εις επαινον δοξης αυτου

What is Success?

2009-11-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

It's too easy to dish on Carrie Prejean but I thought this was an interesting comment she made the other day. It's telling culturally that she thinks she has "accomplished so much" evidently by becoming famous. Or has she done something else I don't know about?

King: What are you going to do next?

Prejean: Oh, my gosh. I'm just so excited to be, you know, promoting this book. I'm so excited to be an author now. It's really great that -- I'm 22 years old, and I think that I've accomplished so much. And I think that there is definitely a message out there to spread to young women and that is, you know, never do anything that you wouldn't want your biggest fans to see or, you know, never do anything that, heaven forbid, your dad would see.
Link: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2009/11/carrie-prejean-accuses-larry-king-of-being-inapproprate-and-then-fails-to-walk-off-his-set.html

Fort Hood Reaction

2009-11-06T09:03:00.000-08:00

I pray that my interest in this side of the story not be taken as an indication that I feel no sympathies for the families of those victimized. May our prayers be for them today.

(edit) Another version of the story

From Pajamas Media

CNN (ditto the New York Times website) was considerably less useful than the tidbits I picked up online by following links on various blogs and in Facebook postings. They led me to (among other things) an AP story, a Daily Mail article, and a Fox News interview that provided telling details: Hasan had apparently been a devout Muslim; Arabic words, reportedly a Muslim prayer, had been posted on his apartment door in Maryland; in conversations with colleagues he had repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers; on Thursday morning, hours before the massacre, he had supposedly handed out copies of the Koran to neighbors. A couple of these facts eventually surfaced on CNN, but only briefly; they were rushed past, left untouched, unexamined; the network seemed to be making a masterly effort to avoid giving this data a cold, hard look. Meanwhile it spent time doing heavy-handed spin — devoting several minutes, for example, to an inane interview with a forensic psychiatrist who talked about the stress of treating soldiers bearing the emotional scars of war. The obvious purpose was to turn our eyes away from Islamism and toward psychiatric instability as a motive.

See also, Dreher, Ft. Hood killer's Islam matters -- but how?

David Frum reminds us to keep this in mind:

And others

Friends of CSNTM Newsletter

2009-11-05T18:08:00.000-08:00

Fascinating story here about an Irish manuscript of Romans from the 9th century, Codex Boernerianus. Take special note of why the author changed "in Rome" to "in Love."

Argument from Art: Exposing the Sex Trade

2009-11-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting story, an appropriate appeal to the arts to stir up consciences. Kudos to Emma Thompson for what she's doing. May more follow.

NPR Story

Happy Reformation Day!

2009-10-31T03:57:00.000-07:00

Educating better journalists

2009-10-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

This is interesting, from Dreher, citing Malcom Gladwell:

If you had a single piece of advice to offer young journalists, what would it be?
The issue is not writing. It's what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he's one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He's unique. Most accountants don't write articles, and most journalists don't know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.

A New You Tube Sensation...

2009-10-26T13:04:00.001-07:00

Staggering...

2009-10-26T06:46:00.000-07:00

"One out of six people in humanity will wake up not sure that they can even fill a cup of food," Sheeran told reporters. "We have to make no mistake that hunger is on the march."
Link and LINK

Those who taste honey...

2009-10-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

But amongst us you might find simple folk, artisans and old women, who, if they are unable to furnish in words the assistance they derive from our doctrine, yet show in their deeds the advantage to others that accrues from their resolution. They do not rehearse words but show forth good deeds; struck, they do not strike back, plundered, they do not prosecute; to them that ask they give, and they love their neighbors as themselves. Surely then, if we did not think that God was in charge of human affairs, we would not thus cleanse ourselves.
...
These thoughts are but few out of many and trivial rather than lofty, but we do not wish to trouble you with more. Those who taste honey and whey can tell if the whole be good by tasting even a small portion.

Athenagorus, Embassy for the Christians. Ancient Christian Writers. Joseph Hugh Crehan, trans. New York: Newman Press, 1955.

Brett Dennen: Ain't No Reason

2009-10-23T04:17:00.000-07:00

I posted the lyrics to this song a while ago, but hadn't seen the video. Here it is:

Let me know your thoughts.

Strange collocation

2009-10-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

John Piper writes,
...
One great benefit of going to a good Christian college is that you read important bad books with the help of wise Christian scholars. Most 19-year-olds are not ready to navigate the sophisticated arguments of seasoned skeptics. But with the guidance of a seasoned Christian thinker, the navigation can be profitable. It was for me.

Russell stressed the absoluteness of physical matter. In other words, if you trace the origin of everything all the way back, you arrive at impersonal matter, not personal spirit: Matter, not God, is absolute. This meant, for Russell, that there is only material existence.

This produced one of the bleakest views of human life imaginable. Here, he says, is "the world which science built for our belief."

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of the universe in ruins. . . . Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built (Why I Am Not a Christian, editor Paul Edwards [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957], p. 107).

It doesn't take too much assistance from a wise teacher to help a 19-year-old see something odd in this. Tragically odd. Triply odd.

