Epithet Hierarchy
My husband is bingeing Supernatural and whenever I’m in the same room sort of watching, I’m basically incredulously questioning everything in the show’s lore. Like. There’s this bureaucracy of angels trying to protect heaven, and I’m like, but God is in heaven so he can kind of protect it, and he’s like, no God left heaven, and I’m like WHAT. And then apparently they kicked Lucifer out of hell, so there’s this lesser demon named Crowley (I can only think of Aleister Crowley) in a gangster suit who’s running it. Purgatory is filled with these man-eating vampires. It’s like someone read all the words in Catholic metaphysics but didn’t bother to find out what any of them meant.
Oh, George R.R. Martin is going to end his book series differently than the Game of Thrones show? Gee, I wonder why! /sarcasm
George R.R. Martin has big updates on Winds of Winter and why his ending is very different from the show
#relatable
Garden update! Harvested the first banana pepper today. Have several tomatoes that are good sized, just waiting for them to ripen. And lots more peppers and cucumbers in progress! Carrots, radishes and zucchini planted from seed are finally starting to make an appearance.
Oh.
“Some of us embrace the Bible with our hearts, which is right to do, and yet we do not bring disciplined minds into the process. Sometimes the reverse is true: we apply first-rate minds to the Bible and yet fail to be sensitive to what the Word is whispering to our hearts. In the end, it is not a heart problem, nor is it a head problem. It is an integration problem. We must ask the Lord to help us bring our whole self to the task of listening to the Bible. How can we begin to reconnect what became disconnected at the Fall? How can the heart and mind become reintegrated?
The imagination is the vital bridge between the heart and the mind. It is the means by which the Spirit begins to reconnect what was disintegrated by the Fall. This explains why the majority of the Bible is seeking to recapture our imaginations, whether it is the poetry of the psalms, the imagery of the prophets, or the luminous parables of Jesus.
Often we are tempted to believe that the commentary or the lecture is an end, the final word. Here are the facts: record, digest, and the work is done… the lecture is only the seed, not the fruit. We are called to move forward on our own, interacting with heart and mind, continually asking what all the facts mean… We are being conformed to His image as we engage our hearts and minds, by means of the imagination, with the Word of God.” - Michael Card, from his commentary on Luke
“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.” - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The used bookstore had a Memorial Day 50% off sale and I bought so many books they gave me a BANKERS BOX to carry them all out to the car. So far my husband has not kicked me out for the massive amount of books I keep loading on our overstuffed bookshelves, so that’s good.
Garden update 5-28-22. Cucumbers, strawberries, broccoli and garlic, and teeny baby carrot and bean (I hope!).
Garden update 5-28-22. Peppers - serrano, jalapeño, banana. Should have some peppers on there soon!
Garden update 5-28-22. Tomatoes growing lots of flowers, starting a couple new fruit. Leaves a little curly, due to missing watering yesterday. Haven’t totally figured out how to water them enough without flooding the seeds I planted in the same bed. Oops…
Just participated in my first ever graduation as a faculty member. Amazing. Simultaneously thrilled and excited for the graduates and heartbroken to not be teaching them anymore. But I think I need to get a doctorate because the robes/hats/stoles are way cooler.
College: A Place for Training Exiles
“All of us know this in our bones: we know that something has gone wrong and that people and places are broken. Yet we still try to restore the connections necessary to make our places healthy and whole. The season of college can help us learn to be like Israel is commanded to be in Jeremiah 29: Israel is in Babylon, in exile. God promises that, after seventy years, He will bring them back to their place. Despite this promise to eventually return them to their place, He does not command them to do nothing in their exile. Instead, he commands them to build homes, to raise families and start new families, and to plant gardens and eat their produce. In the same manner, we are to be in this world while recognizing that it is not our final destination but a training ground for our final home.
