#harry blamires

[christophe76460]

Discipline spirituelle (1)

“Or nous, nous avons la pensée du Christ.” 1 Corinthiens 2. 16

La complexité du cerveau humain n’a pas fini de nous étonner. Nous disposons d’environ 86 milliards de neurones qui forment un vaste réseau interconnecté grâce à des connexions nerveuses, les synapses. Dans 1 cm3 de cerveau humain, on dénombre pas moins de 10.000 milliards d’entre elles ! Un incroyable ordinateur a été créé par Dieu et logé dans notre cerveau. Mais aucun ordinateur, aussi puissant fût-il, n’est capable d’imaginer les pensées de Dieu. Pourtant Paul affirme : “Nous avons la pensée de Christ” ! Grâce au Saint-Esprit, notre esprit se renouvelle constamment pour embrasser les pensées de Christ Lui-même (Romains 12. 2).

C’est la raison pour laquelle Dieu nous a créés avec un tel cerveau. Watchman Nee écrit : “Le scandale le plus frappant de notre époque est de voir combien de chrétiens ne possèdent pas “la pensée de Christ !” Et Harry Blamires ajoute que bien des chrétiens louent et prient comme des chrétiens, sans pour autant “penser” comme des chrétiens ! Il appelle cela “l’anorexie religieuse”, autrement dit, un manque d’appétit pour acquérir une maturité spirituelle en Christ.

Dieu nous a donné un formidable instrument que nous, chrétiens, utilisons souvent si mal, par manque de discipline ou pas simple manque de réflexion. N’est-il pas plus facile de “sous utiliser” notre esprit en négligeant les activités qui le stimuleraient, comme la lecture, l’étude approfondie de la Parole de Dieu, la méditation ? Salomon explique que nos pensées déterminent l’homme que nous sommes ou que nous devenons : “Car il (l’homme) est tel que sont les arrière-pensées de son âme” (Proverbes 23. 7).

Des pensées négatives produisent une attitude négative, des pensées immorales produisent un comportement immoral... etc. Aussi Paul a-t-il conseillé : “que tout ce qui est vrai... digne... juste... pur... aimable, tout ce qui mérite l'approbation, ce qui est moralement bon et digne de louanges soit l'objet de vos pensées” ( Philippiens 4. 8 ).

Un conseil bon à suivre.

[craigtowens]

The fashion for giving sex instruction in schools, and the nature of that instruction, are symptomatic of the Church’s abdication. This instruction is supposed to prepare the young for a life in which sexual experience will be harmonious and fulfilling; yet it is almost exclusively clinical and hygienically divested of emotional overtones. It is difficult to understand why detailed understanding of the physiology of sex should be supposed to be an assistance to the happy practice of monogamy, especially in the absence of any instruction in the nature of love.

Harry Blamires

[perennialessays]

Week 2

From Origins to the Future: The Hero and the Epic Quest.

This week and the next we shall engage in one of the traditional approaches to comparative practice, following various re-appearances of a myth / hero / genre through successive literary periods and in different countries. The example we shall use is the figure of Odysseus / Ulysses in epic writing and film from Homer to the turn of the 21st century. We shall consider how this figure has changed, and focus on specific episodes of Homer’s original epic poem.

Homer, The Odyssey (read in particular Book 1 and the episode of the Cyclops (in Book 9);

Dante, Inferno (read canto 26, Ulysses);

James Joyce, Ulysses (read the ‘Cyclops’ episode (the 12th, pp. 280-330 in Johnson))

Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (Film: Please watch this in advance of the seminar)

Some secondary reading on Homer’s Odyssey & the figure of Odysseus/Ulysses

Boitani, Piero, The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth, tr. Anita West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). [Has an excellent chapter on Dante's Ulysses]

Doherty, Lillian E., "The Snares of the Odyssey: A Feminist Narratological Reading", in Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature, ed. by S. J. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 117-133. Foley, John M. (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)

Fowler, Robert (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004).

Graziosi, Barbara, end Emily Greenwood (eds.), Homer in the Twentieth-Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Jong, Irene de,  A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001)

Hall, Edith, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008).

Lane Fox, Robin, Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer (London: Allen Lane, 2008)

Manguel, Alberto, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey A Biography (London: Atlantic Books, 2007).

Murnaghan, Sheila, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

Stanford, W. B. The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963).