First the language he uses seems borrowed from another worldview: "loves," "beliefs," "devotion," "inspiration," "genius," "despair," and strangest of all, "soul." To be sure, he insists that these are all "but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms." Really? Why would material atoms collide to create a language affirming realities beyond matter? It is an odd creation of Russell's world.

Second, did Russell really say to his crying children (he had three) that their sorrows were the unfortunate collocation of atoms? Did he say to any of his three wives, in the best of their affections, "This is only the collocation of atoms?" In other words, did he live his philosophy? Or was he playing 20th-century academic games?
...
Read the whole thing

Why I Love Hebrew: Janus Parallelism

2009-10-21T09:57:00.000-07:00

The flowers are seen in the land,
The season has come for (pruning//singing)
The turtledove’s voice is heard in the land

- Song 2:12
The zamir does double duty referring backward to the flowers, meaning “pruning,” and forward to the turtledove, meaning “singing.” Hence, Janus Parallelism.

Digging Out of Debt

2009-10-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

What a story

Skol Vikings!

2009-10-16T09:36:00.001-07:00

Protest Fail

2009-10-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

ht: Mark Vance

Quotable: Postman

2009-10-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

"To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple." -Neil Postman
ht: Groothius

Who Killed the English Major?

2009-10-08T08:32:00.002-07:00

This is a fascinating story from Rod Dreher:
=============
Did you realize that in the last generation, there has been a startling drop-off -- a near-collapse, actually -- in the number of college humanities majors? Prof. William Chace, writing in The American Scholar, takes on the problem from the English Department:

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

Chace tells a long, fascinating and depressing story of how broader social and economic changes have marginalized the humanities in colleges. But he focuses his frustration on how English departments have done so much harm to themselves, by turning the study of the beauty and the wisdom of literature and language into a bloodless, clinical dissection of this or that Theory. Chace, who is a veteran professor of literature, says there is no center or coherence to teaching English literature nowadays, and therefore a dissipated sense that its study is important. The withering and decay of the profession can no longer be hidden, he writes:

Meanwhile, undergraduates have become aware of this turmoil surrounding them in classrooms, hallways, and coffee lounges. They see what is happening to students only a few years older than themselves--the graduate students they encounter as teaching assistants, freshman instructors, or "acting assistant professors." These older students reveal to them a desolate scene of high career hopes soon withered, much study, little money, and heavy indebtedness. In English, the average number of years spent earning a doctoral degree is almost 11. After passing that milestone, only half of new Ph.D.'s find teaching jobs, the number of new positions having declined over the last year by more than 20 percent; many of those jobs are part-time or come with no possibility of tenure. News like that, moving through student networks, can be matched against, at least until recently, the reputed earning power of recent graduates of business schools, law schools, and medical schools. The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn't here anymore; our technology is obsolete.

the whole post

The Tribune

2009-10-08T08:32:00.001-07:00

When risk replaces morals companies who see no more risks which are too great to take do whatever they want. LINK

"Sitting on the Q"

2009-10-07T11:21:00.001-07:00

Stolen from my sister's blog: From Our Backyards

It's been said before that kindergarten is just a little microcosm of the real world ("all I really needed to know I learned in kindergarten..."). Well, this week things are really falling apart for my kindergartener. Up to this point, my son had been sitting on the "T" of the big rectangular kindergarten carpet (for large group and story time, etc.). I guess the teacher decided to change the seating arrangement and now he is sitting on the "Q". This is a horrible thing because each letter also has a picture next to it, and Q has a queen. Queens, of course, are the very last thing that six-year-old boys want to sit on or next to. His little world has simply fallen apart! My first response was a desire to call the teacher and ask her to put a girl on the "Q". My husband is much wiser than I. Will admitted that it isn't very fun for a boy to have to sit on the "Q", but he pointed out to our son that God was in control when He allowed our son to be put on the "Q". My boy's job now is to love whoever sits on the "P" and the "R".

- Amy Hatfield

Give to the One Who Begs from You

2009-10-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

John Bloom has a good article at Desiring God Blog. LINK

A Voice We Should Listen To

2009-10-01T15:08:00.001-07:00

I'm always looking for voices that I feel like I should listen to. It seems like there are certain men who are blessed with an inordinate amount of wisdom. I always try to take notice of these men and listen when they speak. Most often these men are not the ones who are being heard. The ones who are being heard are often the most extravagant or the loudest. Success has a way of bringing one's voice to the fore. And often it is wise to listen to those who are successful. But in our culture of rampant pragmatism it is also wise to understand "success" should not always be our highest ideal. And those who are successful are not axiomatically the ones we should listen to. One example of a man I listen to is Carl Trueman. Just about everything he writes I come away thinking - "that was right on." Another one: Paul Hartog. You need to read and listen to this entry by Dr. Hartog. I love his "prophetic-evangelic" model. There may be some slight differences between us in how we carry out this vision practically. But "this is right on."

- One caveat I might add to this article. I do think the "evangelic" aspect of this vision involves more than words. Dr. Hartog says,

Therefore, the ambassador of Christ must understand the receptor culture in which he or she ministers. As an incontrovertible example, Christian heralds must master the language of their hearers, and culture is tightly interwoven with human language.

