Lewis on Walking with Immortals

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

About the Blog Banner

I snapped this photograph last fall on a crisp morning. The overall lighting and leafless trees captured in the picture remind me of our present moment in springtime. The trees will remain wooden skeletons tossing in the wind for only a brief moment longer before bursting into greenery. In a few [...]

Reality According to Phillips

“It is not our job to accept reality; it is our job to define it.”
—Howard Phillips

The Plague in My Own Heart

1 Kings 8:37-40 (ESV)
“If there is famine in the land, if there is pestilence or blight or mildew or locust or caterpillar, if their enemy besieges them in the land at their gates, whatever plague, whatever sickness there is, [38] whatever prayer, whatever plea is made by any man or [...]

Chrysostom on Apostates

“Apostates are worse than those who are openly wicked. They give godliness a bad name.”
-John Chrysostom

Wycliffe Recapitulation

Okay, I haven’t finished writing about my week at the Wycliffe Total It Up course. I have finally gotten the chance, however, to write about the three other classes we had each day: Language Learning, Translation, and Phonology. I have a separate post about each, but I tried to keep them shorter this time.

Phonology

Phonolgy. For me these were some of the most difficult classes to comprehend. Phonology is the study of the sound systems of particular languages. Basically, phonology is a tool to help identify the sounds of a language– which sounds belong together, which are phonetically different, which are the same– to prepare for symbolizing a [...]

Translation

In the Translation class we looked at linguistic idiosyncrasies and potential problems in translation. For example, how would one translate “by the will of God” to a language that had no genitive (no ‘of’) construction— “because God willed?” We considered idioms and metaphors and semantics. This class proved a bit of a challenge to me [...]

Language Learning

The Language Learning class was really fun. It was always our last class of the day, and by that time my mind was usually just about fried, so it was really nice to have a more relaxing class. In this class we learned and practiced the first steps of learning a foreign language. To help [...]

Burke on How to Read Well

“To read without reflection is like eating without digesting.”
—Edmund Burke

See What I Saw

I put together an online photo album of my recent caving expedition in February. You can go to the album and see what I saw deep down below the mountains of West Virginia.
“And of Joseph he said, Blessed of the Lord be his land, for the precious things of heaven, [...]