tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78837368763741696582024-03-12T20:33:40.034-06:00The Thinking Groundsstomping ground: n. (usu. in pl.) a favourite or familiar haunt or place of action.
breeding ground: n. 1 an area of land where an animal, esp. a bird, habitually breeds. 2. a thing that favours the development or occurrence of something, esp. something unpleasant.
(OCD)Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.comBlogger701125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-6404725116132688572015-05-06T23:30:00.001-06:002015-05-06T23:30:29.027-06:00New Blog: Accidental Shelf-BrowsingThis will be the last post here.My new blog is called Accidental Shelf-Browsing. It is on Wordpress; otherwise, I do not know if I have much to say about it yet.
I've turned off commenting capabilities here (I think). If you would like to get in touch about anything at this blog, please do so at my new one.Thank-you all for reading.Christian H.
Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-47380146947259227292015-03-19T00:44:00.000-06:002015-03-19T00:44:18.158-06:00Resignation
1.
A few years ago—at least three—I was talking to a friend who
said he felt great embarrassment about his past: the things he used to say, the
things he used to believe, the person he used to be. He felt uncomfortable running
into people he met back then, because it always reminded him of that gap. Even
though I had changed a lot, I couldn’t say I shared the feeling. I felt
comfortable Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-37498698069240062662015-03-14T15:14:00.003-06:002015-03-14T15:15:26.488-06:00Disciplinary Epistemologies 101
Since there have been universities, there has been a crisis
in them. We should probably look at the more recent hand-wringing about
universities teaching students relativism in the light of recurring accusations that universities corrupt youth, but I’m not going to do that
analysis here (or ever, even). Instead I’m going to tell you about my Research
Methods class.
1.
I had recently that Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-7282971038561710472015-03-08T17:40:00.004-06:002015-03-08T17:46:44.770-06:00A Mature Philosophy, Part II
Or, Personal
Epistemology, the Perils of Education, and Two Ways of Not Being a Relativist
Knowledge is always uncertain, but some ideas are better
than others. Evidence for propositions exists, but doesn’t that require claims about evidence for which we cannot have
evidence? One-size-fits-all-answers usually fit no one but the person who made
them, but then physics decided to go and be all Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-41169098831472056912015-02-27T20:57:00.000-07:002015-02-27T20:59:21.451-07:00Book-Eaters and Titanomachy
TW: a brief discussion
of cannibalism
Back in November, I posted the following to Facebook:
Does anyone else find themselves,
at times, thinking, "I ate that book," rather than, "I read that
book"?
Eating a book, for me, is different
from reading it. If you read a book, you look at the words, understand them,
and recognize the whole book as an object. If you eat a book, you do all of
that, Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-88809165296738406592015-02-26T21:57:00.001-07:002015-02-26T21:58:06.834-07:00Alien, Warrior, Outcast, Fugitive, and Victim
Or, Jones and the
Theological Worlds
A Taxonomy of
Religions Post
Behind each set of eyes is
profound mystery, a tender, unique, fragile, and special creation which
identifies the self as theological artist. And in such artistry, the self is
always a social creature.
W.
Paul Jones, Theological Worlds
I started
the series comparing Stephen Prothero’s God
is Not One and W. Paul Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-86743828771962328732015-02-06T18:01:00.000-07:002015-02-06T18:01:37.426-07:00My Very Own Exploitation Flick?
Or, The
Ex-Exploitation Flick
It occurred to me that it would be boring to talk about every genre in terms of my own worldview, so I’ll probably tackle
them as lenses to other worldviews instead. However, I think it might be worth
considering what my exploitation flick would look like, rather than talking
about what someone else’s exploitation flick would like, because there are a
few problemsChristian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-34504979252108720452015-02-03T01:26:00.000-07:002015-02-05T23:11:03.948-07:00My Very Own Epic: Part 4
What in Me is Dark, Illumine
What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
In the previous posts I thought about how I might use the
epic conventions to depict my Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-33944824633003902322015-02-02T01:14:00.000-07:002015-02-05T23:24:20.174-07:00My Very Own Epic: Part 3
Thinking of those Branches Green
Which to express, he bends his
gentle wit,
And thinking of those branches
green to frame
A garland for her dainty forehead
fit,
He plucked a bough; out of whose
rift there came
Small drops of gory blood, that trickled down
the same.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, modernized by me
Content warning: suicide, depression.
