Reading War and Peace into the small hours. I don't want Prince Andrei to die again.

     I have a great stand-up routine with Werner Herzog as a contractor, but for the life of me I can't figure out what audience would take to it. 

reading Kant for the hell of it...

     Kant's Critique of Pure Reason makes sense as a Kafkaesque self-portrait. As such it is at once hilarious and terrifying. 

reading reading reading...

     Something from Sarah Coakley: 'In much recent Western theology, and more especially in feminist philosophy and theology, an anti-hero stalks: the Enlightenment ‘Man of Reason’. Can we not all agree in despising him? This villain has a number of characteristics. Cogitating, lonely, individualist, despising the body, passions, women and indeed all sociality, he artificially abstracts from the very dependencies he takes for granted: the products of earth, the comforts of family and friends, and — not least — the miraculous appearance of regular meals….'
     I have met him. His initials are IK.

notes from a commonplace book...

     ‘Here it is perhaps also worth raising the issue of what might be taken to be the unduly negative, the unduly dry and dismal, take on the apophatic I have been presenting. Have I not, with my simple insistence on what cannot be understood, on lack of insight, on questions that cannot be answered, missed the point of true apophaticism? Is it not itself bound up with contemplation? Surely denial and negativity are never employed for their own sake, and it is not a matter of a sheer blank, of simply hitting a wall, in thought and speech about God. Surely something much richer is gestured towards in apophasis: it is a response to excess, to God’s superabundant richness. Where is this, one might ask, in the account I have been giving of an apophatic trinitarianism
     ‘Richness, excess, this overwhelming quality of what we cannot comprehend should, on the view I am developing, be located precisely at the level of our contemplation in the Trinity, rather than at the level of contemplation of the Trinity. It is enough to acknowledge infinite depths that exceed our grasp in the Father who is contemplated through the Son – we do not need to look for such infinite depths and dazzling darkness in the very notion of three-in-oneness or perichoresis. And it is precisely because of the sense of excess and transcendence associated with contemplation in the Trinity that there ought properly to be, on the view I am exploring, a resistance to, a fundamental reticence and reserve surrounding, speculation on the Trinity,’ Karen Kilby, ‘Is an Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?’ International Journal of Systematic Theology 12, no. 1 (2010): 65–77.

heading for that Big Rock Candy Mountain...

     Checked my email just now. Seems I've an E-Deposit pending from Somewhere. All They need is my e-signature, along with a few pieces of personal information handled discretely and professionally, and I can collect this windfall.
     So, why am I working today?

yeah, i'm all over the place this morning...

     Apparently there are those within what we call the financial sector who want to see a Democrat take the White House in 2016. That's the only reasonable conclusion we can draw. After all, if they wanted a Republican to win, they wouldn't be looking at people like Paul, Cruz, and Rubio. We need, after all, someone who can deal with the complex, delicate strategic challenges that define our time - Russia and Ukraine; uprisings in Thailand; a possible war between China and Japan; all of which tie up North Korea and Iran; changes throughout the Middle East as younger rulers take over; political and economic crises in Latin America. Need I continue the litany?
     Well, we can dare to dream. Maybe there's a culturally conservative, fiscally responsible, liberal-minded lover of chess out there in the Republican ranks who could be the guy. I doubt it. 

pop culture madness...

     See, this is what I'm talking about: I have never, ever seen an episode of The Bachelor. Yet, I can't read the news to see if anyone has found that missing 777 without learning about Juan Pablo. O, and that can't possibly be a real name, can it?

the Small Catechism is good for what ails you...

     Thanks to the efforts of my long-distance friend John Halton and his gang, you can now find Luther's Small Catechism online without fear of Concordia Publishing House and its army of legal minions. While roaming our strange ecclesial world, I've returned again and again to this deceptively simple work. Anyone can grasp the Catechism in its essentials, yet there are depths to it that become clear only after years of reflection. So yeah and amen, I'm happy to see this. (Because I can't help it, allow me to quibble a bit about the use of that there NIV - we here at ER do not endorse it, like it, buy it, or otherwise go near it.) By the by, if you're over that way in Engelonde, the parish of Christ Lutheran Church is apparently in a mysterious Brigadoon world somewhere between, lessee, Orpington and Petts Wood, names no doubt made up by C. S. Lewis. Anyway, visit their site, study that Small Catechism, and have a fine morning.

