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