Thursday, May 04, 2006

Learn It Live It Love It

We'll be out of blog for a bit. Dawn and I are doing some anniversary vacating--23 years' worth, no less. I think the traditional gift for 23 is credit...

Finishing up the semester. I like to teach. Just let me. Okay?

Jonathan and Beth took 40 or so APs between them. I never heard of APs til after high school.

Finished Mitchell Aboulafia's The Cosmopolitan Self, which is not about egoistic decolletage-obsessed New York women, and am working through Annette Baier's Moral Prejudices. I'm writing my August paper on the Aboulafia book. I want to write another article based on Baier.

I'm also enjoying R. C. Sproul in a very different mood than I usually think of for him. His The Consequences of Ideas turns out to be an idiosyncratic, very personal tour through what seem to him to be the high points of Western philosophical history. That he highlights the intersections with Christian theology, and the value or challenge to the latter (i.e., the apologetic situation), is no surprise. But I was fairly stunned to read him musing over, of all people, Parmenides, saying that his (Sproul's) youthful dismissiveness of heavyweight metaphysics (such as Parmenides's) was incorrect, and that he takes Parmenides's struggles with being very seriously now. Wow. A, a nice admission, and B, what a monster thinker to decide to take on at 65 or whatever age Sproul is. (Parmenides was one of the bigger philosophers who lived before Socrates.)

By the way, my gentle readers, you doubtless are the sort to already know this, so I shan't detain you long, but surely you do know that Sproul is, so far as I know (and perhaps unbeknownst to himself? I would love to find that out...), the only major American evangelical theologian to be quoted in a Hollywood film by a lesbian vampire? (She is alarmingly and well played by Annabella Sciora. This most unlikely event occurs in Abel Ferrara's amazing The Addiction.) And that kind of credentialing has got to totally rock a resume otherwise impenetrably clogged with impedimenta such as papers presented, books published, awards received, and similar tedium.

I pray for more such tedium in my life daily...

And a happy conclusion: props to Mandy the Magnificent for emitting boyful new child Andrew. Yay. Saw the small poo factory this afternoon, and got to chum it up with older and somewhat jealouser sister Ruby. News on NPR mostly bad--babies good. Time spent with checkbook baaad--time spent with babies, gooood. Mark and Mandy: Happy Andrew to you!

1 Comments:

Blogger Henna Hippie Mama said...

you just gotta love the poo factories when they are still innocent, heh heh.

11:12 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home