[gallery] Flux Machine
Letter to the Catholic Academy
Letter to the Catholic Academy
ADDENDUM: Let me just make it clear that this is not one of those cases in which he jests at scars who never felt a wound. In my 29 years at Wheaton College I was on more than a few occasions — some of them before tenure — accused of violating that college’s Statement of Faith or undermining the faith of my students through amorphously “dangerous” ideas. Once World magazine even ran a hit piece on me, accusing me of disparaging solid, reliable Christian authors and corrupting my students’ minds with Frenchified literary theory. But precisely because I wasn’t trying to undermine my students’ faith — just the opposite — I took these challenges as opportunities to articulate my ideas for different, and often larger, audiences. (I always talked to my students about these matters also.)
But after talking with Tim Carmody about this I do find myself hoping that in some follow-up column or post Ross will specify which scholars he believes to have redefined the notion of the “development of doctrine” to the point that it has no boundaries.
As for me, though, if a pundit were to challenge my work and declare it heretical — or even say it smells of heresy — I’d see that as an opportunity to be embraced. Unless of course I actually were a heretic. In which case I guess I’d need to learn to own my heresy.
[gallery] jonklassen:
a small story i did last year for Monkey magazine. Monkey is a Japanese magazine, so that is why the action goes right-to-left. Happy Halloween you guys.
[gallery] A page from the oldest known draft of the King James Bible
[gallery] the jewel caterpillar
From her dialect my mother left me one specific word that she used to describe how one felt when one was pulled here and there by contradictory feelings that tore her apart. She said that she had inside a frantumaglia. La frantumaglia (she pronounced it frantum-maglia) depressed her. At times it made her dizzy, caused her a metallic taste in her mouth. It was the word for a discomfort, illness not otherwise definable, manifested out of the throng of heterogenous things in her head, like refuse on turbid water of the brain. La frantumaglia was mysterious, caused mysterious acts, was the origin of all suffering not attributable to a single obvious reason…Often la frantumaglia made her cry, too, and the word remained in my mind from childhood to define first of all the crying that is sudden or without a reason one is aware of: tears of frantumaglia.
Dark matter’s existence perplexes people who find it implausible that the vast majority of matter in the universe would be undetectable by our senses and their technological extensions. Some even wonder if it’s a sort of mistake. To me it would be even more astonishing if the matter we can see with our eyes were all the matter there is. You might have thought such hubristic beliefs were upended by the Copernican Revolution. After all, the history of physics is the history of revealing how much is deceptive, or is hidden from view.
Most people mistake their own perspective, shaped by their subjective and limited perception, for the absolute reality of the external world. Questioning this assumption is what advanced our research on dark matter. It is also the only thing that has ever advanced human empathy.