Month: October 2007
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Why We Should Read Lesser-Known Books, or, the Anselm I Never Knew
Anselm was born in 1033 in Aosta, Italy and while young was put under the tutelage of a relative who was a professional teacher. This man kept Anselm confined to the house so that he would study more diligently so that when Anselm returned home he was frightened by both his family and neighbors to…
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Coleridge the Wind Harp
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was evidently fascinated by Aeolian harps, string instruments played by the wind without human intervention. Just as novelties they are fascinating instruments, no doubt, but Coleridge saw in them an emblem of poetry itself. In fact, in one of his early poems, 1795’s The Eolian Harp, Coleridge takes the wind harp as…
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Genevieve Foster and the World of Columbus
Genevieve Foster is the author of a number of histories for young readers, published in the forties and fifties. Foster is a great story-teller who knows how to include all the information you’d expect in a kids’ history, but who also reads widely enough to gather up some surprises from primary text and older histories.…
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Cramming for the French Test
Back in 1995, I found myself in a situation that is common for graduate students: needing to demonstrate basic reading knowledge of a modern language in case I should need it in my future research. The kind of knowledge required isn’t exactly what you’d call learning the language, certainly not with any fluency. But it…
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Medieval Gazing and Eating
A couple of weekends ago my wife and I took our kids up to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The opportunity to visit the Getty at will is certainly one of the perks of living in southern California. We were invited to go to the Getty with one of my students and her significant…
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Welcome to the Humean Race
David Hume (1711-1776) was a real gadfly of a philosopher. As skeptics go, he was one of the champion doubters of all time. Reading his work can be bracing, because he knows more variations on “Oh, really?” and “How do you know that?” than anybody between Montaigne and Foucault (You can use that line to…
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Making Comics with Scott McCloud
Cartooning is an art form that communicates with great immediacy. We don’t rely on comics for the best literary writing of all, and we don’t look to cartoonists to be the greatest visual artists. Good as the writing and art may be in a comic, we usually look for the highest achievements of word and…
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Goes to Columbia
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Columbia University has sparked both reactions of appreciation and disgust from pundits across the media. While many have debated the political cost of his visit, questions about whether or not it was meritorious for Columbia to invite Ahmadinejad for educational reasons have been largely unaddressed. Was it good that Columbia…
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F. B. Meyer Talks to His Lamp
F. B. Meyer (1847 – 1929) was a great Baptist pastor and commentator about a hundred years ago. In his commentary on Zechariah (The Prophet of Hope: Studies in Zechariah; Fleming Revell, 1900), Meyer pondered one of Zechariah’s visions, the vision of a seven-pronged lampstand which was constantly supplied with oil by pipes that ran…
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The Heresy of Cool
Coolness is heretical. Or at least the pursuit of it is. This is because an inverse relationship exists between our attempts at being cool and our faith in Jesus Christ. The one struts, confident in his ability to do and say all the right things. The other limps, just as confident in his ineptitude, his…