Gadfly's Muse

What Are Your Educational Goals For Your Children?

Every year I give the opening address to the parents and tutors of our classical curriculum home-school academy.  I thought I would post these most recent remarks to see if anyone else might find them of interest.

School Year Commencement Address
Severn Run Classical Christian Home-School Academy, August 29, 2005

Welcome to another school year

I Called On "Miss Evelyn" Yesterday

There are some occasions when all that was best about the "Old South" floods back over your awareness like a gentle changing tide on the Mississippi river.  You just sense the lift and the inescapable  pleasant contentment  that it brings.  Only someone who knew her and loved her can ever truly understand the bittersweet experience.  The "Old South" will always be feminine in our remembrance, because, I suppose,  Southern Ladies epitomized all about which I am speaking.  There was a gentleness, a sense of propriety, a firm conviction in the "way things ought to be", that characterized the externals of Old Southern society.  And it was not the least bit hypocritical, though it is easy to think it was by those who never knew her.  But that which made the gentleness, the sense of propriety and conviction more than mere gloss, was the tempered steel which provided its foundation.  The Old South, at its best, was the conviction that civilization meant moral conviction and apart from that conviction, barbarity reigned.  And barbarity simply was not allowed.  It 'twasn't nice.  Nowhere was that more evident than in Southern womanhood and hence, the Old South is "she."

Illumination and Deconstructionalism

More thoughts on reading N. T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God posted on Deeper Thoughts, this domain.

Knowledge & "Story"

Another chapter In N. T. Wright's "The New Testament and The People of God" discussed on my other blog  (Deeper Thoughts) on this domain.

Universal Rejection Needed

Evidently the emotional boiling point at Crawford, Tx. has been surpassed with the usual type of results.  Check out a letter from an Iraqi veteran posted at Common Ground for Left, Middle & Right .  Christians need to be just as loud in condemning this type of thing as we are in yelling about the removal of monuments to the 10 Commandments on public property.

Interaction With NT Wright

Posted on my "Deeper Thoughts" Blog - this domain

Meditations & Contemplations:  How Normative Is The Early Church?  Interaction with N. T. Wright: The New Testament & The People of God

Part of my summer reading goal is to complete the first volume of N. T. Wright's series.  As I go along I will interact with his thought as best I can.  I will publish it as a series under Meditations & Contemplations.

 

The War In Iraq: Perspective Is Needed

Discussions of the war have never been elevated, but they have now degenerated to a Warner Brother's cartoon -- with Sylvester, Tweety, Elmer and Bugs all cranked up on speed and self-righteousness.

STRATFOR GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT 08.02.2005  Stratfor.com

cross posted at UTI:Perspective Needed

A Conversation on Biblical Hermeneutics, Inerrancy & Stuff

JY writes
My 'hermeneutic', or interpretive approach, is to assume that the works were written by one or more humans to communicate to humans, and that they largely mean what they say. It's fairly straightforward. One runs into difficulty, of course, when you encounter poetic sections, highly metaphorical sections, and so forth, at which point you have to understand what various metaphors mean, which requires understanding things about the period. Nevertheless, it's easy to find plainly written, non-poetic sections of the Bible which contradict other non-poetic, plainly written sections of the Bible.

Approaching a text attempting to prove inerrancy is not honest, if one is already committed to the idea of inerrancy and divine inspiration, because of the ease at which literary 'problems' can be rationalized. The types of justifications that 'rescue' problems in the Bible from being seen as inerrant can rescue any text from such problems. The Bagavad Gita, the Quran, the I Ching, or Moby Dick, all could be approached with the assumption of inerrancy, and post-hoc rationalizations can always be used to 'solve' problems in the text. Ishmael famously declares whales to be fish (in Moby Dick, not the Bible). This is an obvious error. But it's easily rescued by pointing out that the goal of Moby Dick is not to provide information about the nature of whales, but the nature of man, and the whale is being used throughout Moby Dick in a metaphorical sense.

A Question About Salvation and Sacrifice

Gadfly, perhaps you can explicate this whole process of salvation and sacrifice for me. It never really made any sense.

Why would God kill Himself to convince Himself to change the rules that He, Himself, made?

For that matter, why does God have wrath? Shouldn't he be above all that. Anger generally arises from thwarted expectations. Shouldn't He have seen all this coming?

Question posed by "Mothworm" on UTI

What The Bleep Did Jonathan Livingstone Seagull Know?

Movie Review:  What The Bleep Do We Know?  (I know, the title should have math symbols in it)
Captured Light Distribution, 20th Cent. Fox, available DVD

cross posted at UTI:Unscrewed (02-02)

I liked this movie and I will tell you why, but first, contrary to all the movie promotes, let's get the negatives out of the way first.