December 2007
19 posts
George Müller at the Close of the Giving Season →
“A master of six languages, taking Scripture alone as his guide, a fool for Christ, Müller never asked a soul for a sou and raised seven million in today’s coin and cared for more than ten thousand children. What are the odds? Only an atheist would know.” Anthony Sacramone from First Things’ Blog.
“The procrastinator’s rule of thumb. Procrastination is the act of putting off or...”
– The Rule of Thumb Calendar
On Teaching Literature at West Point
Out of class, they keep at it. Lieutenants in Iraq who took [Elizabeth Samet’s] course three years earlier write back to ask about her current syllabus. Another stationed in Korea tells her, “Someone once told me that ‘the most important book you will ever read is the first one after your graduation.’ I wish I could remember what it was—I have done more reading since...
A Religious Movement With An Edge →
By Nicholas Riccardi… It was “the attitude in YWAM that wants to serve, that wants to take the lower road rather than the higher road, that will do the dirty work,” Filidis said. “I’d rather take those attitudes than those of organizations that want to be on power trips.” via First Things.
The Decline of Reading
There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an...
Library Thing →
I’d heard about this a while ago, but I just signed up and started logging my library. It’s daunting, but I think it’ll be really helpful when I’m done. I just wish I could finish a book before I felt compelled to buy more books. It’s got to be some kind of pathological psychological condition - librarioexpandiosis - or something like that. Remembering the books I do...
Stefan Beck responds to William Grimes on Diana... →
Excerpt: Values have indeed replaced virtues. The former are malleable; the latter have been case-hardened by the centuries. Virtues teach us how to be an “us” in opposition to a “them,” whereas values encourage us to be a tertium quid, above the ruck and morally protean. We imagine that our feelings are too fine and our minds too subtle for us to take a firm stance on anything, but that is the...
Bright Eyes sing Silver Bells →
Alan Jacobs on Making Trade-Offs →
The Innocence Mission - Tomorrow on the Runway
Old days, don’t come to find me, the sun is just about to climb up over there. ‘While my heart is sinking I do not want my voice to go out into the air’. Did you leave the darkness without me? You’re always miles ahead. And you’re standing in tomorrow on the runway. Oh be the music in my head, the air around my bed. Oh be my rest. Replace the...
Margaret Atwood on Huxley
How does [Brave New World] stand up, 75 years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers and programmed conformists that it presents? The answer to the first question, for me, is that it stands up very well. It’s still as vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it. The answer to the...
Cristina Nehring on What’s Wrong With the American... →
She makes a great point. An excerpt: Although Michel de Montaigne, who fathered the modern essay in the 16th century, wrote autobiographically (like the essayists who claim to be his followers today), his autobiography was always in the service of larger existential discoveries. He was forever on the lookout for life lessons. If he recounted the sauces he had for dinner and the stones that...
“As the obligations of morality are founded in religion, so also the only...”
– Bennet Tyler, former president of Dartmouth, as quoted here.