December 2008
60 posts
4 tags
Samuel Huntington, 81, political scientist,... →
3 tags
2 tags
“The religious ideal of forgiveness is more profound and more difficult than the...”
– Reinhold Niebuhr
4 tags
“But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been...”
– Times of London, Matthew Parris, AS AN ATHEIST, I TRULY BELIEVE AFRICA NEEDS GOD.
3 tags
To those who have seen the child...
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes—
Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —
Not that we have much appetite, having...
2 tags
“Ilúvatar contains 220 trunks. The crown of Ilúvatar fills thirty-one thousand...”
– Richard Preston, The Wild Trees, describing one of the largest redwood trees in the world
3 tags
The tree of life my soul hath seen, Laden with fruit and always green: The trees of nature fruitless be Compared with Christ the apple tree.
His beauty doth all things excel: By faith I know, but ne’er can tell The glory which I now can see In Jesus Christ the apple tree.
For happiness I long have sought, And pleasure dearly I have bought: I missed of all; but now I see ‘Tis found in...
3 tags
4 tags
“Man with dog closes a gap in the universe.”
– C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, chapter 3
3 tags
4 tags
4 tags
At the Manger
Mary
Oh shut your bright eyes that mine must endanger With their watchfulness: protected by its shade Escape from my care: what can you discover From my tender look but how to be afraid? Love can but confirm the more it would deny. Close your bright eye.
Sleep. What have you learned from the womb that bore you But an anxiety your Father cannot feel? Sleep. What will the flesh that I gave do for...
7 tags
Christmas Greetings from the Ellsworths
Say Heav’nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God?
Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome Him to this, his new abode…?
December 24, 2008
Dear Family and Friends,
The biggest news we have for you this year is that our eldest son, Evan Robert, was married May 31st to Kristin Signe Torok, the daughter of Andrew and Robin Torok of San Juan...
4 tags
3 tags
Christmas Eve Services at Saint Francis, Potomac →
Lest you find no room in the inn, arrive by 5:00 for the 5:30, and by 9:30 for the 10:00 o’clock.
6 tags
The stable door is open
We still have this half-buried conviction that church is a place where, at least at this time of year, we ought to be able to feel at home. We turn up, tired and overwrought, perhaps, still thinking vaguely about what we haven’t done and need to do before tomorrow. And then the story unfolds. Yes, this is our story, and yes, we can for a moment believe that this birth makes a difference. Yes, God...
2 tags
3 tags
2 tags
“I pray good beef and I pray good beer
This holy night of all the year,
But I...”
– Hillaire Belloc
4 tags
“Just a hurried line … to tell a story which puts the contrast between our...”
– C. S. Lewis, in a letter to an American lady, 29 December 1958.
3 tags
“You should not look a gift universe in the mouth.”
– G. K. Chesterton, in a letter written to one of his closest boyhood friends, E. C. Bentley.
5 tags
7 tags
6 tags
Religions and Dialogue
This essay by Philip Jenkins can stand in for many, many books and articles — and cocktail party conversations — about interreligious dialogue. People have been making just this kind of argument for more than a hundred years now. It goes like this: “As trade and technology shrink the globe,” “teaching different faiths to acknowledge one another’s claims, to live peaceably together side by...
5 tags
Heather Joy Wilson, in memoriam
That is why she didn’t let go of her life easily. She was the kind of person who got notes like the one from her student Max at Rock Creek Forest Elementary School. In some of the best lines in any literature, Max wrote: “Dear Ms. Wilson: You’re the best English teacher in the world. I want to flunk second grade in a good way, so you can be my English teacher again” [Max’s...
5 tags
“What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and...”
– Hamlet, Prince of Denmark [4.4]
3 tags
5 tags
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou...
3 tags
Chesterton on Education
Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human...
It's like something directly out of Trollope
The call came at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11. I had been waiting for it for five years. When the call finally arrived, it was my wife Sarah who answered. What the person said on the other end of the phone was both simple and devastating: we were financially wiped out. Of course, I knew this instantly from the look on my wife’s face. Her words to the caller, the person handling our financial...
4 tags
“It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what...”
– Edmund Bertram in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Austen was born this day in the Year of our Lord 1775, to the Rev. Fr. George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen.
4 tags
The Christmas Message of +Rowan Cantuar
Human beings, left to themselves, have imagined God in all sorts of shapes; but – although there were one or two instances, in Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt, of gods being pictured as boys – it took Christianity to introduce the world to the idea of God in the form of a baby: in the form of complete dependence and fragility, without power or control. If you stop to think about it, it is still...
5 tags
John Milton's vision
For centuries now, English intellectuals have seen him primarily as a poet, and his thought has been treated with slight embarrassment - whether on Tory, Catholic, atheist or aesthetic grounds. The vast majority of those who now write about Milton are literary critics who are not very interested in his religious thought, except as a theme within his art, almost as important as his misogyny....
4 tags
Kenan Malik
To see how much the ground has shifted in the past 20 years, we only have to compare the response to The Satanic Verses to that to The Jewel of Medina. Written by an American journalist, Sherry Jones, The Jewel of Medina is a breezy, romantic, almost Mills-and-Boonish tale, about Aisha, the Prophet Muhammad’s youngest wife. It had originally been bought by the American publishers Random House for...
3 tags
Watch“Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal, I would never fight on the front lines again or command you to the field where men win fame. But now, as it is, the fates of death await us, thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive can flee them or escape—so in we go for attack! Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!”...
3 tags
4 tags
About my mother: Akiko Tamaoki Ellsworth
In the spring of 2006, I traveled with my parents to Japan in celebration of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. My sister Vicki arrived at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, disembarking her plane even as I boarded mine for my flight returning to Potomac. She would be in Japan, with her son Kyle and daughter Naomi, for about 10 days.
After she got back to her home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she sent...
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
An interactive timeline of British History →
It’s wonderful.
2 tags
“This is not a new concept, but one that Adam Smith espoused in an intriguing...”
– Shanker Singham, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Colloquium Lecture, December 5th, 2008
4 tags
Gladwell on Quarterbacks and Effective Teachers
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually...
3 tags
“Look, in short, at practically anything—the coot’s feet, the mantis’...”
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
3 tags
