Sunday, November 25, 2007

Lydia Supplee, Junior Piano Recital, Pepperdine University, November 17, 2007


Click on the title above to hear Lydia play Debussy's Estampes (La Soiree dans Grenade). She comments in her program notes that Debussy "greatly admired the habanera vocal pieces by Ravel, which inspired him to write this Spanish dance of his own. The piece is permeated by lush melodies and harmonies...which paint images of Grenada, Spain."




After the recital...sightseeing (Rodeo Drive)

Saturday, November 10, 2007

de/construction

Over at experimental theology, Richard Beck quotes Peter Rollins' How (Not) to Speak of God:

"As we have seen, we ought to affirm our view of God while at the same time realizing that that view is inadequate. Hence we act as both theist and atheist.

This a/theistic approach is deeply deconstructive since it always prevents our ideas from scaling the throne of God. Yet it is important to bear in mind that this deconstruction is not destruction, for the questioning it engages in is not designed to undermine God but to affirm God. This method is similar to that practiced by the original cynics who, far from being nihilists and relativists, were deeply moral individuals who questioned the ethical conduct they saw around them precisely because they loved morality so much. This a/theism is thus a deeply religious and faith-filled form of cynical discourse, one which captures how faith operates in an oscillation between understanding and unknowing."

For more of Rollins and Beck's interesting commentary, read the post here.


Wednesday, November 7, 2007

back again

It's been awhile ...especially if a friend who doesn't necessarily read blogs all that much tells me I need to update. So I'll begin again with where I tend to camp in the fall semester, in the writings and life of C.S. Lewis. The sonnet below is one of my favorites, not because of the style or quality, but for what Lewis says. He expresses much of what I have been exploring in the last year, that our thoughts and words of God, about God, necessarily contain the lie, are "flashy rhetoric" because we are limited by ourselves; we are "self-imprisoned". Another reason why we need each other's stories. A postmodern calvinist tree hugger friend often says that God constructs our reality. And deconstructs.

As The Ruin Falls
-- C.S. Lewis

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love—a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek—
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give are more precious than all other gains.