What an interesting thought. I’ll be working that over for a while.
I guess it depends on the grade of modesty.
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I’m still in the first fifteen minutes and I enjoyed the bit about the hemispheres of the brain. That has personal importance to me because my younger brother is a mathematician whose left hemisphere is effectively dead; the cells are alive but there is no coherent activity and indeed little activity at all. When after the accident which caused this it became evident that not only was he still perfectly capable of math – supposedly a totally left-hemisphere function – but in a number of ways was even better than before (example: he was always good at multiplying three- and sometimes four-digit number in his head, but now that extends to five- and six-digit numbers, and he is much faster at it) [he currently teaches ‘GaoD’ students online – “Gifted and/or Difficult” from high school geometry through doctoral program material]. The difference and its divergence from the expected (the doctors warned he had probably lose his mathematical ability) was stark enough he became the subject of a couple of scientific papers; we like to think that his situation helped overturn the simplistic understanding of the two hemispheres.
His point about things being taken out of context made me think of the Laffer curve, which interested me enough that I did a couple of hundred hours of study about it. My conclusion was that both sides were wrong about it: the one because it is not complete nonsense, the other because it is not anywhere close to being universally true (the constraints include employment levels, utilization of industrial capacity, tax rates, and a handful of other aspects). It wasn’t hard to figure out, it just took a hefty amount of slogging through economic data, which made it simple yet complex – yet the complexity made people on both sides ignore the simplicity and thus my efforts brought very little fruit in terms of explaining the issue to anyone.
I like the Augustine line about understanding God; I’ve pointed it out to a number of cultists who don’t seem to grasp that they are dedicated to limiting God to what common humans can understand with little effort, yet they fail to see that if what they understand as God can be humanly understood then it is not in the least likely that it is God that they understand.
Love his points about mysticism and the great minds of the past!
U.S. politics in a nutshell: when people think they know and understand everything, that’s when things begin to go wrong.
I kept looking at the Rubik’s Cube on the shelf behind the interviewer and thinking how my younger brother solves it: he doesn’t consciously analyze it, he “absorbs” it and then solves it without having to think about what he is doing. That strikes me as being very right-brain, where my solving it involves step-by-step analysis beginning with learning how various moves alter the orientation and placement of the pieces.
Near the end I remembered something a Franciscan priest said, that a Dominican mystic would be a contradiction in terms. Thinking back I think that suggested that Dominicans are very left-brain oriented – and I wonder if a Dominican might say that a Franciscan theologian would be a contradiction in terms (and perhaps a Benedictine would shake his head and chuckle at both of them).
“When God builds a church the devil builds one right next door.” Love it!
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Well, what people think of as righteousness, anyway. Righteousness cannot exist apart from love, and love cannot exist apart from people, so righteousness necessarily involves humanity. I might even go so far as to say that it is impossible to be righteous alone, by one’s self.
“Good” pursued to the extreme tends to turn out to be the greatest of evil.
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I long ago decided that modesty is a tool for shaming people into following the behaviors desired by those who invoke it.
So did I. I’m glad to see Christians finding value in his hemisphere research and surveys of history, cosmology, philosophy and world myths. I think the hurdle is seeing the Christian mythos as one of many without seeing it thereby diminished. The work of Mozart and Beethoven do nothing to diminish Bach, just more musical pathways to glory. Of course if one could celebrate all the stories that connect anyone to what is the divine without worrying so much about the content of the mythos that has awakened them to it.
One hopes there is still a good place left for something that might qualify as real modesty, or at least close enough. It seems like the same criticism could be hurled at humility too. And yet, we’re not free to abandon the call toward humility. And the [original] quote, if taken there, seems to me to have a toxic, if not fatal cynicism to it.
[And maybe it just involves accepting that, yes, real modesty does have a shadow side, and perhaps necessarily so.]
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Interesting quote to contemplate. But the topic always calls to mind Winston Churchill’s put down of “a modest little man with plenty to be modest about.”
