Opinion 38

My daughter is lovely.

Opinion 37

Waiting for a baby reminds me of waiting in line for a roller-coaster ride as a child: terror, unsettled bowel, and from time to time a pathetic prayer with runny nose.

Opinion 36

Lukacs on why history is how our minds work:

Scientific knowledge, dependent as it is on scientific method, is by its nature open to question. The existence of historical knowledge, the inevitable presence of the past in our minds, is not. We are all historians by nature, while we are scientists only by choice...The past in our minds is memory. Human beings cannot create, or even imagine, anything that is entirely new. (The Greek word for "truth", aletheia, also means: "not forgetting.") "There is not a vestiage of real creativity de novo in us," C.S. Lewis once wrote. No one can even imagine an entirely new color; or an entirely new animal; or even a third sex. At best (or worst) one can imagine a new combination of already exisiting - that is, known to us - colors, or monsters, or sexes.

Opinion 35

"The past is very large, and it gets larger every minute". -Lukacs

Opinion 34

A great division among the American people has begun - gradually, slowly - to take shape: not beween Republicans and Democrats, and not between "conservatives" and "liberals,", but between people who are still unthinking believers in technology and in economic determinism and people who are not. The non-believers may or may not be conscious or convinced traditionalists: but they are men and women who have begun not only to question but, here and there, to oppose pubicly the increasing pouring of cement over land, the increasing inflation of automobile traffic of every kind, the increasing acceptance of noiseome machinery ruling their lives. Compared with this division the present "debates" about taxes and rates and political compaigns are nothing but ephermeral froth blowing here and there on little waves, atop the great oceanic tides of history."
-John Lukacs (emphasis mine).

Opinion 33

Three honest Christians are worth one honest hog.

Opinion 32

Any opinion followed by a flash of lightning and clap of thunder is valid.

Opinion 31

Laziness reaches out and brushes heaven with its slow, uninterested fingers.

Opinion 30

Making money is more pleasant than many are willing to admit.

Opinion 29

" I have two recurring nightmares: in one, David Bentley Hart is telling me off; in the other, I don’t have a dictionary." Here.

Opinion 28

Bottle of Bookers, two glasses and a companion...but Lord, how my throat burns!

Opinion Interlude 2: Gardens

Main Bed

Main Bed, another view

Minor Bed in front, Secondary Bed to the right

A close up of the two.

Minor Bed

Minor Bed

Minor Bed

Opinion 27

Dear God. Good steak. Amen.

Opinion 26

Meister Eckhart:

When people think that they are acquiring more of God in inwardness, in devotion, in sweetness and in various approaches than they do by the fireside or in the stable, you are acting just as if you took God and muffled his head up in a cloac and pushed him under a bench. Whoever is seeking God by ways is finding ways and losing God, who in ways is hidden.

And this from a mystic!

Opinion 25

"Materialist materialism is simply not as materialist as theological materialism." -John Milbank in this book, ending a long, long, long argument I won't dare to attempt to interpret.

But it's like this: to the materialist, there is just matter. To the Christian, there is MATTER!

Or, to put it another way, to the materialist there is just matter and matter - ho hum - doesn't matter. For the Christian, however, matter matters.

Opinion 24

At least when it comes to art Hegel makes some sense.

Opinion 23

The despising of what is evil and the contemplation of what is good is much easier than the cessation of evil and the doing of the good.

Point of fact: Christ did not come to be the contemplative of divine love but to enact it.

Opinion 23

One reads the Odyssey to discover what is precious in life - its wheat, wine and oil. One reads the Iliad to discover why life is precious at all.

Opinion 22 - oh, the hopelessness of all living!

What is it that we want? We take our soda without the sugar. We cook with fatless butter. We have our sex without the children. We want to drive without producing emissions. We want to waste money on "Green" products which will somehow reduce waste. What we want is clear: pleasure without the consequence. Yet in this pseudo-compromise, is it really pleasure that we are given? Diet soda tastes like shit. Butter without fat is an abomination. Sex with one's organs either bound tight in barriers or, more subtly, neutered with chemicals, is sex one step (or more) removed from the immediacy of true flesh on true flesh.

What we want is pleasure without consequences. What we get is a lessened pleasure with unforeseen and often worse consequences. We give our gold away for shiny foil.

This abdication of self-control is tied in with the fantasy that we have somehow transcended the laws of cause an effect, that we have superseded the age of common sense. We forfeit raw and earthy humanity for the idiocy of ghostliness. And deep below every excessive celebration of this exchange is a pool of vast and gray despair.

