NARNIABOUND

Friday, August 24, 2012

Gefeliciteerd mijn lieve schat met jou verjaardag - - - - - - - - - De vreugde van mijn jeugd en de glorie van mijn ouderdom

Images from a Lovely Time

"A good wife contains so many persons in herself. What is [A3] not to me? She is my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding these all in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have had good ones) has ever been to me … Solomon calls his bride Sister. Could a woman be a complete wife unless, for a moment, in one particular mood, a man felt almost inclined to call her Brother."
Gefeliciteerd, dear - en voor de hele familie.

On our way to Conçeicão do Ibitipoca - A very special time

Pousada Alto dos Manacás
Chalé - Alto do Sol

Parque Estadual do Ibitipoca

Back at the Pousasa

Café Plantation near Itajubá

Monday, August 20, 2012

Ideas for Reflection from Lewis

Chronological snobbery

Chronological snobbery - the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.

You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

Looking at and looking along
We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. We must look both “along” and “at” everything.

Resistance thinking

C.S. Lewis called it “resistance thinking,” saying if you apply the Gospel in ways that fit into your own age, you’ll end up with something comfortable and convenient. You have to remember the resisting material—the parts of the Gospel that don’t fit in. Lewis called it “the parts that are difficult and obscure and even repulsive.” Teach and be faithful to those, and you’ll be faithful to the whole Gospel and the next generation.
Look at the faith of many of the people who are seeker-friendly to Boomers. They remove crosses from churches. They’ve watered down, diluted, streamlined, and softened the Gospel. Then along came the Xers who said, “Wait a minute, we want crosses, history, literature. We want to put some guts to what we’re about.” They said, “You people have betrayed it!” Lewis’s resistance thinking is far better: teach what’s unfashionable, too.

Subjectivism / Relativism

Out of this apparently innocent idea [that values are subjective] comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its 'ideology' as men choose their clothes.

Bulverism

You must show that a person is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he/she is wrong and then distract his/her attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he/she became so silly. - - -
- - - refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right - - - and you will be in trouble.

Charientocracy

Not the rule of the "saints" but the rule of the Cultured, the Educated, the Academic, the Manager - - -

As the old social classes broke down two new ones have developed. On the one hand we have people building themselves into groups within which they can feel superior to the masses; the self-appointed aristocracies. On the other hand we have a new ruling class: the Managerial Class.

The combinations of these two groups bring us Charientocracy. And the two groups are already combining, because university education is the main mean of access to the Managerial Class - -

Os Guiness - Prophetic untimeliness:

A challenge to the Idol of Relevance.

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant.

Stock Response

"By a Stock Response,[we] mean a deliberately organized attitude which is substituted for the ‘direct free play of experience’. In my opinion such deliberate organization is one of the first necessities of human life - - - All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or, in general, as perseverance – all solid virtue and stable pleasure – depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux of mere immediate experience. …To me, it seems that most people’s responses are not ‘stock’ enough, and that the play of experience is too free and too direct in most of us for safety or happiness or human dignity…. That elementary rectitude of human response, ….so far from being ‘given’ is a delicate balance of trained habits, laboriously acquired and easily lost, on the maintenance of which depend both our virtues and our pleasures and even, perhaps, the survival of our species …"

Ambition

We must be careful what we mean by it. If it means the desire to get ahead of other people -- which is what I think it does mean -- then it is bad. If it means simply wanting to do a thing well, then it is good. It isn't wrong for an actor to want to act his part as well as it can possibly be acted, but the wish to have his name in bigger type than the other actors is a bad one.