Links for the week:
1. (Classic) Catholic Social Theory Reading List
2. The Calvinist – A poem by John Piper
4. Living Out – Christian resources for same-sex attraction
5. A Unique Way to Memorize Scripture
6. Janet Mefferd’s Driscoll Evidence
7. The Man who Carries a 25kg Cross Everywhere
8. Social Description in Early Christianity
9. Debatable: Is Christian Hip-Hop Ungodly?
10. How Anthropomorphic is Your God?
11. Theistic Personalism vs. Classical Theism, Revisited
12. Relations, Uncreated and Created
13. Can You Give Without God? Yes, But Religion Makes a Difference
14. A “Greatest Common Denominator” Approach to the Bible
15. Dallas Willard on the Nature of Feelings
16. Catholic Sexual Ethics: An Unknown Treasure
17. Are PhD Programs in Biblical Studies Ethical?
20. “Jesus’ Wife” Fragment: A Continuing Puzzle
21. Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife?
22. Alas, and Did My Saviour’s Death Symbolize Something Secular?
23. The Intellectual Civil War Within Evangelicalism: An Interview With Molly Worthen
25. Who Really Invented the Clerical Collar?
26. New Wine and New Wineskins
27. More Arguments that are Less than Meets the Eye
28. The Courage to be Ignorant
29. Why It’s Time to Lay the Selfish Gene to Rest
30. James Howells searches for hard drive with £4m-worth of bitcoins stored on it
31. ‘Memories’ Pass Between Generations
32. How Men’s Brains are Wired Differently than Women’s
33. The Most Neurosexist Study of the Year?
34. Men and Women Have Distinct Personalities
37. Reverse-Engineering a Genius (Has a Vermeer Mystery Been Solved?)
38. Plain Talk – A great Canadian legal tale
39. The Problem With Gender Quotas
41. The Quantum Algorithm that Could Break the Internet
42. Headlines From a Mathematically Literate World
43. Algorithmic Governance and the Ghost in the Machine
45. After Antibiotics, the Faeces Pill Remains
46. How to Be a Feminist According to Stock Photography
47. Humanities Studies Under Strain Around the Globe
48. Brief Glimpses of Everyday Life in North Korea
49. Can Silicon Valley Make Fake Meat and Eggs That Don’t Suck?
51. 7 Things You Had No Idea the World is Running Out Of
52. Whatever Happened to Male Friendship?
53. Joe Jonas: My Life as a Jonas Brother
54. Amazon Prime Air: Drone-Based 30 Minute Delivery
55. A Mechanic Invents a Childbirth Device
56. The Most Commonly Awarded Grade at Harvard is an A
57. Man Found Alive After 60 Hours in a Sunken Ship
58. If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction Stories
59. 21 Science Fictions that Became Science Facts in 2013
60. Christianity and the University Experience: Understanding Student Faith
61. 100 Years of Breed “Improvement”
62. The World’s Most Exquisite Libraries
64. A Horrid Maritime Coincidence
65. ‘Jumbled Up’ Tongue Twister is Named Most Difficult
66. There’s a £60m Bitcoin heist going down right now, and you can watch in real-time
67. You Can Now Visit Middle Earth on Google Maps
68. Exploded Views of Classic Sports Cars
70. A Cat’s Guide to Taking Care of Your Human
71. The World Outside My Window: ISS Timelapse (more here)
Pictures from the last week:
Alastair's Adversaria 
Regarding theological personalism:
Ever since I translated some (a very little bit) of Aquinas’ commentary on Dennis about 6 years ago, I’ve been a classical theist. (Working through what troubled me about openness theology also led to this.) I think the question about whether God is he/she or it misses the point of the Classical Theists. The claim isn’t that God is “it”, but that God transcends even “personhood”. He is not “it” any more than He is “He”–indeed, inasmuch as “it” represents something bounded by not being a person, God is “He” not “it”. However, He is *also* not bound by “He”. He is in-finite, not in our modern sense of being “extremely big” but in the etymological meaning of the term: without bound, of any kind.
(I think Mere Christianity mentions something along these lines–when we deny God is a person, we do not intend to say that God is less than person, but that He is *more* than person–though He’s also “more” than “more”–he’s beyond personality, or as Denis would have said, hyperperson.)
As far as I can tell, this is simply the doctrine that He “maker of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible”. Even “person” is something created by God. As a result, He is beyond all affirmation *and negation* (as Palamas says), for any affirmation describes God in terms of created things (which are necessarily, not Him) and any negation denies created things to Him, thus acting as if He is less for not having the thing denied.
That said, God is definitely a “he”. And He in fact saved us by his outstretched arm. And the blood that flowed from it. However, this is something He took up, not something He is in Himself.
Also, if the point is merely linguistic, there may be something to it. Divine Names are not an irrelevant consideration, and just because after everything that can be said of God through creaturely analogy has been said, what God is remains hidden and unknown, a point which begins the book, does not keep Denis from writing the rest of the book.
I recently read Stephen Holmes’ The Quest For The Trinity. It has some good stuff on this.
Reading this week was mostly Shakespeare and finishing off Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It is a great novel (not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky great, but still great), and I’m not prone to throwing around compliments about literary works. She has a lot to say on religious experience in particular. Like with most liberals, the experience tends to be a bit vague, but what she says is still well worth attending to. Highly recommended, and especially relevant those studying theology.
(I haven’t been that impressed with Robinson the essayist and lecturer, but the novel seems to bring out the best in her.)
Gilead is a superb book. I really want to revisit it at some point.
RE: Theistic personalism vs. classical theism
There is a very real danger of reducing God to creaturely categories, but, frankly, I’ve read too many classical theist descriptions of God that leave me completely cold, if not outright repulsed. There are dangers on both sides.
Most definitely. Admittedly, that is what should be expected in those cases where reflection upon the being of God proceeds with limited reference to the one in whom he has made himself known.
Yes. I’ve heard enough formulations of who God is that leave me with *only* philosophy, and not God Himself.
It would be more accurate (at least in my opinion) to say that God stooped down to, and took up personhood, than to say that God is a self. With the second, I have a very hard time not running into monothelitism (which though it sounds abstract, is just a confession that Jesus is not like us in all respects, apart from sin). And, I have trouble seeing God as anything but *super big*, which strikes me as a description of evil, not good.
Found this wonderful Lindsay Anderson documentary on Covent Garden:
http://vimeo.com/37249758
Thanks for the link; I’ll take a look.
I wanted to let you know that I appreciated the (dark) story on homeschooling. I’ve had a little discussion about that with others. There seem to be three rough categories of homeschooling families in the US. Those who think it’s the best educational option, those who have religious objection to public school practices, and those who neglect and/or abuse their children. One virtue that schools have is that they are a place where children can get away from truly terrible homes for a time, and a place where suspected abuse might get reported for intervention.
I’v tried to think about what sort of regulatory system would both allow for fairly wide freedom of home educational methods as well as providing enough oversight to detect serious abuse, but I’ve come up blank.
FWIW, our own efforts at home schooling our three boys have been going well, in my estimation.
In unrelated news, I started reading A Failure of Nerve today. Maybe we can discuss that a bit when I’m done with it.