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