Some secondary reading on Kubrick

Bizony, Piers,  2001: Filming the Future  (London: Aurum, 1994)

Chion, Michel, Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey. Trans. Claudia Gorbman (London: BFI, 2001)

Ciment, Michel, Kubrick. Trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983)

Cocks, Geoffrey, James Diedrick, and Glenn Perusek (eds.), Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film and the Uses of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

Falsetto, Mario, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport, Conn; London: Praeger, 1994)

Falsetto, Mario (ed.), Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: G.K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall, 1996)

Herr, Michael, Kubrick (New York: Grove Press, 2000)

Kolker, Robert (ed.), Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Nelson, Thomas Allen, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)

Naremore, James, On Kubrick (London: British Film Institute, 2007)

Rasmussen, Randy, Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed (London: McFarland, 2001)

Wheat, Leonard F., Kubrick's 2001: A Triple Allegory (Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 2000)

Some secondary reading on the epic

Bates, Catherine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Beissinger, Margaret, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford (eds.) Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)

Clarke, M. J., B. G. F. Currie, and R. O. A. M. Lyne (eds.), Epic Interactions: Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the Epic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Danow, David K., Transformation as the Principle of Literary Creation from the Homeric Epic to the Joycean Novel (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004)

Elley, Derek, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984)

Foley, John Miles (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

Hardie, Philip, The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Hainsworth, J. B., The Idea of Epic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

Hurst, Isobel, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)

King, Katherine Callen, Ancient Epic (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009)

Konstan, David and Kurt A. Raaflaub, eds., Epic and History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

Merchant, Paul: The Epic (London: Methuen, 1971)

Miller, Dean A., The Epic Hero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)

Johns-Putta, Adeline, The History of the Epic (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Newman, John Kevin, The Classical Epic Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)

Quint, David, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Roisman, Hanna M., and Joseph Roisman (eds.), Essays on Homeric Epic (Waterville, ME: Colby College, 2002)

Toohey, Peter, Reading Epic: An Introduction to the Ancient Narratives (London : Routledge, 1992)

Tucker, Herbert F., Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Winnifrith, Tom, Penelope Murray and K.W. Gransden, eds., Aspects of the Epic (London: Macmillan, 1983)

Some secondary reading on Ulysses

Guidebooks: (These classic ‘guidebooks’ can supplement the annotations in your edition of Ulysses.) 

Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) Weldon Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968) Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book (London: Routledge, 1996) 

Some suggested criticism on Ulysses 

(This is a small selection of Joycean criticism, from useful collections of essays (Attridge, Latham, Hart and Hayman), to critics who read language and narrative very closely (Kenner, Senn), to works on the Homeric in Ulysses (Flack, Kenner, Seidel), to a few examples of studies which read Joyce through theoretical, historical, comparative, and postcolonial approaches.)

Derek Attridge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) — ed., James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Scarlett Baron, ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Frank Budgen, James Joyce and The Making of ‘Ulysses’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961) Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Leah Culligan Flack, Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Clive Hart and David Hayman, eds., James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: Critical Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978) — ‘Ulysses’ (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980) Sean Latham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to ‘Ulysses’ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote, eds., Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013) Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Michael Seidel, Epic Geography: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Princeton and Guilford: Princeton University Press, 1976) Fritz Senn, Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce, ed. Christine O’Neill (Dublin: Lilliput, 1995) — Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) 

Online searchable concordance of Ulysses (e.g. if you can’t remember where the renowned Irish hero ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’ is mentioned, type it into a ‘string search’ and untick ‘whole word’) http://joyceconcordance.andreamoro.net/