I wonder if anyone else is watching Rings of Power? I didn’t expect I would so I didn’t watch the first season while it was being discussed in a thread initiated by Merv around an article comparing the world of LOTR with GOT.
I’ve finally started watching season 1 and of course season 2 is underway as well. Will probably polish those two seasons off eventually. But now I’m wondering if I would be better off reading Tolkien’s own prequel, The Silmarillion? I’m not patient with Tolkien’s long descriptive passages of meals and gardens. Though I appreciate both when I’m reading a story I want to focus on either characters or plot. Any recommenders or detractors?
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we are watching. It got sort of mixed reviews, with hard core LOTR fans being a bit critical as it takes liberties, as film adaptations always do. Personally, I am enjoying it having never read The Simarillon so no expectations. Just watched the second episode of season 2, enjoyed it. the Christianity today review gave an interesting slant.
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It’s going to be behind a registration wall for most (or at least the full interview will be), but Skye Jethani (In a Skyepod episode - part of the Holy Post series) interviewed our very own Deb Haarsma! You can listen to at least the first 2/3 of the interview here, even if you aren’t a Holy Post member.
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I agree with those who are liking this second season of Rings of Power better than the first. I did read Silmarillion, but too many years ago to have much of it at ready recollection. So while the first season just seemed like mostly fancifully added story to me, I nonetheless couldn’t be sure how much of it actually was in there or which parts might have been but that I was just forgetting. (I did know that Halbrand as Sauron was all made up backstory - what with Galadriel adventuring with him and all - I knew none of that was in the Silmarillion). It wasn’t till the second season that the story began to coalesce for me around stuff that I do half remember - or recognize as true even from the LOTR books themselves. So yeah - now that the story seems to be back to at least some skeleton of the way Tolkien wrote it out, I find myself being much more forgiving of, and even enjoying all the escapades in between, apocryphal as they may be.
Sauron was a “fair-seeming friend” indeed, and that is a lesson for the ages. What does it say about us though when the leaders we fall for aren’t even fair in appearance? How far do we have to fall so that we’re not even selling out our inheritance of Truth for a bowl of stew, but knowingly walking away from it for a pot of sewage?
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Well said. Glad to hear you and @jpm are still enjoying it on into season 2. I just watched season 1, episode 4 yesterday. I’m fitting it in gradually as I’m also still reading The Magnificent Rebels by Wulf. Though it isn’t a true page turner I do intend to finish it this time as she brings these characters to life and makes me want to see how it settles out.
Having just re-read “The Great Divorce”, I’m noticing more than I remember getting from it in prior encounters. I think there may be some general truth in play that not only is the encounter fresh if one reads a new book, but it is equally (maybe even more) a fresh encounter when a new person (one’s later self) re-reads the same book!
In the case of this quick read, my older self isn’t finding it any easier to meditate on. In fact, one of my impressions is that Lewis’ words are like the sharp and hard blades of heavenly grass hurting the feet of the visiting phantoms. It’s too much truth and insight all at once - making me want to retreat into my shallower, less real worlds of distraction and ambition over fleeting stuff - including religion and all its machinations. May the seed of real love - real life - stay viable down in there somewhere!
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I’ve found that book helpful in that way, too–I have to read it over to get the layers he puts in there.
Nearly all his books exhibit kindness, I have been musing–a real search for a relationship with God the Father, and believing He is like Christ. He sure reminds me of Macdonald in that way. I’ve been listening to the Narnia books again like old friends, too–and am picking more up on this umpteenth time, or else meditating on other biblical themes, too.
Tim Keller would bring up that tone that his wife received in the several letters she got from Lewis as a girl.
It’s encouraging that that was a consistent theme, as well.
Thanks.
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Aye - there’s the crux of the matter. For MacDonald - and not accidentally, for Lewis then too.
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- "What Is the Illusory Truth Effect?
The illusory truth effect is the tendency for any statement that is repeated frequently—whether it is factually true or not, whether it is even plausible or not—to acquire the ring of truth. Studies show that repetition increases the perception of validity—even when people start out knowing that the information is false, or when the source of the information is known to be suspect."