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]-Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-78280090722886689262015-02-01T01:02:00.000-07:002015-02-05T23:12:29.882-07:00My Very Own Epic: Part 2
There Are Many Paths to the Edge of Night
Home is behind, the world ahead,
and there are many paths to tread
through shadows to the edge of night,
until the stars are all alight.
J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
Content warning: depression.
Let’s dive right in to planning my epic. I’ll break it up into a few posts to
keep them shorter and more manageable; the divisions are arbitrary.
Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-70025827872810236902015-02-01T00:50:00.002-07:002015-02-05T23:13:42.810-07:00My Very Own Epic: Part 1
The Lineaments of my Own Face
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
Jorges Luis Borges, in the Afterword to his Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-56727178224785859402015-01-31T00:18:00.000-07:002015-01-31T00:18:44.507-07:00On Pilgrims and AliensI wrote a bit before about Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking, arguing that in rejecting scholarship it rejects community. After I finished the book, I had quite a few more complaints about it, some of which I addressed in this post I wrote for one of my tumblrs. Here's an excerpt:
As previously discussed, H. P. Lovecraft saw the world as radically Other, and he reacted Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-83368555647241243402015-01-25T01:44:00.001-07:002015-01-25T14:48:10.066-07:00Fixing Arthas and Narrative Time-Travel
[Edit 25 Jan 2015: I was meaner than I ought to have been in this review. Arthas is not good by the standards of novels, generally; it is possibly quite good at what it is supposed to be and do, that is, produce a fictionalization of the games on which it's based, maintaining much of the narrative tenor of those games, for an audience which cares about very different things than the standards ofChristian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-84281146830158075042015-01-14T16:04:00.000-07:002015-01-14T18:17:09.251-07:00Must the Philosopher Walk Alone?or, Families that Cite Together Stick Together
One of my favourite places to walk; copyright mine.
[EDIT: Just a few hours after posting this, I have realized one way in which I was unfair to Gros, because his discussion does reflect some of my own views on the world, and one very serious error that Gros committed and I forgot to bring up; I'll maybe need to write a second post, but until Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-86039684210257731572015-01-03T00:16:00.001-07:002015-01-05T13:59:02.586-07:00On Mystics and Postmodernists
This post will barely rise above the autobiographical, but
perhaps despite that it will be of some use to someone; I intend to discuss the
way in which my (mostly former) interest in mysticism has been related to a
sympathy for (but lack of identification with) postmodernism.
