How times have NOT changed!

I've been reading George MacDonald's The Princess and Curdie to my boys as a bedtime story whenever we are at St. John's House in Vancouver for the night, and tonight I ran across this passage. MacDonald's 19th Century fairy-tale description of a society in decay sounds eerily familiar...

At last river and road took a sudden turn, and lo! a great rock in the river, which dividing flowed around it, and on the top of the rock the city, with lofty walls and towers and battlements, and above the city the palace of the king, built like a strong castle. But the fortifications had long been neglected, for the whole country was now under one king, and all men said there was no more need for weapons or walls. No man pretended to love his neighbour, but every one said he knew that peace and quiet behaviour was the best thing for himself, and that, he said, was quite as useful, and a great deal more reasonable. The city was prosperous and rich, and if everybody was not comfortable, everybody else said he ought to be.

When Curdie got up opposite the mighty rock, which sparkled all over with crystals, he found a narrow bridge, defended by gates and portcullis and towers with loopholes. But the gates stood wide open, and were dropping from their great hinges; the portcullis was eaten away with rust, and clung to the grooves evidently immovable; while the loopholed towers had neither floor nor roof, and their tops were fast filling up their interiors. Curdie thought it a pity, if only for their old story, that they should be thus neglected. But everybody in the city regarded these signs of decay as the best proof of the prosperity of the place. Commerce and self-interest, they said, had got the better of violence, and the troubles of the past were whelmed in the riches that flowed in at their open gates.

Indeed, there was one sect of philosophers in it which taught that it would be better to forget all the past history of the city, were it not that its former imperfections taught its present inhabitants how superior they and their times were, and enabled them to glory over their ancestors. There were even certain quacks in the city who advertised pills for enabling people to think well of themselves, and some few bought of them, but most laughed, and said, with evident truth, that they did not require them. Indeed, the general theme of discourse when they met was, how much wiser they were than their fathers.

Good Quote

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Pope Benedict's Conclusion

I was pleased to learn recently that the whole of Pope Benedict's much-maligned address at his meeting with the representatives of science at the University of Regensburg is actually available online. I rather liked his conclusion:

"Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.

Evidently the Muslims, given their violent, knee-jerk reaction to the pope's address (or at least to the 30-second media sound-bite version), have elected to decline his invitation to be reasonable.

Web Design: Valuable Tutorial Sites

My (non-paying but, to me, fun) job as webmaster of various sites (like this one, archdiocese.ca, and artofseraphim.ehewlett.net) is forcing me to learn, among other things, about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I've been very impressed with some of the free resources out there, most notably, w3schools.com, which I've mentioned before, and, most recently, alsacreations.com, whose tutorial on the Use and position of CSS elements finally cleared up for me some of the bits of basic information that I was missing in understanding exactly how CSS works.

I've always been impressed by the "open source" idea, even before the concept of "open source" came around. Knowledge, it seems to me, is not something that should be hoarded, but, rather, is a gift to be shared. My thanks, and my (metaphorical) hat off, to all who do that.

Of course, that being said, there is one important caveat that should be noted in this context. Tennyson said it best, perhaps, in his prologue to In Memoriam:

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.

But certainly not first - my other favourite articulation of this idea being from the Teacher in Ecclesiastes:

Much study wearies the body, and of the making of books there is no end.

OK, I'm tired now. Goodnight!

Update: OK. One thing more (there always is, it seems). Just after signing off and articulating my intention to go to bed (yeah, right!) found another nice resource, HTMLdog.com. Perhaps I should add some of these to my (rarely updated) Links page, eh?

Quote of the Day (on The Da Vinci Code)

Ran across this great quote today from Fr. John Matusiak, responding on the OCA website to someone's question of whether or not they should read The Da Vinci Code:

Frankly, the book is interesting as a fictional novel -- in the same sense that the recent mini-series "Revelations" was interesting as a fictional novel -- but both are about as factual as a book or mini-series about 18th century chicken breeding on Mars. Sadly, there are people out there who are incapable of discerning between fact and fiction.

Lewis Quote: On Essays

Just ran across the most wonderful quote from C.S. Lewis' The Horse and His Boy as I was reading it to my children as part of our usual bedtime ritual (which, for the last couple of years has consisted of a Bible story, a story from the complete Thomas the Tank Engine collection, and a chapter from one of the Narnian Chronicles - we're on our second pass through both of the latter now). It struck me as particularly wonderful right now as I am writing my thesis and marking essays over Spring Break!

In Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to read the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.

Quote: On tradition and the historical-critical method

Been researching/rereading for my thesis and just had to post this quote from Andrew Louth's Return to Allegory about the role of tradition in the formation, interpretation, and continued formation of the Old Testament:

The tendency of the historical-critical method has been to concentrate on originality and regard what is not original as secondary: but if we see here a process of inspired utterance and reflection on - comment on - inspired utterance within the tradition, itself regarded as inspired, then we have a more complicated, but, I suggest, truer picture. The formation of the Hebrew Scriptures is an object lesson in the kind of complementarity of Scripture and tradition - or inspired utterance and tradition - that I have outlined. The art of understanding is more complicated, and richer, than an attempt to isolate the earliest fragments and to seek to understand them in a conjectured 'original' context: we hear the voice and the echoes and re-echoes, and it is as we hear that harmony that we come to understanding.

- Louth, Return to Allegory, p. 108.

Holy Saturday and Aslan

A blessed Holy Saturday to all of you! Just wanted to share with you something I noticed as we were reading the praises of Holy Saturday Matins this evening—reminded me a lot of C.S. Lewis:

O Saviour, as a lion
Thou sleepest in the flesh,
yet as a lion's cub Thou didst arise,
casting off the old age of the flesh!

May the Lion of Judah, Who endured fearful suffering, the life-creating Cross, and voluntary burial in the flesh on behalf of us men and for our salvation, Christ our true God, have mercy on us and save us, for He is good and loves mankind!