Archive for November, 2009

November 28, 2009 0

Astronomy and Alienation: Preliminary Thoughts

By Robert Minto in Astronomy, Man, Time

Next semester I’ll be taking my “lab science” : astronomy. I love the fact that my lab involves staring at stars. But more than that, I’m fascinated by the development of the meaning of the study of astronomy. I hope to study and write about that; but even now, before it has become a conscious [...]

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November 26, 2009 1

The Spine as the “Seat of Artistic Delight”

By Robert Minto in Appreciation, Art, Music

Another gem from Desiring the Kingdom. Smith quotes Vladimir Nabokov on reading Bleak House, for the purpose of demonstrating how embodied our imaginations are:
All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the [...]

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November 25, 2009 0

“Programming” As a Pedagogy of Desire

By Robert Minto in Community, Desire, Learning, Pedagogy

This evening I borrowed and perused the first half of James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom. His thesis involves the notion that because humans are not simply cognitive beings but actual desiring animals (embodied, and carrying in every action an implicit telos) Christian education needs to be about the forming of desires as well as [...]

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November 25, 2009 1

Are We Temporally Alienated?

By Robert Minto in History, Time

One of my Thanksgiving break projects is to finish a paper comparing the views of Maimonides and Averroes on the relation of the truths of faith and philosophy. To that end, I’m reading the fabulous new biography of Maimonides by Joel Kraemer: Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds.
One of Maimonides [...]

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November 23, 2009 5

Re: Blogging c. 2010

By Robert Minto in Blogging, Community, Responses

Interesting post on the state of the art of blogging by millinerd. One thing I would take issue with, and one I would add:
1. Site-design still does matter, as do blogrolls. And this is because there are still newcomers to the blogosphere, and for these newbies nothing is more attractive than a good site-design and [...]

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November 20, 2009 0

Faith: Foundation or Target?

By Robert Minto in Faith, Mystery, Self-subversion, Theology

There is a malicious understanding of the life of faith. It goes something like this: to have faith is to believe in certain foundational ideas. The proper result of this belief is a logical and rigorous application of those ideas to all of life. And make no mistake (this understanding says)—all of life will be [...]

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November 19, 2009 0

Intellectual Tombstones

By Robert Minto in Death, History, Hope

One of the more interesting portions of my day involved contemplating the cultural effects of the Black Death on 14th century Europe. People got religion: flagellants took the burden of repentance upon themselves for the whole society, peasants took up prayer as lifeline rather than pastime or social custom. Art became full of memento mori: [...]

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November 17, 2009 1

Notes on Note-taking

By Robert Minto in Organization, Scholarship, Strategy

Ann Blair’s article “Note-taking As an Art of Transmission”, has finally kicked me in the direction of explicitly formulating my own method. My method has been developing over the past two years; now, I have finally achieved a level of technical proficiency such that I no longer look back on books and lectures with regret [...]

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November 14, 2009 0

The Moral Tutelage of Literature

By Robert Minto in Books, Literary Theory, Pedagogy, Virtue

To the Lighthouse is a profoundly convicting book. As we follow Virginia Woolf on her whirlwind tour through the consciousnesses of her characters, I imagine that all of us will get stuck identifying with a particular character. She lures us into identification by attractively presenting the internal monologue of that character—in my case, the single-minded [...]

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November 8, 2009 0

Sunday Sundries (Nov. 8, 2009)

By Robert Minto in Sundries

Why “We” do not have troops.
Neither Wellhausen nor Kugel.
A beautiful tribute to my summer camping ground! (Aesthetic, locale oriented conservatism I can stand.)
Mammonian Circular Logic.
An excellent response to the “Heidegger smash-up.”

It can be frustrating to be young and not yet in a position to make much of a contribution to the debate. But at least [...]

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