways we know, un­like books from the pre­sent, which are wrong in ways we don’t yet know.
• Doug Wilson: Fight like cav­a­liers, not like thugs.
• Giles Frasier: Education is like friend­ship, some­thing that is valu­able in and of it­self, and not for what else can be gained by it.
• Northrop Frye: the only ques­tion you should ask an el­e­men­tary stu­dent about a story: what does this re­mind you of?
• John Williamson Nevin: Reformation did not take the Church back to the fourth cen­tury. It’s a con­tin­u­a­tion of Catholic Christianity.
• Robert Alter: hu­mans are both the “zenith and nadir” of the cos­mos.
• Charlotte Mason: ed­u­ca­tion is the sci­ence of re­la­tions
• Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles were only split into two books each be­cause they could­n’t fit on a sin­gle scroll.
• Bestiary is “A trea­tise on beasts; esp., one of the mor­al­iz­ing or al­le­gor­i­cal beast tales writ­ten in the Middle Ages.”
• The me­dieval cy­cle of fa­bles fea­tur­ing the char­ac­ter Reynard the Fox be­came so pop­u­lar, the “renard” re­placed the pre­vi­ous French word for “fox”.
  • Other char­ac­ters were Isengrim the Wolf, Tibert the Cat, Noble the Lion, Bruin the Bear, Grimbard the Badger, Baldwin the Donkey, Kyward the Hare, Chanticleer the Rooster, Bellin the Ram, and Martin the Ape.
• Kevinism is German prej­u­dice against trendy Anglo names such as Kevin.
• There’s an area out­side of Dublin called, “the Pale”. Hence, “beyond the pale”.
• Explorer John Cabot had a son named Sebastian.
• King James I wanted his ti­tle to be, King of Great Britain. Parliament thwarted his at­tempted le­gal union with Scotland.
  • He thought witches at­tempted to drown him by con­jur­ing storms while he sailed home from Denmark in 1589.
• Argue like you’re right and lis­ten like you’re wrong.
• Edwardian tra­di­tion: name first­born (son?) af­ter moth­er’s maiden name

Quotes

• “We hunger to in­quire of each other, to com­pare notes and as­sure our­selves that it was all re­ally true, as one by one the scents and sounds and names of long-for­got­ten places come grad­u­ally back and beckon to us.” –Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
• “Roe was also the abor­tion of mar­riage–al­though it took a few decades for Obergefell to put the clown nose on it.” –Doug Wilson
• “The ac­qui­si­tion of knowl­edge al­ways in­volves the rev­e­la­tion of ig­no­rance–al­most is the rev­e­la­tion of ig­no­rance.” –Wendell Berry
• “Vocabulary in com­mu­ni­ca­tion is the dif­fer­ence be­tween light­ning and the light­ning bug.” –Mark Twain
• “[The Bloomsbury Group] lived in squares, painted in cir­cles and loved in tri­an­gles.” –Dorothy Parker

Words

• Apotheosis: de­ifi­ca­tion, glo­ri­fi­ca­tion, ex­al­ta­tion
• Atavism: re­sem­blance to re­mote rather than near an­ces­tors
• Badinage: ban­ter
• Deasil: clock­wise (before clocks ex­isted)
• Enormous: ex­ceed­ing the usual rule, norm, or mea­sure; out of due pro­por­tion; in­or­di­nate; ab­nor­mal (Latin: out of rule)
• Groat: old English sil­ver coin
• March: bor­der­land
• Marquis: sen­tinel and de­fender of a march
• Massif: dom­i­nant part of a moun­tain range
• Scarp: slope of the ditch near­est the para­pet
• Tawdry: bought at the fes­ti­val of St. Audrey; very fine and showy in col­ors with­out tast or el­e­gance; cheap and gaudy
• Widdershins: counter-clock­wise