Toronto

Reading week was an overall sucess- for the first half I pretty much just immersed myself in work. I finished my music paper, did research and wrote the first draft of my philosophy paper (on Pascal and restlessness), and read our book for Book Club (Charles Williams' All Hallow's Eve-its creepy but i like it). Then on Thursday Jenny and I went to Toronto and stayed with our classmate Rosie and her family. It was much needed and so much fun!!! We went snowboarding, toured the city, went cross-country skiing, ate at a nice restaurant, did some karaoke, sauna-d, and overall just relaxed! I loved seeing the city- its really cool and although I would never want to live there forever, for a short time while you're young I can see how it would be really fun.

Anyway now we're back at the grindstone at school. Dr. Tingley extended the deadline for our philosophy paper but we have many other assignments right on its tail so I'm going to hand mine in on the original date, I think.

I've been doing research on George McDonald tonight, I hope to write something about him for my lit paper which i just found out is worth 60% of our mark!!! eek, scary. The rest of tonight will be spent trying to find something to write on for our Scriptures paper (which is only worth 40%...). I can hear Jenny whispering Augustine outloud, so I'm assuming she's trying to do the same thing!

Last night Ben and Martine and I went skating on the canal- the ice is completely done. It didn't help that it had been snowing all day and hadn't been cleared, but even the ice itself is super soft and it was painfully slow- glide time was about 1 second. :( too bad. But on the other hand, I am definitely ready for spring....anytime... seriously...

love,

S

week 5, semester 2

Wow, week 5 already! Its no wonder things are getting busy. Only one more week, however, until reading week! I'm hoping to use the time to finish up at least a couple papers and start on a couple more! Also, I'll be going to Toronto on Thursday with a few other classmates to stay at Rosie's house for the weekend. It's very exciting!

This week was yet again busy, but I've really been enjoying the work. We also had our Restless Hearts Cafe on Tuesday, where we all got up and contributed various little performances, and on Thursday I went to young adults' at the Met and got to hang out with people there. At the cafe Rosie and I sang a song called 'heal over' by KT Tunstall, and also the song Popular from the musical Wicked. (I sang it to my roommate Jenny, it was great fun and everyone seemed to enjoy it.) Our administrator Harold and his wife sang a hymn; Trevor gave us his long and alliterated ode to the Pun (of which he is undoubtedly king); Jenny and Susan and Jasmine did a skit where they performed neuro-analysis on Jasmine, a girl suffering from social rejection after 6 months at Augustine College; Rosie and her sister Michelle did a hip hop dance, and Michelle also performed a ballet piece she choreographed; three girls sang 'twas in the moon of wintertime; and Landon played us a couple songs with his guitar, ukelele, harmonica, and whistling ability. Dr. Patrick read us some stories, one was a comedic version of an anglican priest's sunday address that went off on a million tangents and has already provided our class with several phrases for inside jokes. Professor Blaedow read us a poem about the College which he wrote that was very good; Stephanie read us a story she wrote from Horatio's (from Hamlet) point of view; and all of the boys got up to do a rousing version of 'like someone in love', which they sing every morning at their house, apparently. Emily provided excellent biscotti and banana bread and fruit along with tea and coffee. All in all, it was a very successful and entertaining evening!

Now onto what I learned this week:

Latin- we had to translate a passage from Luke 2, which we'll correct tomorrow... it took forever and I'm sure I got most of it wrong, since it employed a lot of perfect passive and subjunctive verb tenses that we haven't learned yet...

Philosophy- We 'romped through' both Luther and Machiavelli. Its too bad we couldn't get into them too deeply because of the time constraints, but this week we've read Descartes and Pascal who are really interesting, so I'm happy to carry on. On Luther we talked mostly about Determinism and how he had a different ethics from Aristotle. His writings signified a big shift in our culture.
Machiavelli stresses virtu and fortuna: power and fortune. Basically, the individual is the ultimate social unit and power is the ultimate concern. He wants to call justice and abstraction and impossible to attain so it shouldn't even be tried for. Real, for him, does not include good and evil which are only in our imagining, thining, willing, or feeling. Rules are artificial, written by the winners, and there is nothing good or bad but thinking/be powerful makes it so. His advice is practical, but this doesn't make it true. He assumes there is no authority over him and makes the metaphysical assumption that there is no God. We talked in class about whether it is possible to avoid metaphysics by being purely factual.

