An old friend of mine from the Newman Center community at Stanford has begun a blog detailing a pilgrimage (currently on-going) along the Camino Santiago in Spain. The pilgrims include members of her family, including her husband who is only going along for the first week (he’s the “plus one”). You can follow the whole story at Six Pilgrims Plus One: A Camino Journey. Read more
In Part I, I talked about Clojure and the need for a convenient “REPL”: a piece of software that lets you type input at the language engine and see its responses. In Part II I talked about Leiningen, a very cool tool that not only gives you a good REPL but also automates many other tedious aspects of development. In Part III I talked about a simple IDE for Clojure called Nightcode. And the final piece in the puzzle is... Read more
Ray Stevens’ classic novelty song “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” randomly appeared in my music stream this morning, and I felt I ought to share it. For those not familiar, it’s the story of how one “half-crazed Mississippi squirrel” brought revival to the folks at church one day. Here’s Stevens performing it in 2006 at the Grand Ole Opry. Read more
The Mouser made a very small parry in carte so that the thrust of the bravo from the east went past his left side by only a hair’s breath. He instantly riposted. His adversary, desperately springing back, parried in turn in carte. Hardly slowing, the tip of the Mouser’s long, slim sword dropped under that parry with the delicacy of a princess curtsying and then leaped forward and a little upward, the Mouser making an impossibly long-looking lunge for one... Read more
Recently the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has been calling for an increase in the minimum wage. I don’t like to argue with the bishops, and I’m not going to do so now; but I worry about efforts to use the Big Hammer: to try to fix social problems by fixing the “system”, rather than by helping individuals. It’s true that our society has systemic problems. It is clear that we have problems in the area of poverty and access... Read more
Subtitled “New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus”, Charles C. Mann’s 1491 is a delightful survey of native civilizations and cultures in North and South America prior to the coming of the Europeans. Much has been discovered in the last twenty years, and it turns out that a lot of what I thought I knew about pre-Columbian times is wrong—or, at least, incomplete. I knew, for example, that smallpox brought by the Spaniards (and later colonists) had decimated the Indian*... Read more
We’re blogging through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae, sometimes called his Shorter Summa. Find the previous posts here. Having established that God must be unchanging by reducing the notion of a changing First Mover to absurdity, Thomas then goes on to make a direct argument for the Unmoved Mover: Among things that are moved and that also move, the following may also be considered. All motion is observed to proceed from something immobile, that is, from something that is not moved according to... Read more
Continuing with Paragraph 35 of Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis talks about those who seek God through the light of faith, even though they haven’t yet found Him. He says, Because faith is a way, it also has to do with the lives of those men and women who, though not believers, nonetheless desire to believe and continue to seek. To the extent that they are open to love and set out with whatever light they can find, they are already,... Read more
In Part I, I talked about Clojure and the need for a convenient “REPL”: a piece of software that lets you type input at the language engine and see its responses. In Part II I talked about Leiningen, a very cool tool that not only gives you a good REPL but also automates many other tedious aspects of development. (I find myself wishing very strongly that TCL, my usual language, had something like it.) So at the end of Part... Read more
So Elizabeth Scalia sent me a YouTube video the other day, a performance of the hymn “Wondrous Love” by a group called Blue Highway. And I sat and listened to the singer’s raw country voice on the first verse. And on the second, he was joined by another; and on the third, another, and so on, and when it was all done, I went to the kitchen and played it for Jane, who loves close harmony almost more than she... Read more
Cry 'Woof'
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