My roomates are home from their weekend retreat in Quebec and I'm filled up on cookies from Jasmine. I'm listening to KT Tunstall's "Heal Over" since I think Rosie and I may do it for the Restless Hearts Cafe next Tuesday (if I can learn it, that is).
So the week. Latin was full of ipse, ipsa, ipsum (which means himself, herself, itself) and all the variations of that, we got sentences like "He himself must truly look inside himself by himself", its ridiculous but apparently these Romans liked emphasis and redundancy. In philosophy we talked about Thomas Aquinas some more- the nature of evil, the impossibility of its being a nature since existence is in itself a good thing, what we can call evil, its cause... and also about the soul (appetitive and intellectual parts) and man's last end. Here's a bti from my notes that I found interesting:
"Christianity has often failed to eliminate a Manichaeism that sees the body as sinful. The body is an instrument of righteousness. That mistake can be made about the mind as well, which happened when the attention of Christians moved from the body to the mind. We have seen the mind as an instrument of wickedness, not of righteousness. To see reliance of the mind as a sinful refusal of reliance of God is not have a disdain for God's order. Aquinas does assert the power of the intellect."
Dr. Tingley is (of course) very big on the importance of reason, which is cool because I know a lot of Christians do disregard it. Anyway, moving on...
Art class was cancelled, because Dr. Tingley's slide show was erased from his computer. Which sucks for him. I use the time to get all my Latin done though, so it was great and saved me staying up super late that night.
In Dr. Patrick's class we talked about William Harvey, John Ray, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke. Ray especially is interesting, he was a hardcore Christian and that is why he doesn't get a lot of credit these days, even though he was the 'father of botany' and Linnaeus gives him the credit for starting taxonomy in a serious manner. We also learned about the Royal Society which still exists in Britain, and then we talked about the "four levels of happiness": animal, intellectual, charity, and knowing God (I don't have the actual names for them but there is a book by Robert Spitzer called "Healing the Culture" where he talks about this, although the idea has been around for ages.)
Oh and we talked about the sermon on the mount section where he says "unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." He talked about how this is emphasizing how important grace is, as it is the only possible solution to a righteousness of that standard. Jesus then deconstructs the legalistic approach to righteousness with 5 examples, one of which is: anyone who kills will be judged, anyone who dismisses his brother is in danger of hellfire. This standard is impossible for us to meet on our own, it brings us, once again, right back to the first beatitude: poverty of spirit.
We had bookclub on Tuesday evening (the friendship chapter of the four loves), and afterwards had a prayer service for Gideon, Jasmine's little brother who has cancer and was going in for surgery on Wednesday morning. Apparently surgery went well, they removed most of the lower lobe of his left lung. We're praying hard for him and the whole Stairs family!
Wednesday was Latin again and Music, where we talked about Handel (listened to a bunch of his oratorio Israel and Egypt) and the transition to the classical period. We're cruising through history! We got our research paper topics this week as well- I'm going to do mine on the operas of Puccini, so I'm pretty excited for that!
In Literature we talked more about George McDonald and his novel Lilith, and also about a short story we read called "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis. It was a really sad story set in the industrial revolution. As much as Dr. Patrick talks about how degraded today's culture is, I'm glad I didn't live back then.
Scriptures class was about Augustine on recreation (a sermon on Romans 8) and original sin, and also we started on Thomas Aquinas' Compendium on Theology. I did a synopsis this week on part of this work where he talks about hope, which I thought was really great (the Aquinas, not my synopsis haha). Oh and we got the topic for our research paper in that class as well- we have to compare three of the writers we've studied and write 10 pages on something to do with them. haha its pretty vague but I'll probably look either at how they all see a particular passage of how they see a theme (the theme might be easier). Here's a link to the Aquinas Compendium, he talks about hope in part two, chapters 7-10 (the last three chapters, he died before he could finish the rest): http://www.diafrica.org/kenny/CDtexts/Compendium.htm#B7
Prof. Tucker taught us about essay writing on Friday. We don't have science class with Dr. Metelski for a couple of weeks (this is a scheduled thing, they are trying not to overload us with classtime since they're giving us more homework).
I went to a birthday/baptism party on Friday, and also to a concert of a friend of a classmate. On Saturday I baked bread (yay!) and made crepes and banana bread, I was feeling very domestic! This morning i went to Church, Timothy's coffee shop, and then skating on the Rideau canal!! I'll put pictures up next week. In the meantime, here's a picture I took at the young adults retreat last weekend.
love,
Starr
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