I Am Not Hamlet

There was (probably still is for all I know) a sub-current in Evangelical Christianity that derided using “Christian” as an adjective. Looking around the ghetto that Evangelicalism created for itself one could find “Christian’ magnets, movies, and music, ”Christian” t-shirts and toys, “Christian” books and baubles of all kinds. The problem was baptizing and separating things that didn’t necessarily need that kind of labeling.  So a friend of mine sent me the link to a podcast episode about Christian Animism. Christian Animism? What is that? Noel Moules explains on the Nomad February 2020 podcast. To start with, what is Animism? Many indigenous religions can be seen as Animist. Moules cites Graham Harvey, a British professor of Religious Studies, who says Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, but only some of whom are human and that life is to be lived in relationship with others. That leads to the question of what is a person? Online dictionaries aren’t

 Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.                                                                                                             --Simone Weil      Man, is that hard to do. I don't know about you, but even the most interesting and enriching conversations' spells can be broken by some flash of something that catches my eye.   

 Here's the first one for the year. What's cool is it's being picked up by the Planet Detroit newsletter . Anyway, this piece is a bit of a love letter to my friendly-neighborhood river.

      Aside from a plague, 2020 turned out to be a good year for reading, what with the abundance of time on my hands. All books are listed in order of being read, not necessarily in ranking of quality. Methodical Realism * Etienne Gilson--a short, relatively accessible primer on philosophical realism. Parts of this were interesting, others, not so much. Ian Pollock's Illustrated King Lear by William Shakespeare --While I didn't appreciate Pollack's illustrative style, I did like that the play was visually presented with the unabridged text. Essentially, this was a graphic novelization of Lear. This was better than just reading the play, though without helpful notes, it still falls short of experiencing the play live. By the way, did anybody catch the Stratford Festival of Canada's streaming of many of their productions in late spring through midsummer? Lear happened to be one of them and it was the first time I saw the whole piece. Gravity and Grace * Simone Weil--Ye