Ulysses Synopsis

Ulysses: A Synopsis “Telemachia” 1 - “Telemachus” (Oxford World’s Classics, ed. J. Johnson, pp. 3-23 / Penguin, ed. D. Kiberd, pp. 1-28)- The chapter opens with Buck Mulligan celebrating a parodic mass in which Stephen Dedalus becomes an acolyte in spite of himself. Stephen is a melancholy artist obsessed with guilt since the death of his mother; his taciturn nature is contrasted with Mulligan’s clownish joviality. The Englishman Haines, their guest in the Martello Tower, combines seriousness with an enthusiasm for Gaelic culture; the three characters illustrate three possible positions in relation to Ireland, which is symbolised by the old peasant woman who brings in the milk: the dispossessed Son (Stephen), the treacherous usurper (Mulligan); the representant of English imperialism (Haines) who - through his dream of the panther, traditionally a symbol of Christ - is also associated by Stephen with the imperialism of the Roman Catholic Church. Stephen chooses errancy and exile: he gives over his key and will not come back. 2- “Nestor” (OWC 24-36 / Penguin 28-45)- Stephen teaches history and English Literature to a class of well-off schoolchildren who are disconcerted by his caustic humour and riddles. He confronts Mr Deasy (Nestor in Homer’s Odyssey) on Irish history and economics. The old headmaster cherishes his inaccurate reminiscences and promotes thrift, whereas Stephen squanders away the little money he has. Stephen views history as a nightmare. Despite the antagonism, Stephen agrees to help Mr Deasy is his fight against the foot and mouth disease which affects Irish cattle by helping him to publish a letter in the press. 3 - “Proteus” (37-50/45-64)- Stephen’s philosophical and aesthetic meditations lead him to question the reality of the outside world. Through a complex philosophical argument which hesitates between Aristotle and Berkeley, he redefines for himself the nature of visual and auditory perception. His literary recollections blend with the painful evocation of his past, especially the unsuccessful exile in Paris from which a telegram announcing his mother’s death recalled him. The sterility of Stephen’s “creations” in this chapter (which include urinating and depositing a snot on a ledge of rock [cf. Bloom’s own excremental “creation” in “Calypso”]) is pitted against the remarkable metamorphic poetic prose of the narrative and of Stephen’s stream of consciousness. Odyssey 4 - “Calypso” (53-67/64-85)- Leopold Bloom, who will increasingly become the major protagonist, is introduced in his home at 7 Eccles Street and is first seen preparing breakfast for himself and his wife Molly, who is still in bed. He goes out in search of a pork kidney at a Jewish butcher’s, where he picks up a leaflet advertising plantations in Palestine (inaugurating the theme of the lost, promised land, and of the “recall”). He brings Molly her mail, which includes a letter from Boylan, her future lover later in the day, announcing his visit. He explains to Molly the meaning of metempsychosis; the chapter ends with his defecation in the outhouse, mingled with his remarks on cheap literature. 5 - “The Lotus Eaters”(68-83/85-107) - Bloom has left his house for what will become the epic wanderings of an untypical literary hero, on an ordinary Dublin day - 16 June 1904. He first goes to fetch the reply, sent post restante, from his unknown penfriend Martha Clifford, to whom he sends amorous letters signed “Henry Flower”. He runs into several acquaintances on the way, unwittingly “throws away” a tip for the horse races (the source of a later misunderstanding), and eventually goes to the public baths. Throughout the chapter, drugs of all kinds (perfumes, tobacco, medicine, eroticism, religion, etc.) express a voluptuous narcissistic abandonment to the world of the senses. 6 - “Hades” (84-111/107-147)- Bloom goes to Paddy Dignam’s funeral together with Simon Dedalus (Stephen’s father) and other characters already seen in Dubliners. The conversation soon takes on a malevolent anti-Semitic tone which puts Bloom ill at ease. He thinks of death, remembering both his father’s suicide and the death of his son when he was only eleven days old. Bloom catches his first sign of Stephen (who does not see him). 7 - “Aeolus” (112-143/147-189)- Broken down into a series of newspaper articles complete with headings, this episode brings together, in different scenes and locations of the newspaper office, Bloom, Stephen, various “windbags” including Myles Crawford, the king of windy and hollow journalistic rhetoric. The orators outdo one another in eloquence and the parable of the captive Jews provides the Irish with a mythical model. Stephen narrates a story illustrative of the paralysis of his fellow Dubliners which nobody pays attention to, while Bloom the ad canvasser gets severely ticked off by Myles Crawford. 8 - “Lestrygonians” (144-175/190-234)- The “food chapter”: Bloom is obsessed with food (it is between 1pm and 2pm) and alimentary thoughts, and tastes and smells of all kinds percolate through into the language and style of the episode (the rhythm of the chapter is dictated by the “peristaltic” [digestive] movement of the organism). Put off by the monstrous devouring mouths in the restaurant and obsessed by the impending encounter between Molly and Boylan, he finally orders a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy wine at Davy Byrne’s pub. 9 - “Scylla and Charybdis” (176-209/235-280)- In the National Library, Stephen spins out his Aristotelian theory of artistic creation which boils down to a sublimated autobiography; his paradoxes on Shakespeare’s life and works fail to convince his Platonist audience. In the complex reasoning of the young artist, Shakespeare becomes like a god who begets himself through his works. Bloom puts in an appearance; Mulligan meets up with Stephen and offers a more burlesque conclusion to the philological / theological debate. 