Impeded Stream

The Master.

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:24:35 -0400

The worldly doctrine of today

Sat, 19 May 2012 09:44:03 -0400

The world says: “You have needs - satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, “All southern literature can be summed up in..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:23:42 -0400

“My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, “All southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’””

- Pat Conroy, from a speech delivered at the annual American Booksellers Association convention in 1985.

It is, of course, untrue - but I’ve been chuckling over it for the last ten minutes.

"Michael Polanyi says that we must relate to information as clues on which we rely subsidiarily,..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:30:00 -0400

“

Michael Polanyi says that we must relate to information as clues on which we rely subsidiarily, attending from them to invite the insight of profounder pattern. The act of coming to know—the epistemic act—is not the passive transferral of explicit information from one mind to another. It is not so much information as it is transformation, the gracious inbreaking a profounder pattern of meaning and reality. The moment of insight transforms whatever we were relying on, curiously relativizing it even as it renders it preciously meaningful. It binds it and us dynamically together in this wondrous, greater real.

Our effort to indwell clues we have yet to understand as such evokes reality rather than presuming to exhaust it. Being breaks in in its telltale intimately present mystery and apprehends us. Even the words we were saying, along with our own selves, get graciously, wonderfully, altered in the encounter. “OHHHH…” we say, as reality invades and recenters us: “I get it.” Epiphany. And we can sense that we have been visited by God.

”

- Esther L. Meek, “It’s a Wonder-Full Life” (2012 Commencement Address, Providence Christian College, Pasadena, CA)

This is a beautiful explanation. I’ve been wanting to read Dr. Meek’s new book Loving to Know, but can’t afford it right now. Looking forward to a few weeks when I’ll have a well-stocked philosophy and theology library at my disposal again.

Coming this August.

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:40:48 -0400

Coming this August.

Photo

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:17:57 -0400

WHEN I CATCH A COPY ERROR IN THE NEW YORKER

Fri, 11 May 2012 21:16:16 -0400

editorrealtalk:

Just a few minutes of pure enjoyment from a Woody Allen film I...

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:32:00 -0400

Just a few minutes of pure enjoyment from a Woody Allen film I loved entirely.

"[O]nce one has learnt, like modern man, to become greatly preoccupied with one’s own feelings,..."

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:44:50 -0400

“[O]nce one has learnt, like modern man, to become greatly preoccupied with one’s own feelings, even despair over their unreality will not easily open one’s eyes; after all, such despair is also a feeling and quite interesting.”

- Martin Buber, I and Thou (p. 94)

Another notable place to check off my bucket list.

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:41:49 -0400

Another notable place to check off my bucket list.

While in Paris, I finally got to visit Père Lachaise Cemetery,...

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:39:24 -0400

While in Paris, I finally got to visit Père Lachaise Cemetery, the largest burial ground in the city and a place I’ve been wanting to visit ever since 2007 when I saw Heddy Honigmann’s documentary Forever, a masterpiece that changed my life. This is a photo I took while there.

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on..."

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:10:08 -0400

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

- Carl Sagan, Cosmos (via wilfordlauren)

The best sentence I’ve read all week … and...

Thu, 03 May 2012 15:23:04 -0400

The best sentence I’ve read all week … and it’s not even the whole thing!

justapinchofsouth: Scones is just biscuits with a fancy...

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:25:23 -0400

justapinchofsouth:

Scones is just biscuits with a fancy accent.

This is wonderful news and hopefully a prelude to a Criterion...

Wed, 02 May 2012 18:02:17 -0400

This is wonderful news and hopefully a prelude to a Criterion run of the Dardenne canon.

criterioncorner:

THE DARDENNE BROS. ARE COMING TO THE CRITERION COLLECTION!

been waiting way too long for this one.

the top image is a tease that Criterion posted on their Facebook page this afternoon. the bottom image is a full frame from the Dardenne brothers’ breakthrough film, ROSETTA (1999). Criterion will release it on DVD and Blu-ray this August.

while it may not have been the Dardenne film that i would have chosen (THE SON, duh), it’s still a remarkable bit of storytelling that was deserving of its Palme D’Or, and it allows one of the most accomplished filmmaking duos in the cinema’s history to take their rightful place alongside the other legendary auteurs whose work has been released under the Criterion banner. expect an official announcement on May 15.

This translation is marvelous. I have a feeling that I’ve...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:00:11 -0400

This translation is marvelous. I have a feeling that I’ve discovered a whole new world with Alter.

"[T]ruth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still..."

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:25:00 -0400

“[T]ruth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger.”

- Wendell Berry, “It All Turns on Affection” (2012 NEH Jefferson Lecture)

Wendell Berry, American Hero

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:34:00 -0400

Wendell Berry, American Hero:

Were I not in New England this week, I would have been at The Kennedy Center last night seeing Wendell Berry receive this award. In addition to this affectionate Opinionator piece by Mark Bittman, the presentation and Wendell Berry’s lecture - “It All Turns on Affection - can be found at the National Endowment for the Humanities website.

The most miserable, hilarious movie trailer I’ve seen in...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:34:55 -0400

The most miserable, hilarious movie trailer I’ve seen in recent memory.

"[The United States of America] in its early period was largely populated by religious people..."

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:31:01 -0400

“[The United States of America] in its early period was largely populated by religious people escaping religious oppression at the hands of state churches, whether French Huguenots, Scots Presbyterians, English Congregationalists, or English Catholics. Freedom of [religion] was freedom from [religion]—the coercions that did and do arise when there is no wall of separation between church and state. Historically, the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly were deeply implicated in religious freedom, all of them being violently curtailed on religious grounds through most of Western history. Since my own religious heroes tended to die gruesomely under these regimes, I have no nostalgia for the world before secularism, nor would many of these ‘Christian nation’ exponents, if they looked a little way into the history of their own traditions.”

- Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (p. 135 – “Wondrous Love”)