Twilight by Stephenie Meyer Recommended by Whimsy Books.
New Moon by Stephenie Meyer.
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer.
Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean. Recommended at Chasing Ray.
War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.
The Crazy School by Cornelia Read.
Angel by Cliff McNish. Review copy, review to be posted soon.
Dark North by Gillian Bradshaw.
Song for a Dark Queen by Rosemary Sutcliff.
Best Books of the Month: Dark North and War and Remembrance.
Thoughts on chapter 2, Method, of Christianity For Modern Pagans by Peter Kreeft, a commentary on Pascal’s Pensees.
Kreeft quotes Kierkegaard: “Therefore, create silence.”
The purpose of the silence is to make a space for the truth to be heard and experienced. We are so busy, so innundated with material goods, entertainment, educational experiences, and just plain noise, that we lack the silence that is needed to contemplate the basic, important questions of life. A couple of weeks before I went on a blogging sabbatical for Lent, Cindy at Dominion Family made a decision, along with her husband Tim, to stop blogging. If I read her final post correctly, it was a desire to create just the kind of silence that Kreeft and Kierkegaard are writing about that led her to give up blogging altogether.
In the end, it was not the evil things on the Internet, not even the arguments and negativity, but rather the good things that bogged me down. So many, many good things. Pictures of decorated houses, libraries, recipes, book suggestions (this alone has been enough to almost drown me), crafts, knitting, aprons, sewing, frugality, weather, poetry, audio files, friends, homeschooling suggestions, music and the ideas, the wonderful, wonderful ideas. . . . And in the midst of my small world comes the Internet, almost like a god, vast, unmeasured. Always like a siren wooing me with good things, great things, better things.”
I’m not feeling called to give up blogging, but I do respect Cindy’s decision to do so. And I challenge you and myself to make space for silence, which is another way to say to make space for God to speak.
In this chapter Kreeft and Pascal are writing about methods of evangelism, about how to bring men to a confrontation with the Living God, by whom they are naturally appalled and of whom they are afraid. The first step is the afore-mentioned silence. And the next is what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication” and what Pascal terms “talking like an ordinary person.” Kreeft mentions Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, subtitled The Last Self-Help Book as an example of this subtle way of bringing people into an encounter with first of all, themselves, who they really are. (Eldest Daughter is quite fond of Walker Percy, but I have yet to taste his writings; another author to be added to the list.)
Another part of method for the Christian apologist is to see things from the point of view of the atheist or agnostic, to enter into a pagan world view in order to counter that worldview effectively. Pascal says, “We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.” Kreeft amplifies by advocating, “indirect comunication, spying, looking at things from your opponent’s point of view and drawing out the consequences of his premises.”
This indirect communication is part of what I am trying to accomplish here at Semicolon. To read books from all sorts of viewpoints, to write about them, think about them, draw out the consequences of the ideas and premises presented therein: this work is worthy, even if the writer herself is sometimes flawed and inadequate to the task.
Finally in this chapter Pascal has a thought, a pensee, about saints and sinners, and Kreeft interprets Pascal: “The world thinks men are good and saints are better. Pascal knows men are sinners and saints are miracles.”
I thought immediately of Mother Teresa and the hullaballoo a few months ago about some writing she had done that revealed her doubts and her spiritually dark times. Of course, she had doubts. Of course, she was a sinner, fallible, sustained by the grace of God. Only a modern secularist would be surprised that a “saint” would weather times of spiritual confusion and doubt, or that a “good man” would commit acts of which he is ashamed. Others delight in demonstrating that C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist whom Eldest Daughter calls the Only Protestant Saint, was not a perfect man, intimating that he was sexually immoral or relationally confused.
What does this uncovering of sin and confusion and lostness in even the greatest of saints mean except that we all need a Saviour?
Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.
I thought I’d give you eight eights:
1. When I was eight years old and in the third grade, my friends and I used to have boy-kicking contests out on the playground. I don’t remember whether the winner was the one who kicked the hardest or who kicked the most boys, but I do remember that a girl named Vicky was the winner. I wonder whatever happened to Vicky, the Boy Kicking Champion of Third Grade at San Jacinto Elementary School?
2. I have eight children.
3. My favorite book by Louisa May Alcott is Eight Cousins; even though I like Little Women and its sequels, I like the family/community Alcott creates in Eight Cousins.
4. Eight foods I love: cashews, Danish wedding cookies, pepperoni pizza, Vanilla coke, milk chocolate, fettucini alfredo, hot chocolate, pecans.
5. I was twenty-eight years old when I had my first child, Eldest Daughter.
6. I have been wearing the same pair of SAS sandals for approximately eight years. I need a new pair of sandals, but I can always think of something to else to buy instead.