10 - “Wandering Rocks” (210-244/280-328)- This chapter is a pause in the narrative of Stephen’s and Bloom’s day, and it has no precise correspondence in Homer’s Odyssey. This central and “pedestrian” chapter is made up of 19 episodes which offer vignettes and snapshots of the various characters and cross-sections of the Irish capital and society, including Church (Father Conmee) and State (the Viceroy’s cavalcade); the chapter breaks down the so far focalised point of view. Stephen and Bloom appear only briefly and are not mentioned among the witnesses of the Viceroy’s cavalcade through the city. 11 - “Sirens” (245-279/328-376)- The language of this chapter aspires to the condition of music and forges linguistic equivalents to trills, staccatos, counterpoints, etc. The venue is the Ormond Bar, run by two flashy barmaids or “sirens”; while the tenors are busy competing against each other in a virile singing contest, Bloom listens and replies to Martha. Having eluded the seductive snares of music, he exits, leaving behind an ironic fart. 12 - “Cyclops” (280-330/376-449)- A satire against the bellicose patriotism and anti-Semitism of the Citizen, the “Cyclops” who eventually attacks Bloom physically, the chapter oscillates between the Citizen’s rhetorical bombast and sarcastic deflations which leave unscathed neither the British Empire nor Irish nationalism, while the anonymous narrator - a sardonic barfly and debt collector - offers a brilliant instance of Dubliners’ garrulity. The narrative is periodically interrupted by parodic asides in other voices and styles. Bloom the wandering Jew, who had come to Barney Kiernan’s pub to arrange to offer some money to Paddy Dignam’s widow, finds himself involved in an argument about nationalism and attempts to expound his conception of humanity, love and homeland. At the end, his escape from the Citizen’s assault is turned into a grandiloquent apotheosis. 13 - “Nausicaa” (331-365/449-499)- Bloom rests on the Sandymount rocks (Stephen in “Proteus” had also walked along Sandymount beach) and gazes at young girls in their bloom. One of them, Gerty MacDowell, teases him into an erection by an increasingly daring exhibitionistic pose; the distant eroticism ends with Bloom’s masturbation, climaxing with fireworks. The narrating voice is that of a writer of the romantic pulp fiction then fed to women - the kind of books read by Gerty, who accordingly sees in Bloom a mysterious “dark stranger”. When the point of view shifts to Bloom, we see Gerty depart limping; Bloom dozes off in postmasturbatory gratitude. The accelerated crescendo of the first “tumescent” part is followed by the exhausted sobriety of the second, “detumescent” half. 14 - “Oxen of the Sun” (366-407/499-561)- Bloom’s and Stephen’s paths cross once more in the lying-in hospital, amidst roistering medics. The chapter takes us through a roughly chronologised pastiche of the different styles of the English language until the turn of the century, deceptively mimicking the evolution of the foetus until its birth. The painful delivery of Mina Purefoy takes on a universal value and, although the talk ominously focuses on sterility and contraception, a thunderclap and a rain shower at the moment of birth symbolise the triumph of fertility. 15 - “Circe” (408-565/561-703)- Blooms monitors from a distance Stephen’s drunken escapade to the red-light district, and follows him into the hallucinatory atmosphere of Bella Cohen’s brothel (Circe’s den in the Homeric parallel). The characters experience metamorphoses in a wild oneiric dramatisation of their fantasies, obsessions and senses of guilt. Stephen gets involved in a broil with two English soldiers and is knocked out cold; Bloom rescues him and transforms him into the ambiguous vision of his dead son Rudy. “Nostos” [=homecoming] 16 - “Eumaeus” (569-618/704-766)- Bloom leads Stephen to the cabman’s shelter, and the shared physical exhaustion (it is past midnight) and the unreliable narrator turn the chapter into an amusing, if often tedious, collection of deliberately jaded linguistic stereotypes, full of misunderstandings and approximations. 17 - “Ithaca” (619-689/766-871)- This impersonal catechism narrates the last actions of the novel: Bloom takes Stephen to 7 Eccles Street and offers him hot chocolate, they exchange views of Irish and Jewish culture, Stephen refuses Bloom’s offer of a bed for the night, they urinate together under the stars, and Stephen finally departs into the night. Bloom, back in the house, finds traces of Molly’s visitor earlier in the day, goes to bed, where he finds other traces of the visitor’s earlier presence, gives Molly an expurgated account of his day, and finally falls asleep, his head to her feet. The dialogic play between questions and answers universalises all the themes, sorts out human knowledge into vast catalogues, and finally transform the couple in bed into astral bodies. 18 - “Penelope” (690-732/871-933)- Molly’s thoughts flow freely along eight unpunctuated, meandering sentences. She begins with a reaction to Bloom’s request that she make breakfast in the morning, continuous with a celebration of her afternoon with Boylan, proceeds to review her marriage, her girlhood on Gibraltar, her infatuations and dreams of future romances, and finally returns to Bloom, seemingly reinstated into her imaginary life; this is one of the meanings of her numerous final “yesses”, also an affirmation of life itself.