I may be interpreting him somewhat uncharitably here, but it seems as though the need to connect on a deeper level than language is overlooked. It is also true that our deeds themselves (how we live among our neighbors) must create a bridge for the evangel (Matt 5:16 for example: "In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.")
- Also I hope you can ignore the ridiculous picture of Jesus on the red carpet. I see nothing about glamorizing the gospel in this article. This obviously was not his title.

λυω Quiz

2009-09-30T16:01:00.001-07:00

I spent quite a bit of time on this. The coolest feature is if you get an answer wrong when filling in the answer blank on top it will turn red. This is if you're serious about learning this paradigm, accents and all.

Click to download
EDIT: Click for the file with no accents

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light, Carl Trueman

2009-09-29T18:21:00.000-07:00

The whole article is worth reading. But a couple snippets:

Let me interject a clarification at this point lest I be misinterpreted as saying that mere Christianity is something wrong in itself, a matter to be despised. That is emphatically not what I am saying at all. Salvation does not depend upon the individual's possession of an elaborate doctrinal system or a profound grasp of intricate and complex theology. Yet this is not my point. What I am claiming is that mere Christianity, a Christianity which lacks this doctrinal elaboration, is an insufficient basis either for building a church or for guaranteeing the long-term stability of the tradition of the church, that is, the transmission from generation to generation and from place to place, of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. What is disturbing is that the advocates of postmodern mere Christianity are not debating how much one must believe to be saved; they are actually proposing a manifesto for the life of the church as a whole, a somewhat more comprehensive and ambitious project. It is the validity of this that I question."

...

One cannot critique the inadequacies of the past until one has understood the past; one certainly should not abandon the past on the basis of a caricature; and the kind of historical misrepresentations which undergird certain postconservative analyses of the tradition stands at odds both with the possibility of such critique and with the claims of the very same people that we need to engage with tradition in order to meet the challenges of the contemporary world. Thus, let me put this as precisely as I can: the vigor of my criticism of such writers is provoked as much by their seriously problematic historiography as by any serious heterodoxy within their theology;"

...

The light may well by dying, but we will rage, rage against it; and be assured, we will never go gentle into that good night."

Carl Trueman, "Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light," WTJ 70 (2008): 1-18. (LINK)

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

- Dylan Thomas

Quotable: Camus

2009-09-27T15:48:00.000-07:00

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is
suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to
answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Piel and Whatnot

2009-09-15T15:26:00.000-07:00

Found this portion of Arnold and Choi's A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax really interesting:

Traditionally the Piel has been considered intensive in meaning. Older grammars defined the idea as 'to busy oneself eagerly with the action indicated,' and even associated the doubling of the second radical of verbs in Piel as an outward expression of this intensification.(1) However, in light of today's deeper understanding of Semitic languages generally, we can no longer refer to the Piel as basically and primarily intensive.(2)...The Piel frequently expresses the bringing about of a state. Thus, the Piel focuses on causation and the outcome of the action, though with a patiency nuance rather than an agency nuance (as in Hiphil). The foregrounded interest is not the event that happens to the subject, but rather the condition attained by it. It is for all practical purposes an adjectival causation predicate. Jenni's important study proposed a basic distinction between the Piel and Hiphal as the difference between imposition of a state (adjectival) and the imposition of process (verbal).(3) So using as an example the verb חיה ('live' in Qal), the Piel is 'to cause to be alive,' whereas the Hiphil is 'to cause to live.'

Choi and Arnold, 42-43

What made me think as I read this is how much we take for granted that languages work similarly. They do in many areas. But with any language there are things which are second nature to native speakers which can be totally foreign to non-native speakers. As interesting as Choi and Arnolds section is on the Piel more ink will be spilt on what the Piel in fact meant in Biblical Hebrew. Praise the Lord for men who devote their lives to spilling this ink so that we can have our assumptions challenged about the text. The text is never just text. We need informed (read something like "right") assumptions about it to get to sound conclusions and sound applications.

(1) Kautzsch 1910, 141; and see Blau 1976, 52; Bauer and Leander 1991, 323-29; Martin-Davidson 1993, 136-37. The view that the doubling of the middle consonant is unassociated with intensification may need be reconsidered in light of recent linguistic work on iconicity, that is, the iconic nature of language (cf. Kouwenberg 1997).
(2) The Piel in recent decades has been recognized as the key to the Hebrew verbal system. Albrecht Goetze opened the discussion to new approaches with his famous survey of the Akkadian D-stem (1942, 1-8), and subsequently the significance of his work for the West Semitic languages was investigated by Earnst Jenni (1968). For useful surveys of these developments, see Waltke and O'Connor 1990, 354-59; Fassberg 2001, 243-44. For caveats on Goetze's arguments, see Kaufman 1996, 281-82.
(3) Jenni (1968), and see also Lambdin 1969, 388-89. For dissenting voices, see Joosten 1998 and Fassberg 2001, 243-44.