Ah yes, values. Spare me.

another reminder...

What doesn't kill you can still make you wish it had.

     Just a reminder: Eo mens est imago Dei, quo capax Dei est et particeps esse potest. St. Augustine, De Trinitate XIV:11.
     It's important that we not forget that.

notes from a commonplace book...

Here we have the Knight of Faith, from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling:

‘"Why, he looks like a tax-collector!" However, it is the man after all. I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic message from the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, a note of sadness, a smile, which betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping. No! He is solid through and through. His tread? It is vigorous, belonging entirely to finiteness; no smartly dressed townsman who walks out to Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground more firmly, he belongs entirely to the world, no Philistine more so. One can discover nothing of that aloof and superior nature whereby one recognizes the knight of the infinite. He takes delight in everything, and whenever one sees him taking part in a particular pleasure, he does it with the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is absorbed in such things. He tends to his work. So when one looks at him one might suppose that he was a clerk who had lost his soul in an intricate system of book-keeping, so precise is he.’

A shame Soren could never quite become such a gallant.

notes from a commonplace book...

     'Most of Donne's Songs and Sonets are composed partly in pentameters and partly in shorter or longer lines. . . . In all of Shakespeare's songs, to go no further, there is not a single pentameter line. It looks as if poets realized instinctively what it has taken literary critics much longer to see, that pentameter is different from other line lengths and that whenever it dominates a stanza or a poem, its strength and heft make for a significantly different kind of verse from that which we find in lyrical forms written in other line-lengths. . . .

     'Donne used the stanza of mixed line-lengths to combine feelings of very different sorts into poems of remarkably complex, often mercurial, tone. These different feeling proceed from the lines' different structures and the different relations between phrase and phrase that those structures entail. Usually the line of two or three feet will consist of a single phrase; the tetrameter is variable, but if it contains two phrases, it will often divide int he middle. The pentameter must be made up of at least two phrases or its single phrase must be developed with greater complexity, and it offers room for the more subtle development of an idea or an image. The constant movement that we sense in most of Donne's lyrics proceeds not only from his lively syntax and vigorously prosecuted images, but from the mixture of lines that in their very lengths convey feelings, and even attitudes toward experience, of very different sorts. These feelings and attitudes are not easily characterized, but, in general, the shorter lines tend to emphasize the quick, light, fast-moving, and relatively uncomplicated, even comic, exploration of a subject; the long ones tend to deepen, intensify, and complicate it, to slow it down and make it more serious, more problematical. So brief a summary seems much too formulaic. Obviously, Donne's lyrics do not change their tone abruptly from line to line. Nevertheless, again and again they broach in short lines a subject that at first seems frivolous but is gradually given amplitude and gravity through a series of more expansive pentameter lines, which, as it were, raise the subject to a higher level of serious meditation. See, for example, "The Triple Foole," "The Sunne Rising," and "Loves Infinitenesse,"' George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, pg. 323, n. 6.

reading the news...

     On reflection, I wonder just what's wrong with Russia's military action to hold their Crimean port and the surrounding territory. Have they moved to invade greater Ukraine? This is quite different from their invasion of Georgia a while back, and I'm not sure we should care that much. China and Japan, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria and Turkey, all seem more important. Just a thought.

notes from a commonplace book...

     Something from John Behr:

     'The affirmation, made by the Council of Nicaea and developed by Athanasius, that God is eternally the Father of his Son, means that in God there is a complete identity between nature and will; God does not first exist by himself, only subsequently to beget the Son. This identity of divine nature and activiety, and the claim that the Son is as fully divine as the Father, means, moreover, that the fivinity of God is fully revealed in Christ, so that "he who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn. 14.9). That "in him the whole fullness of divinity dwells bodily"(Col. 2.9) means that there is no surplus of divinity beyond this revelation, awaiting discovery through other means. The divine nature is not a passive object for human thought attempting to comprehend what God "really is" in himself, for God has revealed himself as he is. This also has significant implications for understanding how theological language functions. Later in the fourth century, the Cappadocians, arguing against Eunomius, point out that God is not an object against which the adequacy of our words about him are somehow to be measured, bur rather that God is known in and through his revelation, which expresses what God indeed is, and within which alone it is possible to think and speak about God: "In thy light we see light" (Ps. 35.10 LXX),' The Nicene Faith, Part 1, pg. 17.