i had to laugh when i logged into my blog page today. somehow the embedded music source switched automatically and left viewers thinking i'd gone discotheque. sorry about that... isn't life grand =)

week two:

Quotes:

Montaigne speaks of "an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it." The first is the ignorance of those who cannot read at all; the second is that of those who have misread. These Alexander Pope rightfully calls "bookful blockheads," ignorantly read.
(from How to Read a Book)

The next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. [The difficulty] is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain-clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle; though they do not call an editor's office a coward's castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalists. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press about why the churches are empty, without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty. Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate in a three-act farce, and move us to comfort him after the manner of the curate in the Bab Ballads: “Your mind is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.”The Rival Curates So we may truly say to the very feeblest cleric: “Your mind is not so blank as that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man on the Street, or any of your critics; for they have not the most shadowy notion of what they want themselves, let alone of what you ought to give them.” (gkc, from The Everlasting Man)

I figured out how to memorize Ps 119: forget the assigned numbers; memorize each section letter as a tab on a file containing 8 items. Finding the exact number is easily done by multiplying by 8.

Vs. 17 “Deal bountifully with Your servant, that I may live and keep Your word.”
O God, where is life but in the keeping of Your word? But who is sufficient? Except You look on us with favour, Your word falls like seeds on dry ground; there is no life in us. So we lift our voice to You, and, knowing Your goodness, ask that You do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Send Your rains on us and cause the springs of the deep to break on our understanding; shine the Sun of Righteousness on our cold hearts that we would be warmed to receive Your truth. You are God; we are Your people. Deal with us according to Your lovingkindness that we may serve You all of our days.

from every direction

today, 8^th grade discussed briefly a quote by Plato:
“The world is god’s epistle to mankind—His thoughts are flashing upon us from every direction.”
I reiterated the fact that to prepare for a course in geography, one had to lay the love of God in Christ as the foundation for any intellectual pursuit and then use as a line and compass the understanding that everything we touch with our hands or our minds, though it is tainted and twisted by sin, if we dig at it, will reveal to us something of God – His singularity, His diversity, His creativity, His immutability, His righteousness and His grace, His mercy and His judgment. So geography is not simply peoples and lands; a look at cultures is a window into the divine and perfect disparity (I use the term advisedly) of the God-head, and to study topography is to wrestle with divine intention.
And we will build, properly dimensioned, as we grow in the knowledge of God, the temple of God in Zion with the cedars of Lebanon, the riches of Sheba, the skill of Sidon and Tyre, the gold of Ophir – and the world will see all the wisdom of Solomon, and the house that is built, and the food of our table, and the seating of the servants, and the attendance of the ministers, and their apparel, and the cupbearers, and our ascent by which we go up unto the house of Jehovah; and there will be no more spirit in them.

a first look

just a beginning.