Additional suggestions on Joyce's Ulysses/ Odysseus

Some of the texts through which Joyce reads and receives the figure of Odysseus/ Ulysses

Bérard, Victor, Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée [originally published in 1902-03, there are no English translations that I know of; but you can find a lot about it, and Joyce's use of it in the book by Seidel, listed below; Bérard held the view that the Odyssey was "written" by a Greek poet, but recorded the travels of Phoenician sailors - the Phoenicians were a semitic people, which is relevant when you think that Leopold Bloom (Joyce's Ulysses figure) is a Jew]

Butler, Samuel, The Authoress of the Odyssey: Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands [originally published in 1897; Butler also transalted the Iliad and the Odyssey. There are various editions, including a cheap Kindle version; and it is in the library. Butler suggests that the Odyssey takes place in the island of Sicily, around the port city of Trapani, and that it is narrated by princess Nausicaa. The relevance to Joyce's book, which set on an island in and around the port city of Dublin, and whose final words are narrated by a woman, is evident.]

Lamb, Charles, The Adventures of Ulysses [originally published in 1808, there are various editions in print, and a free Kindle version. The book really is about the adventures and was meant as a book for boys, not as a full tranlation or account of the entire Odyssey. Joyce read this as child and wrote an essay at school about it!]

See also:

Seidel, Michael, Epic Geography: James Joyce's Ulysses (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976) [not a book consulted by Joyce - of course! - but it looks at parallels between the geography of the Odyssey and of Ulysses and the movements of the characters, and relies extensively on Bérard's Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée]

[starkey]

Tagged by @goingsparebutwithprecision! Thank you!! :D

Rules: create your own post, copy and paste the questions, and tag however many people you want to get to know better

Relationship status: Battling the elements, international border closures, malevolent gods, and a world-stopping plague for the insane privilege of getting to cuddle @fivie 🥰🥰🥰 (and feeling super lucky about it ❤️)

Favorite colour: Black (+/- gold/silver accents)

Lipstick or chapstick: Lipbalm for sure

Last song I listened to:  So Down - Mother Mother

Last movie I watched: uhmmmm fuck I have no idea, it’s been months. Might be Ferris Bueller's Day Off? I can’t watch movies without supervision to ensure I don’t get distracted and it’s been a while since I’ve had supervision :’)

Three ships: I’ve not been in fandom much recently but historically... Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Mis), Eames/Arthur (Inception) and Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb (Pacific Rim) were probably my all time favs. Annoying Little Shit(TM) is definitely a running theme.

Book I’m currently reading: (1) Ulysses by James Joyce (2) The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires (3) A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (4) A Room Of Ones Own by Virginia Woolf (5) A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and (6) Salt Water by Andrew Motion

I’m gonna actually follow the ‘tag someone you wanna know better’ rule and torment some other people for a change! @laughingmistress @theblazeofmemory @mona-liar @apocalyps-o @lesamis - tag you’re it!

(plus @fivie 😘 okay i broke the rule a lil bit)

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Ours is an age of shallow thinking. What Harry Blamires referred to as “The Christian Mind” is virtually lost to us in the West. John MacArthur writes: “I am convinced that much of the scandal in media religion is an inevitable result of shallow theology. When people place emotion and experience ahead of biblical truth, they are destined to fail.