I remember, towards the end of high school, engaging with
certain skeptics and atheists among my classmates. When I Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-64072187437814398882014-12-22T14:30:00.003-07:002015-01-03T00:23:02.270-07:00Quest and Castle
A Taxonomies for
Religions Post
I’ve been calling on Richard Beck a lot for this series;
this makes a degree of sense since 1) his work has been fairly helpful for my
own religious formation and 2) his work is specifically about personality types
in religion. So I wrote about theological
worlds and obstacles
to love. I forgot, however, about his work on Quest, prior to this work on
death andChristian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-86702794970753988562014-12-20T21:46:00.001-07:002014-12-20T21:46:14.079-07:00Random Religion GeneratorA Taxonomies for Religions Post, Kinda Sorta
My brother introduced me to a Random Generator site which allows you to fairly easily make your own random generators. I made one for fantasy-style religions. It's a bit long and kind of got away from me. To some extent it was based on the "Taxonomies for Religions" series, but it isn't very close to the questionnaire I wrote previously. (Some of theChristian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-47317515512861519512014-12-12T06:00:00.000-07:002014-12-12T06:00:07.794-07:00The Graveside Crowd
A Note on Depression,
Perhaps
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Today—the day I post this, not the day I write this—it will
have been one month since my father died. As they say, he finally lost the battle
against cancer. A short battle, though, with a rapid decline: there were only a
few months between his diagnosis with a very treatable form of cancer and the
total Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-59539520265993265362014-11-26T20:18:00.000-07:002014-11-26T20:18:16.997-07:00A Post-Hoc Mission Statement
A Taxonomies for
Religion Post
I had planned to write a summary for this series as it relates to real life to
follow the one related to roleplaying games, but as I sit here I realize there’s
nothing to say about real life that hasn’t been said about the roleplaying
games, which I guess should
come as a surprise to no one. So I’m not going to write the second of those
posts; just go read the
Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-43262411013032666462014-11-20T23:35:00.001-07:002014-11-20T23:38:54.555-07:00Taxonomies and Mythopoeia
A Taxonomies for
Religions Post
While trying to find ways
to frame my understanding of different religions, and different individuals’
religion, is a worthwhile activity in itself, I would be lying if I claimed
that my primary motivation was anthropological or psychological. Rather, I’ve
primarily been imagining that this project would be useful for writing fiction:
in a realist context, for Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-46245612651437243942014-11-06T17:09:00.000-07:002014-11-20T20:11:07.752-07:00Some Other Ways of Looking at Religion
A Taxonomies for
Religions Post
Having gone through all of the taxonomies about which I felt
I could write substantial posts, I’m now going to do a quick lightning round
for taxonomies which I find limited, but still probably worth mentioning. Think of it as that drawer in the kitchen where you keep the miscellany.
Harris’s Wakefulness
I have not read Sam Harris’s Waking Up: A Guide to Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-55030868187569861612014-11-05T00:04:00.000-07:002014-11-05T00:04:04.754-07:00Looking Square at Death
A Taxonomies for
Religions Post
I’ve already written a fair amount about Richard Beck’s
work, including a synopsis
of what I’ver read of his Death Trilogy. In case you don’t want to read
that, though, here’s an altogether too quick Coles Notes version:
Richard Beck is an experimental psychologist working on the
psychology of religion and the fear of death, drawing extensively from the workChristian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-52611140955186689472014-10-30T15:57:00.000-06:002014-10-30T16:00:18.090-06:00Who is the Object of Religion? And Who the Subject?
A
Taxonomies of Religion Post
1.
Robert Hunt blogs about interfaith conversations at his Patheos blog Interfaith Encounters
(catchphrase/subtitle: A Christian at the Crossroads of Religions). Hunt is
himself Christian, which might well colour his own assumptions about these conversations;
the assumptions, or investments, a person brings to their understanding of
others’ religions is going toChristian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-40925678088430076962014-10-23T17:00:00.000-06:002014-10-24T12:38:29.193-06:00Ultimate Concerns
A Taxonomies for Religions Post
Paul
Tillich was a Christian existentialist and philosopher popular in the 50s and
60s and one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. He
was known for his book on popular theology The
Courage to Be and The Dynamics of
Faith and his multi-volume treatise of more academic theology, Systematic Theology. He worked by
correlating human Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7883736876374169658.post-60404541400659665852014-10-22T19:38:00.001-06:002014-10-24T12:34:18.506-06:00Prophet, Sage, and Shaman
A Taxonomies for Religions PostIn
the last post, I noted Chaotic Shiny’s Religion Generator and the sorts
of fields it gave describing the religions it generated. A number of these
involve its clergy, and what they do.
For instance, clergy might be community leaders, spiritual protectors, healers
of the sick, judges, inquisitors, or a connection to spirits and the deceased;
they may be monastic,Christian Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10019240793982424774noreply@blogger.com0