Personal

  • Started learning bridge on an app
  • Fed the giraffes at the Birmingham Zoo
  • Offer to buy a house was accepted!

My Thoughts

  • George Washington was an epic hero. John Adams was a romantic hero.
  • Aragorn was an epic hero. Sam was a romantic hero.

Writing, Links, Podcasts

Notes

  • Jonathan and Mathieu Pageau, What is Symbolism?
    • Symbols are not material and scientific, but also not personal and subjective. They are universal.
    • If you want people to care about your story, use universal symbols.
    • Symbols are inescapable. Scientists are mediators between heaven (theory) and earth (physical).
    • Patterns repeated at different level of reality.
    • You can abstract yourself out to do some physical study, but there are limits. Quantum: observers impact observations.
    • What does it mean, "go up into heaven"? Doesn't mean float into space. Can't interpret materialistically.
    • Dante says the cosmology of spheres is a condescension of heavenly reality.
    • "Earth" meant matter. When we realized there was matter outside earth, we split those terms. Word meanings shift.
    • "Jonah didn't get swallowed by a whale, because the Bible says it was a fish, and whales aren't fish." Definition changed.
    • Snake in the garden is a symbol of time. Time is the cause of transformation. Time is change. Cyclical transformation of things to their opposites. Not a metaphor. The snake caused a change.
    • Symbols are not metaphors and not arbitrary.
    • Symbols are more important that "what really happened".
    • The Bible is communicating truth, not history.
    • The Flood, the Red Sea, the Rubicon, the Deleware: crossing water to symbolize change of power. Doesn't mean Washington didn't cross the Deleware, but the symbol is more important than the "fact". Arguing if it happened misses the point.
    • It's okay if some Bible stories are fictional.
    • Symbolism is the union of fact and meaning.
    • Modernism isn't disenchantment: it is deincarnation, the splitting of the physical and spiritual.
    • Scientists care about theory and fact, and so are best at preserving the union. But they are materialists, so theory is not real.
    • Mathematical pattern is more real and universal than any observable fact.
    • Criteria for a real symbol/connection: exactly the same as determining valid science.
      • Consistent: works everywhere
      • Comprehensive: many examples (if it's fundamental, it will appear many times)
      • Insightful: gives more understanding instead of just a code for something else
        • Symbols are meant to reveal, not hide
  • Orthodox Diary
    • Moderns simplify medieval Christendom, overly-demonize modernism
    • Crusades were not wholly bad or good
    • Wokeism is moral absolutism, not relativism
    • If Aquinas is Catholicism, Catholicism started in the 13th century
    • Catholicism is a response to Protestantism
    • Great Schism didn't change much in practice
    • "Much of the Catholic 'development of doctrine' that occurred after Thomas Aquinas and especially after the Reformation is an attempt to grapple with emergent modernity."
  • Angelina Stanford
    • Epic hero is semi-divine, fated for greatness, withstands the gods. Romantic hero is everyman, set apart by character not birth.
    • World War I was caused by Christian, classically-educated leaders. You still need virtue.
    • Since all knowledge is connected, there is no such thing as a sidetrack.
    • Picaresque is a wandering journey, not a quest.
    • Stories don't work mechanistically. You don't become a murderer by reading murder mysteries. Not everyone that reads the Bible becomes virtuous.
    • Modern Christians say we need to take sin more seriously: medievals said we take sin and ourselves to seriously. We should laugh at evil, like we do at Mr. Toad.
  • Cindy Rollins
    • Will reading about bad characters make children bad? Too late, they're already bad.
    • The Bible isn't a character study.
  • Bryce Young: Everyone is in Adam or Christ: a child cannot be un-elect and in Christ.
  • Alastair Roberts: Baptism compared to a wedding, a coronation, an adoption
  • Thomas Banks: If books can save your soul, Jesus should have become a novelist.
  • Peter Zeihan via Doug Wilson: The US has 17 thousand miles of navigable rivers. The rest of the world combined has 16 thousand.

Quotes

  • "How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?" -- Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm

Words

  • Amble: horse gait where both legs on side move at the same time
  • Avuncular: pertaining to an uncle
  • Bilious: pertaining to bile; disordered in bile; choleric, irascible, irritable, angry
  • Cantle: to cut in pieces
  • Grabass: horseplay
  • Hassock: stuffed cushion or footstool
  • Humor: moisture; four ancient humors:
    • Blood: ardent (sanguine)
    • Phlegm: watery, sluggish, indifferent (phlegmatic)
    • Yellow bile: irritable (choleric)
    • Black bile: gloomy (melancholic) (melan (melanin, malice) + choly (cholic))
  • Marmoreal: pertaining to marble
  • Nadir: lowest point, opposite of zenith
  • Patrimony: right or estate inherited from father or ancestor
  • Riparian: pertaining to a river
  • Sanguine: having the color of blood, red; characterized by abundant and active blood, warm, ardent
  • Spangle: small metal ornamental plate; therefore, any little thing that sparkles
  • Tussock: dense tuft of grass
  • Yawl: small ship's boat; to howl