7. 8 is one of the “Lost Numbers” on the television show, LOST, along with 4, 15, 16, 23, and 42. I like LOST and all its characters, especially Hurley who is my favorite.
8. When I was eighteen, I drove a white Volkswagon Beetle named Jojo. I always name my cars. Eight cars my family or I have owned: Calamity, The Maroon Marauder, The Magic Pickle Van, Nero, Bessie, Black Car, Joan, and Jojo.
Camille tagged me for this meme a long time ago, and Bonnie did, too.
I’d like to know eight random things about:
Cathy at Poohsticks.
Lars Walker at Brandywine Books.
Phil also at Brandywine Books.
Born, born again, borne nine babes.
Buy at AllPosters.com
Rules:
Write your own six word memoir.
Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
Tag five more blogs with links
And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!
I’m not tagging anyone, but anyone who would like to write a six word memoir is welcome to play and link back here or to the blog that started the meme. I thought it was an interesting challenge.
For those of you who missed me and for those who didn’t, I am, nevertheless, back to blogging. I took a blog break over Lent, although I left a few post-dated posts, and now I’m back with lots of “stuff” from my reading and thinking and writing over the five or six weeks of Lent.
One of my Lenten projects was Peter Kreeft’s commentary on Pascal’s Pensees, called Christianity for Modern Pagans. In the book, Kreeft takes Pascal’s thoughts and organizes them by subject in an order that makes some sense. Then Kreeft comments on each of the sets of pensees and relates them to a modern mindset. According to Kreeft, Pascal, although he lived in the seventeenth century, speaks quite cogently to the twentieth and twenty-first century man’s dilemma. A lot of what I collected in my commonplace book were quotations from the book, both Pascal’s words and Kreeft’s exegesis.
Chapter 1: Order
Pascal: “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.”
Kreeft: “The root of most atheism is not argument but attitude, not intellection but feeling, not love of truth but the fear of truth.”
“Most apologetics tries to feed spinach to a reluctant baby who stubbornly closes his mouth. . . . What you have to do is make the baby hungry.”
“Why not cultivate neutrality instead? Because neutrality is impossible once you are addressed with a claim as total, as intimate, as life-changing and as sin-threatening as Christianity. Christianity is not a hypothesis; it is a proposal of marriage.”
Sherry: And moderns/post-moderns are afraid of marriage commitment just as they are afraid of Christian commitment. The job is to make people see that there is no neutral ground in regard to Christianity just as there is no neutral ground in regard to eating or marriage. Either you eat or you starve. Either you’re married or you’re not. (“Living together” is an attempt at compromise in this area, but it’s a very poor compromise.) You can’t decide to be neutral about food or marriage. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death. Agnosticism says, like Satan in the garden, “You will not surely die.” And people fear that Satan may be right and try to hedge their bets. But there is no middle ground. Jesus said, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40) and also “He who is not with me is against me.” (Matthew 12:30) We all must choose, and even those who think they are not choosing are making a choice, whether they will or no.
I’ve got lots of book reviews, a couple of memes, more Pascal and Kreeft, and even some essays and Biblical commentary. So as they say, stay tuned.
Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian playwright, b. 1828. I’ve read several Ibsen plays: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People. He’s fond of pittting an individual against the stifling rules and expectations of society. The individual rebels but is often killed or forced back into the mold. Ibsen saw the problem clearly: individuals must violate their own moral standards or live lives of suffering and mental anguish in order to comply with the expectations of others. Sometimes the individual’s suffering is caused by his own rebellion against what is right. Sometimes society’s rules and norms are actually wrong. Either way, anyone who breaks the rules is destined to experience difficulties at the least, great hardships perhaps. What Ibsen failed to see was that such suffering can have meaning only if it is placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. If I decide to violate the unwritten (or written) code of my culture in order to fulfill my own selfish desires, my consequent suffering has no meaning or purpose. I may be an individual, but then I die. If, however, I obey the call of Christ to follow Him whether or not my society approves of my course, then my dificulties and problems have meaning and serve a greater purpose; my suffering is redeemed by a God who has suffered Himself. Suffering in the service of self is meaningless (in spite of all the existentialists say); suffering in the service of Christ is a reflection of the image of God.
Mitsumasa Anno, picture book author and illustrator, b. 1926. He was a teacher of mathematics for ten years before he began to write and illustrate children’s books. His books show both a love of mathematics and puzzles and a love of travel.
Try Anno’s USA or Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar.
I was once asked at a symposium, “Why do you draw?” I knew what they would have liked for an answer, “I draw for the children of Japan who represent our future, blah, blah, blah”. But what I actually wound up saying was, “I draw because that’s my work. I made it my work because it’s what I like to do”. Michael Ende then said, “The same goes for me. I’m just like Anno-san”, while Tasha Tudor said, “I do my work so that I can buy lots of flower bulbs”.
