Oxford 13: Narnia

The alteration of mood and change of tone since Tuesday morning at 11:00 AM has been nothing short of remarkable. I have time. I can actually take advantage of that slower pace that is supposed to be Oxford life. I don’t feel like I have to be at the philosophy library as soon as it opens at 9:30 AM. I don’t have to feel guilty (or troubled) about having to take a lunch break in my studying. I took a nap today, which I badly needed and it’s okay. What a relief.

The temperature continues to drop steadily. We’ve already had one or two zero-degree days. Snow is expected on Friday, but this is expected to be, overall, a pretty dry winter (and the coldest in forty years, I hear). Each day does bring a thin layer of frost that melts in the morning sunlight. The University Parks are absolutely gorgeous in the early hours of the day.

In an earlier entry, I complained about the use of Polar Bears in the upcoming film version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I’m still disappointed by that, but my attitude has mellowed somewhat. Permit me to quote directly from an article in the Daily Mail, “Back to the Wardrobe Kids” (28 October 2005):

“It was [executive producer, Perry] Moore who spent several years pursuing the rights to the collection of seven books.
“At one point, when the rights were held by another film company, [the first film] was going to be re-located to present-day Los Angeles after an earthquake.
“ ‘They thought children wouldn’t understand the original, so they changed Turkish Delight (a major plot point in the story) for hot dogs and hamburgers,’ he added.
“Worse was to come. ‘The most ludicrous statement I heard was that they had Janet Jackson as the White Witch, so I made this very strange vow to rescue this childhood treasure,’ said Moore…”

Thank you, Mr. Moore. I guess I can handle polar bears; it’s decidedly better than the alternative. (*shudder)

I was looking online at different schools and philosophy graduate programs. I realized that if I want to pursue a Ph.D. and career in philosophy, I’m going to have to learn at least two languages (German, French, Greek, Latin) and become sufficiently proficient so as to be able to read and translate primary. Gosh!

It’s getting into the Christmas season here in Oxford. Hurray! (Already? Well, yes. They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here, remember.) A large Christmas tree has been set up in Broad Street and decorations are going up all along Cornmarket. New College is bringing in its own Christmas tree to be lit on Friday after it has been “decorated by the Bringers of Christmassyness in Arboreal Form” according to an e-mail announcement we received. I included that particular quotation for its Strong-bad like character (which is to say, firstly, that it more-than-likely ought to be “Christmassiness,” and, secondly, that I’ve rediscovered Strong-bad e-mails).

Blessings,

Reflection 06: Thinking

God –
Whether God has a nature
Whether God’s nature is knowable
Whether God’s nature is rationally and/or propositionally explicable
How much God can be comprehended by natural reason
How to differentiate between ‘icons’ and ‘idols’ in talking about God
The contingency or necessity of the moral law, the laws of nature, and the laws of mathematics/logic
What it means for God to be ‘unchanging’
The difference between divine sovereignty and naturalistic determinism with respect to human agency.
What it means for God to be a ‘person’
How we are to understand prayer in the light of God’s omniscience
To what degree the rationalists are correct
To what degree the mystics are correct
The proper place of the biblical and Christological revelation in theology (central, I think)
The Bible as a special divine revelation and as a product of human authors
Theodicy

Morality –
The nature of actions, consequences, and ‘culpability’ or ‘guilt’
To what degree the deontologist is correct
To what degree the consequentialist is correct
To what degree the virtue ethicist is correct
The philosophical underpinnings of natural law theory
The place of retributive and punitive punishment
The nature of heaven
The nature of hell


People/Society/culture/government
The proper role of government (that is, delimiting its function and end)
To what degree the conservatives are correct
To what degree the liberals are correct
Whether there is such a thing as human nature and in what it consists
Relationships, friendship, love
The consequences of a mobile society
The formative influence of community and the loss in our society of ‘rites of passage’
The dangers attendant on an anthropological/sociological reduction of ethics, culture, and religion
What anthropology can and cannot say about the content of propositions, dogma, and doctrine
The nature, instruments, ends, and philosophical underpinnings of the ‘social justice’ enterprise
The philosophical underpinnings of any concept of ‘universal human rights’
The source and consequences of globalization, standardization, homogenization, and unification
To what degree culture is shaped by perceptions of truth
Reconciling religious and civic duty in a pluralistic society, and the concept of ‘tolerance’
The conditions of a ‘just war’

Church
Addressing post-modern disillusionment with the church
The need for teachers/mentors
The nature of ‘salvation’
The role of ‘community’

Metaphysics
To what degree the essentialists are correct
To what degree the existentialists are correct
Whether telos follows from or is prior to nature/essence
Reformed epistemology

And this is only a list of some of my most recent philosophical and theological speculations.
And I haven’t even begun to account for my personal, introspective, and self-evaluative reflections; my day-dreams and fantasies; my hopes and fears; my literary, artistic, and aesthetic musings; my imaginings; my devotional thoughts; my remembrances of people—friends, family, relatives, acquaintances; my prayers; and my academic/work-related cogitations.

Thinking is an enormous part of life. Okay, perhaps that was obvious to most people who know me, but it occurs to me that despite its significant place in my life, it goes almost completely unseen. Is this true for most people? I’m not sure—that an activity that involves so much time and energy should be shared with almost nobody or only on very rare occasions. I’m not sure I like that.
This is, in part, why I need to do more writing. I’ll be working on a paper or project and won’t be able to concentrate because my mind is so full; I need to find an outlet. A person will make a passing comment about God, the Bible, the church, politics, a book they read, an experience they had, and, unwittingly, set in motion two-or-three weeks of continuous speculation.
Is this normal?
What about other people?

