Thomas Merton

I've been slowly reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain and have been enjoying it quite a bit. I say slowly because I've mainly been reading it in 15-30 minute snippets during lunch breaks. But occasionally I'll be posting quotes that I find thought-provoking.

Speaking about his educational experience in Oakham, England, Merton writes of his school's chaplain, Buggy Jerwood, and his "sermon" on the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. In his exegesis of this famous Pauline opus, Buggy suggested that the word "love" (or "charity") simply referred to "all that we mean when we call a chap a 'gentleman.' " Merton recounts Buggy's suggestion that one ought to replace charity with the word "gentleman" in order to get at what St. Paul surely must have meant. For example: "A gentleman is patient, is kind; a gentleman envieth not, dealeth not perversely..."

But gentlemanliness, for Buggy, was much more (or much less?) than what St. Paul had in mind. And Buggy was simply using Paul's Hymn to Charity as a celebrity endorsement for stock English gentlemanliness: "good-sportsmanship, cricket, the decent thing, wearing the right kind of clothes, using the proper spoon, not being a cad or a bounder."

But this is the passage that struck me:

The boys listened tolerantly to these thoughts. But I think St. Peter and the twelve Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen. (p.82)

So often we're content with simply being gentlemen, good citizens or nice people. We forget that Christ beckons us beyond niceness and into a Newness that only He can offer.

Bach's Ghost in the Machine?

I've become an enormous fan of NPR (National Public Radio) as of late. An addict, almost. I've been preferring it to the music on my iPod, and have been consistently surprised by the entertaining, well-produced, thought-provoking programs I've heard. A new favorite* show of mine is RadioLab, broadcast by WNYC. While my passion for science manifests itself as more of a hobby than an academic pursuit, it's still a legitimate passion...and one that RadioLab has teased into a frenzy on more than one occasion.

On my way back from a tennis match on Thursday evening, I caught the tail end of a recent episode entitled "Musical Language." The final story focused on David Cope, professor and composer at UC Santa Cruz. Inspired by a debilitating case of composer's block, he devised a computer program that could discern, decipher and ultimately mimic the patterns and stylistic tendencies of composers. It's a fascinating story, and very interesting questions are raised at the end of the program concerning music and artwork in general. I've embedded this story here, for your listening pleasure:



I intend to check out the first two thirds of the program soon, and suggest you do the same. But more on point, what do you think of it?

*American English spelling, not Her Majesty's, will be the norm on the blog for the time being. While I apologize for the inconvenience, I would invite you to deal with it.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...

Welcome!

This blog is not my first, and will be something of an experiment for me.

I have a tendency to over-think and over-analyze things, which generally makes simple tasks (like blog posting) into laborious 2+ hour projects. Instead of making this blog a compendium of finished, scholarly works, I hope it will simply be an arena in which I can write through my ideas. Most often I've used writing as a means of delivering a (more-or-less) complete idea that I’ve allowed to gestate in my mind for some time. But I seldom use writing as a means of thinking: of forming and structuring my thought. I want to think better, so why should I be afraid of writing down my embryonic ideas and sharing them in utero? So to completely overextend the metaphor, welcome to the womb of my mind, I guess.

In order to help me to loosen up and write more freely, I’ll take the Aristotelian approach and aim at the opposite extreme of scholarship: writing shorter, less-organized posts. Hopefully, with time, the writing will get easier and my thoughts will become clearer.

Topically, the blog will be about culture, humanity, life, and religiosity. Anything that piques your author’s interest is fair game. From psychology to mycology; theology to geology; ontology to…brontology.

“But Greg,” you inquire, “will you talk about food? I love food.”

I subsequently rub my belly, nod approvingly, and add: “Astronomy to gastronomy.”

You’re in for a wild ride, folks. But welcome, all the same.