From a 2004 interview with Mitsumasa Anno.
I like Tasha Tudor’s answer.
Fred Rogers, b. 1928. I still say to my urchins, “Correct as usual, King Friday.” The younger ones don’t even know where the phrase comes from, but I used to watch MisterRogers’ Neighborhood with Eldest Daughter about sixteen years ago. I thought then, and I still think, that it was much better than Sesame Street or most of the other PBS children’s shows. It was slower, of course, more reminiscent of Captain Kangaroo, the TV show I remember watching as a preschooler.
Kate Greenaway, b. 1846. In the US we award the Caldecott Medal to the best illustrator of a children’s picture book each year. In Britain, they give the Greenaway Medal “for distinguished illustration in a book for children.” Many of the illustrators who have won the Greenaway Medal are unfamiliar to me, but I do know something of the work of Lauren Child, Helen Oxenbury, Alan Lee (Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy), Janet Ahlberg (Jolly Postman books), Jan Pienkowski, Pat Hutchins, Gail Haley, John Burningham, Pauline Baynes (illustrator of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books), Brian Wildsmith, and the first medal winner in 1956 Edward Ardizzone (Tim All Alone). Kate Greenaway, the illustrator for whom the medal is named, died in 1901.
Frank Gilbreth, Jr., b. 1911, co-author with his sister Ernestine Gilbreth Carey of the childhood memoir Cheaper By the Dozen and its sequel Belles on Their Toes. The books are nothing like the Steve Martin movie, by the way, except for the fact that the Gilbreth family did have twelve children. All homeschoolers should read these books, especially Cheaper by the Dozen, because they have a lot to teach about education in general and about family life. The Gilbreth family didn’t homeschool; in fact, Frank Gilbreth, Sr., the dad, pushed his children through public schools, encouraging them to skip grades and graduate early. However, in another sense, Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth were schooling their children constantly, teaching them everything from languages to typing to Morse code to swimming using a number of ingenious methods—some of which worked better than others. Bribery and the Tom-Sawyer-whitewashing-the-fence method were particularly effective.
Brown Bear Daughter warns that Cheaper By the Dozen has some bad language, and if you’re reading it to younger kids you should skip the bad words. She liked it because it was about real people and the family was interesting. She would like to live in a family like the Gilbreths, but she would want her daddy to go to church. She says it would be cool if her mom and dad were famous like the Gilbreths—not just a famous blogger, like her mom, but really famous.
Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day.
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnesy, English poet, b 1844.
Albert Einstein, scientist, b. 1879. In one year (1905), he created the Special Theory of Relativity and the quantum theory of light, explained in one paper Brownian motion and in another how to determine the size of atoms or molecules in space, and extended the theory of relativity to include the famous equation E=mc squared. He did all this while working forty hours a week in a patent office. I don’t have a clue what any of these discoveries really mean, but I’m impressed with Einstein’s “miracle year”.
I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism have brought me to my ideas.” Albert Einstein
Marguerite DeAngeli, author of 1950’s Newbery-award winning book,The Door in the Wall, b. 1889. In this favorite quote from The Door in the Wall, Brother Matthew is speaking to Robin, a boy who has been crippled, probably by polio:
Whether thou’lt walk soon I know not. This I know. We must teach thy hands to be skillful in many ways, and we must teach thy mind to go about whether thy legs will carry thee or no. For reading is another door in the wall, dost understand, my son?”
Wanda Gag, author of Millions of Cats and Gone Is Gone, or The Story of a Man Who Wanted To Do Housework, b. 1893. She also wrote The ABC Bunny, in which the aforesaid bunnies crash and dash and meet up with all kinds of other forest creatures all the way to “Z for ZERO, Close the Book.”
While looking around, I found this autobiographical book by and about Wanda Gag, Growing Pains: Diaries and Drawings from the Years 1908-1917. I’d like to read it but haven’t been able to find a copy in any of the nearby libraries.
Ezra Jack Keats, author of Whistle for Willie and Peter’s Chair and many more delightful picture books, b. 1916. Oh, he also wrote A Letter for Amy in which Peter invites his friend Amy to his birthday party but then worries that the other boys will laugh at him for having a girl at his party. I always assumed that Ezra Jack Keats was a black man, I guess because many of the children in his books are African-American, but he was Jewish.
And Happy Birthday to Antonin Scalia Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was born in Trenton, NJ in 1936.
Nino says:
In my view, a right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the “unalienable Rights” in the Declaration of Independence.
Source: Supreme Court case 99-138 argued on Jan 12, 2000.
We believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases.
Source: Supreme Court case 92-1 argued on Apr 22, 1992