What I have learned from this season in life is that it is good to form connections in college. It is good to grow attached to the place where I have been further formed. It is good to read books, plant gardens, marry and be merry, but it is also necessary to recognize that my time in this place will come to an end. There are two corresponding mistakes that a college student can make when trying to live well during this season of life. The first is to disregard forming new connections or even to start withering the roots which do grow in order to make the transplanting process more bearable. Friendships wane, and one natural response is to try to be stoic about it all. This stunts emotional, intellectual, and developmental growth. If we do not form and water these roots, we risk killing these roots altogether and stunting our growth when we are transplanted elsewhere.
Leaving a place and community we have come to love will hurt. Still, it will be good because it will hurt – the hurt is a sign that we have lived well in this place.”
First Things - Is God a Therapist by Carl Trueman
Is God a Therapist?
“How should we prepare to stand in the face of what is to come? I agree with Archbishop Chaput that holiness and devotion must mark the church’s witness. After all, if we do not take the faith seriously, how can we expect others to do the same? Furthermore, holiness is not simply, or even primarily, an apologetic strategy. It is in part a response to the doctrine of God. Only when we grasp this can we truly place our own lives in perspective and anchor our faith so as to resist the cultural moment. If our imaginations are not fired by the greatness of the eternal communion with our glorious God that will be consummated at the end of time, then the problems of this present age will loom large and always threaten to overwhelm us.”
This balloon has been hanging out on our ceiling since March 14.
Tomatoes as of 5-21-22. Planted two weeks ago. A good many flowers on each; one tomato (which was there when we bought them). LOTS of flowers on the cherry tomato bush.
4yo: Can I eat something?
Me: It’s almost dinner time, let’s wait.
4yo: But just a little bread? Me: No, when you eat this close to dinner you don’t eat dinner.
4yo: [getting mad] Then I’m not hungry!
Me: Good, then you don’t need to eat right now.
4yo: [defiantly] Fine! Then I’ll eat dinner!
Me: I…think I actually won that round, my little would-be dictator.
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra:
“What you have made me see,” answered the Lady, “is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than aother has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. But this I had never noticed before–that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished–if it were possible to wish–you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had good. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other. […] And this is the glory and wonder you have made me see; that it is I, I myself, who turn from the good expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it. One can conceive of a heart which did not: which clung to the good it had first thought of and turned the good which was given it into no good.”
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
It was the first time he had looked steadily at her, himself unobserved, and she seemed more strange to him than before. There was no category in the terrestrial mind which would fit her. Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images. One way of putting it would be to say that neither our sacred nor our profane art could make her portrait. Beautiful, naked, shameless, young–she was obviously a goddess: but then the face, the face so calm that it escaped insipidity by the very concentration of its mildness, the face that was like the sudden coldness and stillness of a church when we enter it from a hot street–that made her a Madonna. The alert, inner silence which looked out from those eyes overawed him; yet at any moment she might laugh like a child, or run like Artemis or dance like a Maenad.
Dracula adaptations
#Watched half of Bram Stoker’s Dracula this morning. In some ways this is the best version, but in the ways it’s not, it’s really really not. Coppola gets the atmosphere, tone, and visuals very right. Dracula in his castle, smashing Jonathan’s shaving mirror, crawling down the walls like a lizard, so great. It also keeps all the relationships and major events of the book (so far) intact, which neither 1931 nor 1958 do. But while no one would deny that there’s a sexual aspect to Dracula, this one takes it to extremes, from the fanfic of Dracula’s romantic backstory to going far beyond the book in Jonathan’s encounter with the three succubi and Lucy’s first encounter with Dracula (who here is some kind of bloodsucking werewolf?!). Even Mina starts to be drawn to Dracula, in guise as a Prince, before hearing that Jonathan is alive. This runs so entirely counter to Mina’s purpose in the book. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a ‘90s Hollywood movie wouldn’t understand or value virtue. I will say I do really like the addition of seeing Vlad Dracul explicitly renounce God, which does support the themes of Dracula as an inversion of Christianity. Also the idea that Renfield had been an earlier envoy to Dracula and went mad as a result works quite well (this is in the 1931 version as well in a slightly different form).