Over the years I’ve had friends who believed in the healing power of crystals, a friend who thought she was an incarnated alien, friends who believe aliens live among us, and at least one friend who thought that Wuthering Heights is great literature and not, self-evidently, a humorous book. Sarah Hoyt, talking about something else entirely. Read more
I’ve finished my series on “Bootstrapping the Interior Life” for the time being; and as I want to keep my Sunday posts for matters involving the life of faith, I’ve decided to spend the next series of Sundays reading through Pope Francis’ encyclical Lumen Fidei, “The Light of Faith”. I’m not planning any kind of definitive commentary (as if I were qualified to write one); rather, I’ll be reflecting on the text in the context of the daily life of... Read more
This post first appeared in slightly different form in April of 2004. Since then, the blog post I was commenting on has disappeared, and I’m now Catholic rather than being a rather evangelical Episcopalian. The main point, however, remains. Lynn Sislo (the link has decayed) comments on an article about a young preacher who has been charged with heresy by his denomination. It seems that the preacher has been teaching that non-Christians might still be able to go to heaven;... Read more
“The Leaving of Liverpool” is one of the “Irish” tunes I’ve been listening to quite a lot, and have been learning to play on the whistle. I put “Irish” in quotations, because it isn’t really Irish; it’s a sailor’s song, and was collected in the wild (so to speak) twice, around 1885, by two different Americans. It concerns a sailor embarking on a long sea voyage to California from Prince’s Landing Stage in Liverpool, lamenting not the leaving of Liverpool... Read more
Carrot stared straight ahead of him with the glistening air of one busting with duty and efficiency and an absolute resolve to duck and dodge any direct questions put to him. — Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms Read more
I’ve got a character, John St. Cloude, captain of the freezer ship Our Lady of Loreto; a sequence of events, the voyage to S’Mary’s World; I’ve even got a title, always an important point for me, Watchman for Daybreak; yet I can’t seem to get started. Part of it is simply lack of time: we went away for President’s Day weekend, sharing a rental unit with another family; being present to family and friends is not conducive to writing fiction.... Read more
Says so. Right here. Every week Sarah Reinhard does a Catholic Techie interview at CatholicMom.com, and this week it was my turn. If you want to read Sarah saying nice things about me, by all means go take a look. Plus, you get to see me sitting in a teacup. UPDATE: Now, with link! Read more
Don Tillman, hero of Graeme Simsion’s novel The Rosie Project, is a professor of genetics at an Australian university. He is also an “Aspie”—a person with Asperger’s syndrome. One of the hallmarks of Asperger’s syndrome is that certain aspects of social interaction that come naturally to most of us and that we handle without even thinking about it have to be learned and applied explicitly. They observe us, and make hypotheses, and draw conclusions, and (if so minded) try to... Read more
It’s hard to discuss things fruitfully when you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not speaking here of out-and-out ignorance, of people pontificating on subjects of which they know little (although there’s plenty of that going around, and I’m sure it was ever thus, and that I’ve contributed to it in my time). I’m speaking of something more subtle: of two people in dialog using the same words but meaning different things by them. Such hidden disagreements can generate... Read more
One of the hardest things to do in the interior life is to persevere: to keep going, to keep praying every day, especially when, for some reason, we miss a day. It’s only natural. If you’re learning to play an instrument, and you don’t practice, you don’t want to face your instructor; and if you continue not to practice, you’ll soon not be taking lessons. But the fact is, you’re sometimes going to miss a day. Sometimes you’ll just not... Read more
Cry 'Woof'
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