Opinion 21

One wonders, after some hundred plus years of industrialization and wars waged with its fruits, not only at the damage done to humans, but the incalculable damage done to human nature. For every life snuffed out by progress, Life itself has been muted. We live now in a state very blind and unfeeling to the potential fullness of human nature. It is as if something very thick and very evil is waging war against what God offers in the incarnation. The hope and the work of a well-intentioned yet grossly unthoughtful society has left it with a gun against its own head, trigger in its hand, inching closer to a final act of destruction.

Opinion 20

The Modern lives with half the vision, twice the confidence, and four times the confusion.

Opinion 19

"Philosophy is actually homesickness - the urge to be everywhere at home" -Novalis

Opinion 18

"Southern Australia" is a truism.

Opinion 17

I do not believe in a "global conversation".

Opinion 16

Here's Christianity, folks:

To be honest, I think I'd rather have guys like these come to my door with an automatic rifle than a Bible. If I had to choose, that is. As it is written: fear ye not the bullet, which destroyeth only the flesh, but fear ye the proof-text, which destroyeth the mind and soul.

Opinion 15

After the ascension we are not left Christ-less. He is enthroned in the flesh. Where is his flesh? On the altar and on the street. Don't look for him in your heart. If he's there, he's hidden behind all that bullshit you keep around and you won't hardly be able to hear him. Find him rather in the bread and wine and find him in the weirdo whom you don't trust, the one asking you for money. That's the ascension folks: a meal and an unattractive confrontation. Sounds kind of like dinner with relatives, come to think of it.

Opinion 14

Financial management opinion:

Does the 1.75 litre jug of bourbon go into the "Household supplies" budget category or the "Personal entertainment" budget category? Clearly household supplies. Drink a bourbon on the rocks, clean the kitchen. Have two shots, organize the closet.

Opinion 13 (good lord, they keep on coming!)

Wendell Berry somewhere:

“We must achieve the character, and acquire the skills, to live much poorer than we do.”

Opinion 12

"The future will be better than today because it is the future rather than the present. This is a truth that everyone knows because it is a truth that everyone knows."
A way of thought which is interrupted here.

This reminds me of the message that comes through many of my university classes concerning history - namely that those who lived in the past were wrong in their opinions because they lived in the past and we all know that those who lived in the past were clearly wrong about their opinions.

My God! And I give people money to tell me this!

Opinion Interlude 1

At the bar last night, from a young gay man with whom I ended up watching (alas) women's college softball: "Is that a wedding ring on your right hand?"
I: "Yes".
He in a polite seriousness: "Hm, are you Amish?"

Opinion 11

The beauty of the German language is transcendence of ugliness. In German harsh babble becomes elegant.

Opinion 10

Eventually a boy has to grow up.

Opinion 9

"After the Great Divorce"

Adam took the train to Nod.
Eve called her mother who drove up
From Ur, comforting, chatty, “forget
That bastard anyway”.

They saw each other again
At the funeral. Cain killed Abel,
Broke his mother’s heart. She shrieked, graveside
Adam too scared to hold her.

There was a dispute, meat, fruit.
Blood is not as thick as honor
But there is more of it to spill, wet
The ground with parent's shame.

At the reception they looked
Dead. Old Adam. Old Eve. He, shamed,
Addressed her, “Do you miss the garden?”
“What garden? That old dump?”

He flinched. She wilted. They drank
Adah’s wine from stone trays, looked on.
Eve had started smoking. She offered him
The reed. “Do you smoke now?”

He coughed and laughed, said something
Clever about the Tigris, how
It used to move past their house, graceful, smooth,
Sultry in Eden’s sun.

“Do you talk to Him?’ she asked.
“Who?” Adam played dumb, his old sin.
“Him, the Man, the Master Gardener.
Have you two spoken since?”

Adam paused and shifted, sat
On stone seat, head tilted, eyes down.
Then up: “It’s too hard now. I tried once
But then couldn’t understand.”

Eve exhaled white smoke, nodded
“Yes, his words don’t fit my ears since
Babel, that’s all I hear, too loud or
Soft – I don’t know which, no –“

Lamech interrupted.
Violent, belching, stumbling drunk.
“Hear my voice, you wives!” he cried, then fell
Off his stone. Eve and Adam

Broke off, quit the talk and went
Slowly to the door. Turning right
Went Eve, pregnant with dim, ancient light.
To the left, Adam, still lost.

Opinion 8

I have heard many comment that tending the garden is a good metaphor for the duties of the spiritual life. I agree: both are a pain in the ass.

Opinion 7

A tweeting college student is an annoyance; a tweeting politician is a joke.

Opinion 6

Arrogance in a young man is less repulsive than arrogance in an old man.

Opinion 5

Republicans claim to mistrust the government...except when it tells them there is a good reason to go to war.