Art- we carried on with Northern Renaissance art (1420-1550), looking especially at altarpieces and other religious art. Lots by Memling. We talked about the use of legends and their way of communicating. Heronimus Bosch is crazy weird and hilarious- I can't believe his 'garden of earthly delights' triptych was used for worship at church! The Ghent altarpiece by van Eyck is fascinating. As is the Isenheim Altarpiece by Grunewald- this is the piece Dr. Stewart, the former art teacher, gave us a little lecture on when we went to their house before Christmas. Anyway, its amazing how much art changed in just a hundred years!

Science- Talking about the Sermon on the mount, he talked about how chapter 6 starts to deal with our practice of the Faith. Since we can't control everything, we invariably make our objectives do-able by reducing things to a series of rituals. But Jesus sets the standards much higher. We talked about prayer, Jesus tells us to go into your room and shut the door to pray. Don't babble in prayer, and don't presume in prayer that God doesn't already know what you need. We won't understand how God takes care of us until we're in a situation where we cannot depend on ourselves in any way.

Then we went over more stuff on evolution, reviewing the week's chapters in Denton and learning how Darwin himself probably wouldn't have believed his theory if he'd been presented wth the scientific data we have today. He was committed to the idea that nature does not jump, and insisted that evolution would be a very gradual progression over a long period of time. More and more, we have seen that there have to have been at least some jumps...

Dr. Patrick also talked about a book called The Fourth Greak Awakening by Robert William Fogel, who says that "the future will be limited by spiritual resources" a.k.a. virtues. THis guy is an atheist, but he says that the deprivation of purpose is widespread, but that we are starting to go through a revival of these resources such as a strong family ethic, solidarity within families and communities, benevolence, work ethic, discipline, capacity to remain faithful to commitment and to resist temptations to hedonism, a desire for education, and self-esteem. We need to find these things from among the two extremes on either side of them (sounds like Aristotle!).

Music- we talked about Mozart and got to listen to a ton of music, including the Queen of the Night aria , some sonatas, some Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, and the Ave Verum Corpus.

Literature- Chesterton said that "man is comforted by paradoxes". I read his book "The Man who was Thursday" today, and it is indeed full of paradoxes- I can't wait to talk about in on Thursday. It's very allegorical and confusing but really well written and I hope professor Tucker can shed some light on it.
During class we talked about Lewis' Till We have Faces. How we have such an ability to delude ourselves and how being in the presence of God has a silencing effect on us. We talked a lot about the use of myths in stories like this- read from a book called The Narnian. Lewis says that the fairytale form of literature "permits or compels you to throw all the force of a book into what was done or said. It checks the expository demon in me".

Scriptures- we went over some more Aquinas. Talked about the importance of the resurrection, hope, two-fold death (separation from the soul and separation from God) and two-fold life (Life of nature and life of grace). Since Christ never went through the second death, and never needed the second life, by his bodily resurrection Christ is the cause of both the bodily and the spiritual resurrection in us.

Trivium- We did some more essay writing- looked at Matin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

Alright, that's the week in a nutshell. I wrote the first draft of my music essay on Friday but its going to need serious revision. Yesterday I did Latin and Science homework and today I've read Chesterton, we're goign to the 5:00 service at church tonight. Susan had organized a 'father-daughter tea' around the valentine's theme at church, so we helped out with that yesterday afternoon. It just keeps snowing, but today is very warm. I made my first purchase on eBay today: headphones, since mine are broken and I'm going crazy with only these tinny computer speakers! Tonight I'm goign to make french onion soup and rest up for another busy week ahead! I got to talk to Kristen on Friday night, who is in New Zealand, and I have to say I'm a little envious, but not as much as I would have been a couple months ago- I get really excited with being able to learn so much here!!!

love love love
Starr

Week 4, semester 2

This week we got a whole bunch of work piled on us:

Latin- i stem nouns of the third declension (yipee!) and also we translated the first few verses of John 1, which was cool.

Philsophy- we finished up with Aquinas. Talked about man's last end, love and hate, happiness and how to get it (how we can't get it from wealth, honours, fame, glory, power, bodily good, pleasure, or a good of the soul, or any created good, but only from seeing God, the "beatific vision". Then we talked about virtue and what part the soul has in being virtuous, in correcting sin and about the 7 deadly sins and 7 cardinal virtues.

