Every year when I read the Iliad with my students, I pick up a new translation. I laugh out loud with delight when I read fresh characterizations of old characters. Odysseus described as a complicated man or Agamemnon as a drunkard. I love it when ancient heroes or villains shout contemporary phrases. "You’re both whining," says Nestor to Agamemnon and Achilles. Did ancient Greeks whine? Of course they did. Then of course I love comparing translations and seeing how translators grasp the tragedy of the poem.
-
-
Still He Comes
The other day I heard the line sung "let every heart prepare him room" and it made me grieve. I have not prepared him room very well in my heart as of late. What's more, the season for such things is upon us and I—well, I just flat out haven't done much thinking about the coming of Christ.
-
Telling the Truth (Book Recommendation)
"The comedy of the gospel is the surprise grace of God that wrests humanity from sin and death and gives it unexpected and outlandish hope and purpose."
-
Drawing or Color, Part III: The Neoclassicists vs. The Romantics
Ingres considered bright colors “anti-historic” and warned his students against them. “Better to fall into gray,” he said, “than into bright colors.” Color, as Delacroix saw it, was essential to painting. “Remember,” he urged in his journal, “the enemy of all painting is gray.”
-
Drawing or Color, Part II: The Florentines versus the Venetians
They called Michelangelo "the divine one." Titian was "the prince of painters." But these two contemporaries were on the opposite side of one of art's great debates.
-
“The School for Life”: N.F.S. Grundtvig
It is only to a heart and mind and body that is freely expressed in its own time and place that something as universal and cross-cultural as Christianity can come and find a home.
-
The World as a Kolam: Reflections on Augustine and The Supper of the Lamb
As mankind elevates the world’s beauty through his senses, so his soul is elevated. He is transformed from a mere consumer of the world, to its attentive lover. And in this transformation he becomes what he was always meant to be: made in the image of God, participating in the Divine work of preserving and sustaining creation, fully inhabiting the created world, in which he lives and moves and has his being.
-
On Loneliness, Locke, and the Loss of Religion
Wonder from the World Wide Web
-
Seeing and Knowing
I saw things from the top of the mountain. Unforgettable things. I saw them and they were now part of me.
-
QFT: The World is Stranger Than You Thought
Beginning with studies of electromagnetism, scientists have come to understand reality in such a way that there really is no such thing as tiny bits of matter that exist independently and that cannot be divided. Atomism (in any traditional sense) is dead. Reality is not what we thought it was.