Reflection 05: Oh for the people...

C. S. Lewis is too much for me. After an hour of reading his essays, his fiction, his apologetic works; my mind is racing at a mile-a-minute. The character, richness, depth, and sincerity of his writings are so compelling.

The following quotation is from a letter that Lewis wrote to his friend, A. K. Hamilton Jenkin on 4 November 1925, shortly after his appointment to a teaching post at Magdalen College. After writing about the “idyllic setting of his college rooms” he says:

“I wish there were anyone here childish enough (or permanent enough, not the slave of his particular and outward age) to share it with me. Is it that no man makes real friends after he has passed the undergraduate age? Because I have no forr’arder, since the old days. I go to Barfield for sheer wisdom and a sort of richness of spirit. I go to you [e.g. Jenkin] for some smaller and more intimate connexion with the feel of Things. But the question I am asking is why I meet no such men now. Is it that I am blind? Some of the older men are delightful; the younger fellows are none of them men of understanding. Oh for the people who speak one’s own language.”

Carpenter, Humphrey Ed. Inklings, The. (Ballantine, 1978), 22.

Oxford 12: 'Pudding'

On Sunday, the OSAP group went down to the Historic Dockyard at Portsmouth to see a bit of the British maritime tradition. 2005 marks the 200th Anniversary of the British victory over French Napoleonic forces at the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805). The appropriately named HMS Victory—Lord Nelson’s flagship in that historic engagement—is docked at Portsmouth and exploring it was a thrill. We also saw the HMS Warrior and the remains of the Mary Rose (built between 1509-1511).

On 05 November 2005, we visited the Black Country ‘Living’ Museum, a reconstructed mining town portraying life during the Industrial Revolution.

On Friday, 18 November 2005, I went with some students to the Trinity College Guest Dinner. Most of the colleges host a guest dinner on Friday nights to which students can bring friends and family. It was probably the most authentically British meal that I’ve had all term (‘authentic’ in the kinds of food).
Fortunately, I knew before coming that black pudding was not a ‘pudding’ according the conventional American understanding. I’m not quite sure where I learned that, but I did; and it’s a good thing. One might well have mis-taken the dark speckled cake for chocolate and discovered the misconstruction only after the first bite—with no small degree of alarm. The pudding was not bad by any means, though it was rather bland. It was only after dinner was over that someone told us that black pudding (also known as ‘blood sausage’) is made of congealed blood—generally from a pig. But it tasted alright.
There was also steak and chicken liver and a parfait (which was nothing like and much better than what they serve at McDonald’s). It was an interesting experience.

On Thursday, 01 December 2005, I will be performing in the New College Chapel with the New College Wykeham Singers. The theme of the concert is English Anthems and Motets 1500-2000. Our repetoire includes pieces by Benjamin Britten, Thomas Tallis, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being able to do even a little music here in Oxford. And for anyone planning to study music in England, remember that they use different terms to designate note value:

Whole note – Semibreve
Half note - Minim
Quarter note - Crochet
Eighth note - Quaver
Sixteenth note – Semiquaver

Oxford 11: Emerged

Praise be!

I have emerged—emerged from the black pit, from the valley of the shadow, from the dark night; I have emerged. Ha ha! Praise be! Oh light! Oh day! Oh heavens! Oh inimitable, inexorable, incomprehensible grace—outpouring of the divine munificence enthroned in glory.

Praise be!
_____

Greetings one and all. A few have commented to me about my having neglected over the last couple weeks to post any updates. For this, I apologize. This has been an unusually paper-heavy time. I am alarmed by how much time I’ve been spending in library and over books. I pulled one full all-nighter. (I was hoping to avoid that this semester, but oh well.) But all is now well.

I just got back from the last meeting of my secondary tutorial on Leibnizian philosophy. I was very concerned, going into that last meeting, about the quality of my final paper, but my tutor, Kurt Ballstadt, was very positive and our conversation was as engaging as ever.

There’s still plenty to be done. My next paper for my primary tutorial on Integrating Philosophy and Theology—due Monday—will cover Søren Kierkegaard; Karl Barth and Emil Brunner; and with Ludwig Feuerbach and the movement of German Idealism. The paper that I turned in at the beginning of this week covered Blaise Pascal, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. There’s so much material involved, but I’m loving every minute of it.

Earlier today I attended the seventh lecture in a series on the philosophy of Locke and Berkeley by Dr. Anita Avramides (the only lecture series that I’ve consistently attended all term); those continue to be delightful.

On Thursday, most of the APU OSAP students will be getting together for Thanksgiving dinner.

Things are beginning, ever-so-slowly to wind down. But there’s still plenty to do.

There is much, much, much to be said and dealing with this backlog will present some interesting challenges. Updates about recent events, philosophical and theological musings, upcoming activities, random thoughts—I’m going to differentiate and structure the kinds of contents by posting several different entries. Unlike my friend and former roommate, Josh, I have no compunction about posting multiple blog entries in a single day. (That reference was just a random shout-out to him. Yeah, Josh!)

It is good to be communicating with you all again. Thank you to all who have written or sent a message or e-mail.

Blessings and Happy Thanksgiving!
_____

There is nothing so pure
As the laughter that springs,
Unsolicited,
From the sight of the leaves
Dancing in the chill
Wind of a brisk
Autumn day
As you step out your door.