Dr. John Armstrong

[mt-seeker-of-rain]

Thinking Christians

“Wherever men think and talk, the banner will have to be raised. Not, of course, for the purpose of pursuing a ceaseless propaganda campaign, but for the purpose of pursuing clarity and integrity. Not that we should convert, but that we should be understood. Not that the Christian mind should become the immediate and overwhelming vehicle of all truth to all men, but that the Christian mind should be recognized for what it is: something different, something distinctive, something with depth, hardness, solidity; a pleasure to fight with and a joy to be beaten by.” ~ Harry Blamires

[americanelitist]

The Church's present neglect of the intellectual element in modern life may prove to be a very costly one.

Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind (1963)

[midshipmank]

So I just checked the reading list for my Irish literature class and it includes Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses by James Joyce, as well as The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires. That is quite a lot of reading for me to skip.

[sportscri]

England 43-29 USA: Joe Cokanasiga double helps Eddie Jones' team beat USA

England 43-29 USA: Joe Cokanasiga double helps Eddie Jones’ team beat USA

Winger Cokanasiga crossed twice, with Sam Underhill, Ollie Lawrence, Jamie Blamire, Marcus Smith – who kicked 4 conversions – Harry Randall additionally scoring; USA hit again with 4 tries as effectively at Twickenham Final Up to date: 04/07/21 4:08pm Joe Cokanasiga runs in to attain England’s fourth attempt in opposition to the USA Two tries from Joe Cokanasiga helped set an…

[craigtowens]

To think secularly is to think within a frame of reference bounded by the limits of our life on earth: it is to keep one’s calculations within this-worldly criteria. To think christianly is to accept all things with the mind as related, directly or indirectly, to man’s eternal destiny as the redeemed and chosen child of God…. There is nothing in our experience, however trivial, worldly, or even evil, which cannot be thought about christianly.

Harry Blamires

[pastorhogg]

Christians Should Think

In the early 1960s, John Stott was asked by James Houston to speak at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. Stott returned to Regent on a number of occasions and was impressed by its attempts to develop a distinctive Christian approach to a range of secular issues and to train laypeople.1 He was also influenced by Harry Blamires, an Anglican theologian and literary critic who had been mentored by…

[cassiecantyousee]

I Don’t Believe in Science

(the first in a series on religion and science because as advertised that is my jam)

Let's just jump right in, shall we?

There seems to be this idea in American Christianity that science is The Enemy and out to destroy everything good and holy in the world. I’ve even seen it come up in puppet form in a Sunday school video! And honestly? What. The. Heck. Christians should support science! Shoot, Christians should LOVE science, so let’s start getting some major misconceptions out of the way.

I often hear things from the Christian community about "not serving two masters" when discussing science. A good verse for sure, but it is not super relevant in this situation. I even hear things like "I worship God, scientists worship Darwin!" That may seem like it takes it to the extreme, but honestly, that’s what a lot of the Christian opposition to science boils down to. There's a perception that Science (with a capital S) and Christianity are two competing belief systems, with completely different worldviews that cannot exist together.

THIS. IS NOT. THE CASE.

First of all, only Christianity is a religion/belief system. Science is a tool. So by definition they are NOT inherently mutually exclusive. I see a lot of stuff about "believing" or "not believing" in science, and that makes no sense. I don't believe in science. I believe in objective reality and facts, and I use science to find those things. So you can use the tool of science in all sorts of situations, even studying the Bible (cue elderly church ladies clutching their pearls)! There is no “Science with a capital S” that is some sort of central creed for all scientists. The Oxford Dictionary defines the scientific method as “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” Scientists are just investigating things in as rational a way as possible, and there is nothing intrinsically un-Christian about that.

The Bible is also all about objective reality and critical thinking. I'm still trying to keep this from becoming too much of a theology blog, but please know that God is VERY MUCH ABOUT logic and evidence and thinking things through. Faith and belief are not blind or illogical, and are full of common sense (the original Miracle on 34th Street LIED, although it is otherwise an excellent movie). Jesus tells his disciples to touch his hands and side for evidence after the resurrection. Whenever God asks his followers to trust in a new promise, he reminds them of all the other promises he’s already kept. (Long aside: I tried to find a quick easy link laying all of this out to share with you, but after about two hours of wading through internet theology I had turned up nothing, which is telling in and of itself. Literally just super dense apologetics or angsty teen blogs. So I’m going to tell you to read The Death of Truth by Dennis McCallum et al., everything by Harry Blamires and C.S. Lewis, and also to email my dad, who will talk about this for days. *Digory Kirke voice* “What do they teach them in these schools!”) Anyway, moving on.

