Roll Tide, 8-0

Current Reading

Music of the Spheres?

Scientists have recently recorded the sound of distant stars. You can hear these "songs" with this BBC article.

Thoughts on Religion...

by children's book author, Philip Pullman. His anti-Lewis, anti-Christian trilogy is being made into films, with The Golden Compass (2007) as the first installment.

"My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good."

Decorating on a Dime and Imagination

A Kentucky man transformed the bare walls of his basement with sharpies and imagination. This is worth seeing.

Day of Reckoning

Finally someone is willing to tell the art world that the Emperor has no clothes. Robert Hughes takes on Damien Hirst in this article from the Guardian. Hughes is the author of a thoughtful book on modern art, The Shock of the New. Hirst is probably most famous as the artist who slices animals in two and preserves them in glass tanks. His most recent works include a diamond encrusted skull and managing to stay in the public eye as if his art were important. He's become a master of publicity--which is, after all, one of the greatest traits of modern artists.

New Life for an Old Violin

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that the concertmaster of the of the Milwaukee Symphony was offered the loan of a Stradivarius. In a time when collectors, and not musicians, are the only ones able to afford to own the celebrated instruments, this is indeed a generous gift--but, thankfully, perhaps not as unusual as one would think. After all, great instruments were meant to be played.

Intelligibility

What is the use of correct speech if it does not meet with the listener’s understanding? There is no point in speaking at all if our words are not understood by the people to whose understanding our words are directed.
—Augustine, On Christian Teaching

Rhetoric in Defense of Truth

Since rhetoric is used to give conviction to both truth and falsehood, who could dare to maintain that truth, which depends on us for its defense, should stand unarmed in the fight against falsehood? This would mean that those who are trying to give conviction to their falsehoods would know how to use an introduction to make their listeners favorable, interested, and receptive, while we would not; that they would expound falsehoods in descriptions that are succinct, lucid, and convincing, while we would expound the truth in such a way as to bore our listeners, cloud their understanding, and stifle their desire to believe; that they would assail the truth and advocate falsehood with fallacious arguments, while we would be too feeble either to defend what is true or refute what is false; that they, pushing and propelling their listeners’ minds towards error, would speak so as to inspire fear, sadness, and elation, and issue passionate exhortations, while we, in the name of the truth, can only sit idle along sounding dull and indifferent. Who could be so senseless as to find this sensible? No; oratorical ability, so effective a resource to commend either right or wrong, is available to both sides; why then is it not acquired by good and zealous Christians to fight for the truth, if the wicked employ it in the service of iniquity and error, to achieve their perverse and futile purposes?
—Augustine, On Christian Teaching

Symbols

"Symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words."
--Edmund Spenser (1552-99)