Art- We started talked about the Northern Renaissance artists, mostly Jan van Eyck. We read from an essay by Erwin Panofsky, an art scholar who wrote about the 'levels of iconography', as in how to 'interpret' a work of art. It was pretty interesting, the focus is on not looking for the meaning and exact people shown in a painting right off the bat, but just to look at what you see without any guessing and to see what you can learn just by observing. The thing with him is that after he does all this observation of what the painting actually shows, he extrapolates and the 'last level of iconography' is "intrinsic meaning", where you can learn the philosophy of the artist himself. But we wondered if an artist's deepest goal is always just to portray his own outlook on life. Maybe the artist actually wanted to portray a universal truth, something about God. I think we often do look at a painting in hopes of figuring out exactly how the artist's mind worked, but that's not necessarily what the artist wanted, or what is the best thing to do.

Science with Dr. Patrick- we got our papers assigned, we have to write a dialogue where the pros and cons of evolution are discussed. Also, we each will do a ten minute presentation on something that relates to the theory of evolution- mine will be on DNA. So I started reading the parts of our textbook relating to that. Then we talked about how Darwinism has become an orthodoxy, a dogma, and how it eliminates teleology. An american Jewish bioethicist names Kass makes 4 points when talking about teleology and why we can't do without it:
-organisms are organized wholes (Dr. Patrick says the most important ideal for dealing with end and beginning of life issues is central organization)
-our parts have specific functions
-we behave on purpose
-we heal
So inductive reasoning has done very well but we shouldn't have thrown out teleology completely, we just need more sophisticated versions of it. (I'm not sure what he would suggest, exactly.) Within what God has created there is teleology evident everywhere. Even "Struggling for survival" is a teleological metaphor! And the fact that our world built on delayed gratification- that's teleological too.

Book Club- the chapter of the week was on Eros. It wasn't that earth-shattering, I liked the chapter on friendship much better, but that could be because I'm not madly in love with anyone. haha.

Music- the Classical era and Haydn, who we compared with Mozart although we'll talk more about Mozart later. Prof. Warren played us a few piano sonatas in the living room (it was fun- he's so good!) and we talked about sonata form. Then we listened to a bunch of Haydn's symphonies.

Literature- we had read the last chapter of Paradise Lost- so we talked about that. Some people have criticized the last two books, but I really liked them and thought they were well-written. Here are the very last lines of the epic:
In either hand the hastning Angel caught
Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate
Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd.
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

We also started discussing Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis. I loved this book, I'm excited to talk more about it. There's always a lot of discussion around gender issues in our Lit. class, since Milton makes some pretty blood-curdling comments and there are a lot of things in Lewis that relate to it as well. I'm getting kind of tired of the discussion, frankly, because we never seem to get anywhere or talk about anything that is going to change my life.

Scriptures- we talked about Thomas Aquinas' Compendium again. Mostly stuff about original justice, the fall, and original sin and how Adam's sin affects us all, but his repentance could not. Then we talked about reasons for the incarnation:
- To Recall man to spiritual things from material things.
-To show the dignity of human nature- we're not just spiritual beings 'trapped in a physical world'. Christ didn't become an angel, he became a man and was lifted up above the angels.
-God showed his love so that men might serve him not out of fear but out of charity. The pagan relationship with the gods was one of fear.
-There is a possibility of the intellect and the spirit having unity. The incarnation is the completion of what God began.
-Man can be united to the First Cause . We have hope of that restored union, of Him completing his purposes in us.

Then we had chapel, and I went to the MET on Thursday night where we heard a presentation by people from Wycliffe Bible Translators- it was really well done and interesting, although a little long after sitting in class all day. They have a program where you can go to a village for two years that has no written language, learn the language, and help them develop 40 bible stories that tell the Gospel for them to have in their oral culture. This seems really interesting, although I wonder whether there might end up being problems with the stories changing and becoming untrue if they were never written down, but I guess these oral cultures are used to it...

In Trivium we've been learning about essay writing, I think it'll be really useful.

Yesterday we went to the Metelski's for dinner, it was really nice. Today after Church we went to Winterlude and looked at all the ice sculptures that have been entered into the competition- they are amazing! We also listened to the 'junkyard symphony'- some guys who put on a little show where they drum on trash cans and such (kind of STOMP style) whilst doing funny circus stunts (jugling and balancing and such) and bringing kids up to be a part of it and do silly things. It was really cute. The weather was gorgeous- actually too warm because the ice sculptures were starting to melt. Some heads and arms were falling off!

Okay I'm going to eat.

peace out.
S