So there’s no reason science and Christianity can’t get along. In fact, I would argue that they should help each other out.

If you've been in any sort of Christian community in the last few decades, you've probably heard about relativism. It's been the boogeyman of Christianity for a while now. And if you're a person alive in America, you probably also have been hearing a lot about relativism in the form of "fake news" and "alternative facts." Scientists especially have been very stressed about this! With good reason! It's a horrifying problem! The scientific community and the Christian community are, at their core, worried about the same thing: they’re worried that the idea of truth doesn’t mean anything anymore. And science is so ready to help with this! Remember the scientific method? It’s all about proving (or failing to disprove) things.

I could keep rambling about this forever, but I guess basically what I'm saying here is that Christianity and science should STOP. FIGHTING. You’re worried about the same stuff! Science isn't an alternate worldview here to steal your religion. You're not supposed to BELIEVE in science, you're supposed to USE it. So please, go out and do so.

[cultml]

It is tempting to see the veritable work of the Devil himself in getting Christians to point fingers at others because of varying political allegiances, a deception cited by the British evangelical writer Harry Blamires in his book The Christian Mind and by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters.  Anything to get Christians off the beam of the faith's unique power to address the fundamental fact of human existence — death, judgment, destiny — will do, even if it means positing the tacit approval of law-breaking deceptions in the nation's law enforcement and intelligence operations; egregious lies offered up via media minions of "the Resistance"; or the known, serial moral and ethical failings of the candidate who, against all expectations, managed to lose the election to Mr. Trump in the first place.

At this point I'll invoke a principle of understanding these matters that remains pretty much out of view, but it is something especially pertinent to Christian involvement, and that is the remarkable and luminous imagery set forth by Jesus himself: "why are you so concerned with the speck in your brother's eye when you have a log hanging out of your own?" (Matthew 7:3).  This statement is the classic indictment of the practice of the double standard and the psychological projection of one's own failings onto others and the perception of theirs.  It applies in the arena here considered in spades.

[urbanchristiannews]

C.S. Lewis Protégé Harry Blamires, Who Rediscovered ‘The Christian Mind’, Dead at 101

Image processed by CodeCarvings Piczard ### FREE Community Edition ### on 2017-12-08 16:54:32Z | http://piczard.com | http://codecarvings.com British theologian and literary scholar Harry Blamires, who taught the church to think like Christians in the face of a secularizing culture, died last month at age 101. (more…)

[simondcox87]

Died: Harry Blamires, The C. S. Lewis Protégé Who Rediscovered ‘The Christian Mind’

Influential theologian and author lived to be 101, and to see his popular book in print for over half his life.

British theologian and literary scholar Harry Blamires, who taught the church to think like Christians in the face of secularizing culture, died last month at age 101.

Blamires’s writing career was shaped by C. S. Lewis, who grew to become a friend and mentor after he studied under the acclaimed apologist at Oxford University.

His most famous work, The Christian Mind, pushed readers to extend the Christian worldview into all areas of life, particularly intellectual pursuits. The book, published in 1963 and still in print today, called out “the mental secularization of Christians” and the significance of developing Christian thought as it relates to objective truth.

“The bland assumption that the Church's life will continue to be fruitful so long as we go on praying and cultivating our souls, irrespective of whether we trouble to think and talk Christianly, and therefore theologically, about anything we or others may do or say, may turn out to have dire results,” Blamires warned.

“With The Christian Mind, Harry began a polemic that he kept going for 40 years,” wrote Brian Davis, a former student of Blamires’s, in a Church Times tribute. “His Christian apologetic sold well in the United States, where he was frequently invited to give lecture tours. Like Lewis, he was particularly popular with evangelicals, without being one himself.”

Author of over a dozen books, Blamries is remembered both for his writing on the church and his work in literature. An Anglican, he spent most of his career at King’s Alfred College, where he served as head of the English department and wrote about greats like James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot.

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