The Eagle & Child

In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?” It’s a good question….Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened?…”God [...]

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It’s decision time again, or nearing it. One of the pleasures of school life is selecting next year’s classes and perusing their syllabi. It’s also a pain trying to make the classes I want to take work with the classes I need to take as part of the program. Decision A — Last fall I [...]

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I received in the mail today a book entitled The Culture of Fear.  Its subtitle is, “Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things,” and its sub-subtitle (following the colon after the subtitle), “Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plan Crashes, Road Rage, & So Much More”.  A veritable mouthful. The book has [...]

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During our holiday I read Alistair MacLeod’s collected short stories, Island. It’s the kind of book that reminds me what good fiction is and why I love a good story.  The stories are mostly about Cape Breton Island fishermen, farmers and coal miners, but MacLeod somehow manages to make such a localized context accessible and moving [...]

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Got home late last night from our tour of southwestern Canada–all the way to Tofino, which is nearly as far west as a person can go in Canada.  We drove just a hair under 5,535 kilometres over our 3 weeks on the road. I’ve been offline for most of the time away, which I’ve enjoyed. [...]

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Well, this is pathetic, isn’t it?  This blog is going to pot.  Completely. I realized today that one of the reasons I’ve been blogging less lately is because I’ve been preaching more (approximately twice each month for the last couple of months).  Most of my writing energy and time has been directed at preparing and [...]

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1. …subtly: [Kohler said] “One square yard of drag will slow a falling body almost twenty percent.” Langdon nodded blankly. He never suspected that later that night, in a country hundreds of miles away, the information would save his life. (Dan Brown, Angels & Demons, p. 29) I actually laughed out loud after that paragraph.  [...]

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(Link) I usually order books from Amazon.ca.  I’m not sure why.  I should really order from Chapters.ca as a general rule, since they’re a Canadian retailer with a CEO that cares about reading.  Randall has told me several times that Chapters.ca is sometimes cheaper than Amazon.ca.  I recently placed an order at Chapters.ca and he [...]

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