Shameless Plug

Y'all should go buy this book.  Leepike Ridge  It's written by my old Rhetoric professor, and is #750 on Amazon right now. 
You could also buy it at Borders... 

no quarter for mediocrity

Still reading Chesterton, still puzzled by him.  We often hear 'moderation in all things' but I wonder if that is actually what we should be striving for?  Here are a couple quotes to describe what I'm trying to say. 

"Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God." 

Christ wasn't moderation, he was two wildly different beings at the same time, not a dilution in any way, rather a glorious contradiction of possibility. 

The church itself is able to simultaneously hold views that seem at apparent odds with each other.  for example celibacy and marriage are both good.

"It has kept them side by side like two strong colors, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George.  It has always had a healthy hatred of pink.  It hates that combination of two colors which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers.  It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray.  In fact, the whole theory of the Church on virginity might be symbolized in the statement that white is a color: not merely the absence of a color."

We aren't pink, we are Red and White.  St. George's shield defeated the dragon because it wasn't pink.  He defeated the dragon because his shield proclaimed his belief in absolutes, not in moderation. 

pagans strive for a life of balance, christians strive for a life of sweet awesomeness made possible by a very ugly, violent, bloody death....  paradox?

law of gravity

Wisdom from the mouth of Chesterton, found somewhere in Orthodoxy ...

"At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern skeptics are too meek to claim their inheritance."

Fools for Christ

Props to Joe Carlson for telling me about 'Fools for Christ.'

"The holiness of Christ did not challenge men to improve themselves, it demanded that they repent.  Christ represented God's judgment upon every human attempt at self-improvement."  Jaroslav Pelikan
We are not able to save ourselves through making our life more like Christ's.  We are only saved through repentance. 

Daron Lawing is the man, he preached a great sermon on Sunday, touching somewhat on how repentance must be followed by sanctification.

musty smell

George MacDonald might be a lot a bit quirky in his theology, but his fiction is incredible. 
In the opening chapter of his novel Lilith he describes the library of the protaganist. 

"The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied th egreater part of the ground floor.  It's chief room was large, and the walls of it were covered with books almost to the ceiling; the rooms into which it overflowed were of various sizes and shapes, and communicated in modes as various - by doors, by open arches, by short passages, by steps up and steps down." 

When I grow up, I want to have floor to ceiling bookshelves in my house, probably should have a spiral staircase too.