we make hope from every small disaster
Latest musical interest: The Weepies. Dumb band name, sure, but as in the case of the Beatles, the music seems to transcend whatever lameness is bound up in the name. “World Spins Madly On” is particularly noteworthy.
Been rereading Mere Christianity. It’s a more compelling read now that I’ve dabbled in the history of philosophy and learned about the thinkers who pushed these divergent trains of thought to their end. If nothing else, they tried to craft a consistent worldview based on their assumptions (erroneous they might have been), which contrasts with the piecemeal, pragmatic shards of thought we assemble to make sense of things in our day to day. In Mere Christianity, Lewis lays out the reasonable case for Christianity from the ground up, making observations about the world and defusing potential objections. And many of the objections have the flavor of something a Locke or a Rousseau might say, or something we might say, not having thought through the implications of our statement as thoroughly as those men did. So not only does it help place Lewis’s thinking on a continuum of philosophical thought (which is not to imply parity with the those who preceeded him) and understand the foundations of his defenses better, it also provides a point of contact between other worldviews and the one carefully laid out in the book. In other words, having a knowledge of Lewis’s apologetics, should someone approach me with one of the counterclaims he volunteers, I can respond with something to the effect of, “So what you’re saying is…” and more easily trace the implications of their statement. It’s whetted my appetite for more original authors.