++++++++++++++++++++
Repetitions available upon request.
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I finally got my turn with Zoe Schlanger’s 2024 book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. I skipped the Prologue for now to jump right in Chapter 1 The Question of Plant Consciousness. Here she describes her descent into the world of naturalists - @klw - while working as a journalist reporting on the often depressing news in environmental science in search of “something in the natural world that felt wonderful and alive”:
(Oliver) Sacks acknowledges the numinous moment - the briefest flicker - with barely a half a sentence, but it stung me immediately as true.
… the tall corn, the strong sun, the old man, become one. This is one of those moments, indescribable, when there is a sense of intense reality, an almost preternatural reality - and then we are descending the trail to the gate, reboarding the bus, all in a sort of trance or daze , as if we had had a sudden vision of the sacred, but were now back in the secular, everyday world.
The experience of flashes of the eternal, the real, the gestalt, runs like a thread throughout naturalist literature. I wasn’t the only one who had been taken like this before. In Pilgrim on Tiinker Creek, the writer Annie Dillard has a similar moment in front of a tree, watching light pour through the branches. A flash of the real. Almost as soon as she realizes she is having it, it is gone, but it leaves her with the awareness of a sort of open-plan attentiveness that can be accessed in snippets, and which might be a more direct observation of the world than the usual everyday version.
As I read more books about plants and their enraptured naturalists after work and into the early morning, I began to find these moments sprinkled everywhere. In The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf’s [who also wrote Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self] biography of nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, I learned he’d also had it too. Von Humboldt wondered aloud why being in the outdoors evoked something existential and true. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul,” he wrote; “Everything is interactive and reciprocal,” and therefore nature “gives the impression of the whole.” Humboldt went on to introduce the European intellectual world to the concept of the planet as a living whole, with climatic systems and interlocking biological and geological patterns bound up as a “net-like, intricate fabric.” This was Western science’s earliest glimmer of ecological thinking, where the natural world became a series of biotic communities, each acting upon the others.
@Kendel, notice how Wulf and Dillard are being tied in for me here?
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Absolutely. This idea of oneness with and of nature came to fruition in the German Romantic movement. Late classists like Goethe and Schiller whose lives overlapped the movements show earlier versions of this thought as well, and much of it was based in their real engagement with scientific exploration of their day.
I wish I enjoyed Dillard, when I tried reading Pilgrim before. I know her work is highly valued, but it wasn’t speaking to me. Not like, for example, Wendell Berry. I may try again. And I see a Wulf or two in my future.
Her narrow line between righteousness and empathy won’t let me go. I suspect she may be a more perceptive writer even than her subjects.
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Here is a different perspective regarding our position in the grand scheme of things as well as that of plants and other animals. From pp25,26 of Zoe Schlanger’s 2024 book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. @Kendel the second of the indigenous perspectives mentioned is shared from a book by Mary Geniusz and comes from an indigenous culture in your neck of the woods. Ever hear of them? New to me.
It seems to me that plant blindness is something deeper, more tied to value systems, which are of course a product of a cultural perspective. Indeed, not all cultures have this problem. Virtually all Indigenous groups around the world have a more intimate relationship with and recognition of plant life. Many cultures ascribe personhood to plants, humans being just one type of person. Human persons and plant persons are often literally related: the Canela, a group of indigenous peoples in Brazil, include plants in their family structures. Gardeners are parents; beans and squash are their daughters and sons. In Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask, a collection of traditional Anishinaabee teaching about plants, Mary Siisip Geniusz writes that the primacy of plants is central to her Great Lakes-area people. Plants are the world’s “second brothers”, created just after the “eldest brother” forces of wind, rocks, rain, snow, and thunder. Plants are dependent on those elder brothers for their life, while supporting all life created after plants. Nonhuman animals are “third brothers,” reliant on both the elements and on plants. Humanity is the “youngest brother,” the most recently created of all the beings. Humans alone need all three of the other brothers to survive at all. “Humans are not the lords of this earth,” Geniusz writes. “We are the babies of this family of ours. We are the weakest because we are the most dependent.”
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